Inspired by MeltingPages’ post. I wanted to talk about the books I plan on trying to prioritise in 2020! These are not full of new releases as I mentioned in my November 2019 Releases post, I have no idea what new releases are coming out at all. So there aren’t many new releases on my list. These are just books that would want to get to next year.

All synopsis’ have been taken from Goodreads.

Sequels

These are all the sequels I want to prioritise next year. As you know, this year I wanted to make sure I kept myself up to date with series I was currently reading and challenged myself to read 2 sequels a month for 6 months. I completed this. Since then, my sequel list has been getting bigger and bigger and now I am having to prioritise which sequels I would want to read more and these are the ones.

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Looking Glass – In four new novellas, Christina Henry returns to the universe she created for Alice and Red Queen, where magic runs more freely than anyone suspects, but so do secrets and blood.

The Chronicles of Alice duology has been one of my favourite series for the past couple of years so when the new novella collection was announced I could not ignore it.

Sourcery – Once there was an eighth son of an eighth son. A Sourcerer. Unseen University, the most magical establishment on the Discworld, has finally got its wish: the emergence of a wizard more powerful than they’ve ever seen. You’d think the smartest men on the Disc would have been a little more careful with what they wished for. As the drastic consequences of sourcery begin to unfold, one wizard holds the solution in his cowardly, incompetent hands. Rincewind must take the University’s most precious artefact, the very embodiment of magic itself, and deliver it halfway across the disc to safety . . . If he doesn’t make it, the death of all wizardry is at hand.

So, I am not the biggest Rincewind fan and we are back to following him in this book. The reason it’s on my list is I want to crack on in reading the Discworld series and despite not loving Rincewind I have to read this book. Hopefully, it will be really fun.

The Well of Ascension – I won’t be including a review for this one as it is a sequel. Unlike Sourcery which can be read on its own, despite being in a massive series, this book is set not long after the first one so I don’t wanna give out spoilers. I loved The Final Empire it was like nothing I had ever read before so I just want to see what the rest of the series has to offer.

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Mystery of the Blue Train – A mysterious woman, a legendary cursed jewel, and a night train to the French riviera — ingredients for the perfect romance or the perfect crime? When the train stops, the jewel is missing, and the woman is found dead in her compartment. It’s the perfect mystery, filled with passion, greed, deceit. And Hercule Poirot is the perfect detective to solve it…

This is along the same vein as Sourcery, I am currently making my way through all of Agatha Christie’s mystery novels. I have read 3 of her standalones but my focus now is to read all her Poirot books. I have seen the TV adaptation for this novel so I know what to expect going into it but I am interested to see the differences between the novel and the adaptation.

Predator’s Gold – Another synopsis I won’t give as this follows directly after Mortal Engines. I would just like to continue this series as I really enjoyed the first one and a friend of mine really wants to talk about the series as a whole, so I need to crack on.

The Hod King – The third book in the Books of Babel Quartet. My favourite book of all time was the first book in this series. I cannot explain to you how much this series means to me. The world is amazing, the writing just draws you in from the first sentence. Criminally underrated!

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The Toll – I just recently bought this book it was probably my most anticipated 2019 release. I don’t want this series to end! I doubt I will get to this book before the new year as I have many books lined up beforehand. This series really changed my thoughts on sci-fi, I thought I had seen enough to grasp what sci-fi is and my opinion of it at the time was that it wasn’t worth my time. But this series changed that. I will be sad when it’s over.

The Great Hunt – I haven’t finished The Eye of the World as I am writing this as I have been getting very far behind on my Netgalley ARCs but I do plan to finish the book before the year ends. What I have read so far I have loved and I want to continue watching these characters grow. I highly recommend if you are reading this series for the first time. To listen to the Wheel Weaves podcast. It’s spoiler free!

Standalones and Series Debuts

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The Night Circus – The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Over the years I have heard so much praise for this story and have always wanted to read it and now because The Starless Sea is out, it has re-kindled my need to read it!

House of Salt and Sorrows – Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor, a manor by the sea, with her sisters, their father, and stepmother. Once they were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last—the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge—and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods. Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that the deaths were no accidents. Her sisters have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who—or what—are they really dancing with? When Annaleigh’s involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it’s a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family—before it claims her next.

One of my favourite stories is the 12 Dancing Princesses. I watched the Barbie movie all the time when I was younger so when my boyfriend got me a copy of a dark re-telling of one of my favourite stories. How could I not be excited!!

