Today’s TTT is a thankful freebie, so I’m going to highlight ten authors I’m glad to have found in the last year (or two). But first, tease time!

My business is giving people what they need. You heard my rules. I don’t do anything dangerous or stupid. The thing is, a lot of laws are stupid, too, and they don’t always keep people out of danger. What can I say? I’m a woman of principle. (A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers)

So, authors I’m thankful to have found this year!

(1) Rachel Joyce, Rachel Joyce, Rachel Joyce! I have loved each of her novels I’ve found this year. The plots of the three novels have all been quite different, but they each handled the meaningful beauty in human connection expertly.

(2) Paul Kingsnorth. Although I’ve followed Kingsnorth’s substack for the last year or so, I’d never seriously dipped into his books until meeting him at the Resisting the Machine conference in August. Speaking of, Freya India whose substack GIRLS I highly recommend, just did an interview with Paul called “Rejecting the Machine”. Kingsnorth is a former enviromental activist, an Orthodox mystic, and a critic of the way technology can alienate us from one another, Creation, and a meaningful life.

(3) Rhett C. Bruno & Jaime Castle. When I learned there was a dark-fantasy western about a gunman who gets killed protecting a woman and finds himself still up and about in the world — now working off a kind of purgatory by seeking out vampires and werewolves running around the Old West — I couldn’t resist it. Bruno and Castle have proven a fun combo ever since.

(4) Harrison Scott Key, a Southern humorist who has also done a very serious book about dealing with — and growing through — his wife’s martial infidelity.

(5) David Halberstam, baseball historian.

(6) Wayne Grant, whose medieval adventure novels I enjoyed enormously.

(7) Becky Chambers, whose cozy solarpunk novels revealed a new SF subgenre to me.

(8) Ruth Ware. I chanced upon her lone novel with an IT focus and have since read several of her thrillers this year.

(9) Ursula le Guin.

(10) Fredrik Backman, who I found last year (ditto Bruno & Castle) but who has never failed to delight me with his novels.