By Barbara Hoffert

Among strong sf/fantasy titles this month, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy award winner Ken Liu’s new story collection stands out. In addition, Hannah Rothschild returns with castle-set family drama, while women’s fiction newbies Beth Morrey and Alexis Schaitkin lead a contingent of debut authors starting to buzz.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on women’s rights within the framework of immigration, Vivian Gornick on the books that have shaped her life, Brian Greene on where the universe is going, Joshua Hammer on a big threat to rare raptors, and Mara Hvistendahl on industrial espionage by the Chinese, with a wide range of general fiction titles wrapping up February 2020 coverage.

This month’s history picks have a strong focus on African American history, with titles including Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth’s The Last Negroes of Harvard, Jerry Mitchell’s Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era, Jill Watts’s The Black Cabinet, and David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Other key titles on this list feature the suffragist movement, the Revolutionary era, and Max Hastings's view of the RAF’s Operation Chastise. 

Multi-award-winning Scottish-based Sudanese Leila Aboulela on women unknotting their lives, Man Booker Award winner Aravind Adiga on an undocumented refugee in Australia facing moral conundrum, top-notch short story writer Amy Bonnafons with her first novel, leading British children’s writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave with her first adult novel, and National Book Award winner Lily Tuck and multi-best-booked Lidia Yuknavitch with short stories. Plus a dozen debut and rising star authors.