Spinning Silver – Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders… but her father isn’t a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has loaned out most of his wife’s dowry and left the family on the edge of poverty–until Miryem steps in. Hardening her heart against her fellow villagers’ pleas, she sets out to collect what is owed–and finds herself more than up to the task. When her grandfather loans her a pouch of silver pennies, she brings it back full of gold. But having the reputation of being able to change silver to gold can be more trouble than it’s worth–especially when her fate becomes tangled with the cold creatures that haunt the wood, and whose king has learned of her reputation and wants to exploit it for reasons Miryem cannot understand.

I read Uprooted by the same author last year and really enjoyed it. Since then, I have wanted to read more of her stuff. I also love the fact that it is a re-telling of Rumpelstiltskin.

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Station Eleven – Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

I don’t know what it is about this story but I am just really intrigued. I think I am more intrigued about the part of the story that focuses on the actor.

Truly Devious – Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth-century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym, Truly Devious. It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history. True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder

This book was all over the internet last year and I always told myself I was going to read it ASAP and I just never picked it up. I love murder mysteries and this too me just sounds perfect!

A Winter’s Promise – Long ago, following a cataclysm called “The Rupture,” the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands. Known now as Arks, each has developed in distinct ways; each seems to possess its own unique relationship to time, such that nowadays vastly different worlds exist, together but apart. And overall of the Arks, the spirit of an omnipotent ancestor abides. Ophelia lives on Anima, an ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, the young girl hides the ability to read and communicate with the souls of objects, and the power to travel through mirrors. Her peaceful existence on the Ark of Anima is disrupted when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, from the powerful Dragon clan. Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancée to the floating capital on the distant Ark of the Pole. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity? Though she doesn’t know it yet, she has become a pawn in a deadly plot.

I mainly wanted to read this story due to the gorgeous front cover. I loved the floating cities. It just spoke to me. I ended up reading the blurb and was just so intrigued by the plot and instantly put it on my TBR.

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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England’s magical past and regained some of the powers of England’s magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French. All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington’s army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange’s heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.

I have heard so much about this book and the story has always intrigued me. I also have always wanted to read a book that was over 1000 pages.

The Child Thief – Peter is quick, daring, and full of mischief—and like all boys, he loves to play, though his games often end in blood. His eyes are sparkling gold, and when he graces you with his smile you are his friend for life, but his promised land is not Neverland. Fourteen-year-old Nick would have been murdered by the drug dealers preying on his family had Peter not saved him. Now the irresistibly charismatic wild boy wants Nick to follow him to a secret place of great adventure, where magic is alive and you never grow old. Even though he is wary of Peter’s crazy talk of faeries and monsters, Nick agrees. After all, New York City is no longer safe for him, and what more could he possibly lose? There is always more to lose. Accompanying Peter to a grey and ravished island that was once a lush, enchanted paradise, Nick finds himself unwittingly recruited for a war that has raged for centuries—one where he must learn to fight or die among the “Devils,” Peter’s savage tribe of lost and stolen children.

This book has been on my Goodreads TBR since August 2015. At this point I just want to take it off my TBR. I love re-tellings and I have read a really good dark re-telling of Peter Pan last year so I definitely want to read another take on evil Peter Pan.

The Golem and the Jinni – Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic, created to be the wife of a man who dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free. Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker’s debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.

I listened to the podcast called Myths and Legends earlier this year and one of the stories was about Golems. I loved the episode and looked up any stories to do with Golems and I found this. Now I just want to get reading.

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Strange the Dreamer – The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around—and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared that his dream chose poorly. Since he was five years old he’s been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the person of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he has to seize his chance or lose his dream forever. What happened in Weep two hundred years ago to cut it off from the rest of the world? What exactly did the Godslayer slay that went by the name of god? And what is the mysterious problem he now seeks help in solving? The answers await in Weep, but so do more mysteries—including the blue-skinned goddess who appears in Lazlo’s dreams. How did he dream her before he knew she existed? And if all the gods are dead, why does she seem so real?

This book has been hyped so much by people on the internet and while it intrigued me I want to read it to see if it deserved the hype it got.

If We Were Villains – Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail – for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he’s released, he’s greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.

I love the idea of solving an old case, I love that it is set in Shakespearian times and I love that it is set in a theatre. I have never read a murder mystery that was entirely an old case. I have read books which had a old case involved but it always went alongside another mystery. My understanding here is that it is entirely based on an old case and that’s it. It sounds so exciting!

Rivers of London –Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happens to be a ghost. Peter’s ability to speak with the lingering dead brings him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who investigates crimes involving magic and other manifestations of the uncanny. Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic.

I love murder mysteries but to take that but set it in an urban fantasy world. I am sold. I picked this up as I heard Nick Frost and Simon Pegg have decided to turn this series into a TV show so I want to get a head start and at least read the first book before the TV show premieres.

Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and I hope you may have seen a book that you never considered before. Though some of these are very popular.