Books like Ariah by B.R. Sanders

Both a recounting of trauma and its impacts, as well as a retelling of a Nigerian fable. The main character's multiple experiences of trauma are retold and the author unflinchingly explores how they are impacted (e.g., self-harm, dissociation). The character's psychology is viewed through a non-Western lens.

When anything can be owned, how can we be free Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

"The Incrementalists--a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations, races, and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, just a little bit at a time. Their ongoing argument about how to do this is older than most of their individual memories. Phil, whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else's, has loved Celeste--and argued with her--for most of the last four hundred years. But now Celeste, recently dead, embittered, and very unstable, has changed the rules--not incrementally, and not for the better. Now the heart of the group must gather in Las Vegas to save the Incrementalists, and maybe the world"--

Change or die. These are the only options available on planet Jeep. Centuries earlier, a deadly virus shattered the original colony, killing the men and forever altering the few surviving women. Now, generations after the colony lost touch with the rest of humanity, a company arrives to exploit Jeep—and its forces find themselves fighting for their lives. Terrified of spreading the virus, the company abandons its employees, leaving them afraid and isolated from the natives. In the face of this crisis, anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives to test a new vaccine. As she risks death to uncover the women’s biological secret, she finds that she too is changing—and realizes that not only has she found a home on Jeep, but that she alone carries the seeds of its destruction. . . . Ammonite is an unforgettable novel that questions the very meanings of gender and humanity. As readers share in Marghe’s journey through an alien world, they too embark on a parallel journey of fascinating self-exploration.

In the aftermath of a series of plane crashes caused by birds, seventeen-year-old Reese and her debate-team partner, David, receive medical treatment at a secret government facility and become tangled in a conspiracy that is, according to Reese's friend, Julian, connected with aliens and UFOs.

Kurzbeschreibung Insel der Sehnsucht (Sanctuary) - Nora Roberts Die erfolgreiche Fotografin Jo Hathaway hat ihr Leben fest im Griff - jedenfalls bis zu dem Tag, als sie in ihrer Post anonyme Fotos findet: Schnappschüsse und Nahaufnahmen von ihr selbst. Sie ist zutiefst beunruhigt - wer konnte ihr unbeobachtet so nahe kommen und diese Bilder machen? Als dann auch noch die Fotos einer wunderschönen, nackten, toten Frau geschickt werden, bricht Jo zusammen - diese Frau war ihre Mutter. Jo war noch ein kleines Mädchen, als ihre Mutter eines Nachts spurlos verschwand. Der schmerzliche Verlust entzweite und zerstörte die Familie Hathaway. Daraufhin floh Jo, wild entschlossen, ihre Familie und ihr Elternhaus nie mehr wieder zu sehen. Widerstrebend beschließt sie nun, wegen dieser Fotos nach Hause zu fahren, um dort die Antwort auf ihre Fragen zu finden. Ihr Elternhaus auf der wildromantischen Insel Desire ist mittlerweile ein kleines Hotel, das ihr Bruder führt. Die Begegnung mit den Geschwistern und dem Vater führt erneut zu geschwisterlichen Rivalitäten, Eifersüchteleien, Schmerz und Bitterkeit. Aber auch auf Desire ist Jo nicht sicher; wieder tauchen Fotos auf. Jos Freund aus Kindertagen, der Architekt Nathan Delany, steht ihr zur Seite und aus Zuneigung wird schnell Liebe. Nathan aber scheint nicht nur über die Geheimnisse von Jos Seele Bescheid zu wissen ... In der Konfrontation mit dem Mörder muss Jo sich schließlich ihrer eigenen, tragischen Vergangenheit stellen...

An unidentified artifact, found seven miles below the surface of the sea, stumps the scientists examining it but calls out to the two immortal creatures who have wandered the Earth for centuries, never crossing paths until now.

In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots--fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They're a family, hidden and safe. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled "HAP," he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio-a past spent hunting humans. When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio's former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic's assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming. Along the way to save Gio, amid conflicted feelings of betrayal and affection for Hap, Vic must decide for himself: Can he accept love with strings attached?

Chung Mae is the only connection her small farming village has to culture of a wider world beyond the fields and simple houses of her village. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere without power lines, computers, or machines. This technology is Air. An initial testing of Air goes disastrously wrong and people are killed from the shock. Not to be stopped Air is arriving with or without the blessing of Mae's village. Mae is the only one who knows how to harness Air and ready her people for it's arrival, but will they listen before it's too late?

Welcome to the Matriarchy. Sixty years after a virus has wiped out almost all the men on the planet, things are pretty much just as you would imagine a world run by women might be: war has ended; greed is not tolerated; the ecological needs of the planet are always put first. In two generations, the female population has grieved, pulled together and moved on, and life really is pretty good - if you're a girl. It's not so great if you're a boy, but fourteen-year-old River wouldn't know that. Until she met Mason, she thought they were extinct.

Gay cyberpunk, baby!

Lixia and the members of her human crew are determined not to disturb the life on the planet circling the Star Sigma Draconis which they have begun exploring. But the factions on the mother ship hovering above the planet may create an unintended chaos for both the life on the planet and the humans exploring it. As the anger increases on the ship, the ground crew becomes more and more affected by the conflict and begins to rely on their instincts to keep the project moving forward. Unexpected danger plagues the mission as Lixia is determined to expand her knowledge.

The city of Astreiant has gone crazy with enthusiasm for a new play, The Drowned Island, a lurid farrago of melodrama and innuendo. Pointsman Nicolas Rathe is not amused, however, at a real dead body on stage and must investigate. A string of murders follow, perhaps related to the politically important masque that is to play on that same stage. Rathe must once again recruit the help of his soldier lover, Philip Eslingen, whose knowledge of actors and the stage, and of the depths of human perversity and violence, blends well with Rathe's own hard-won experience with human greed and magical mayhem. Their task is complicated by the season, for it is the time of year when the spirits of the dead haunt the city and influence everyone, and also by the change in their relationship when the loss of Philip's job forces him to move in with Nicolas. Mystery, political intrigue, floral magic, astrology, and romance--both theatrical and personal-- combine to make this a compelling read.

The average adult male is approximately 60% water. Blood tastes salty as more than two thirds of the sodium circulating throughout your body is carried in arteries and veins. Which means that your heart is like a miniature ocean within your chest. Chaz Brenchley has not only been awarded the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award but knows all too well the storms and dangers of the heart: the lofty desires, the grieving nadirs, the tempest of love. In Bitter Watters, his first short story collection devoted to gay readers, Brenchley offers men fantastical instances to effleurer, to break for taller timber, to drown in emotions. And while not every tale in this breathtaking collection involves the sea, tears and bloodshed still need to be navigated.

Winner of the 2011 James Tiptree Jr. Award, Redwood and Wildfire is a novel of what might have been. At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This ''dreaming in public'' becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and ''native'' born into Americans. Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a ''city of the future.'' Gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, they struggle to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlours, in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow. Living in a system stacked against them, Redwood and Aidan s power and talent are torment and joy. Their search for a place to be who they want to be is an exhilarating, painful, magical adventure. Blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers.

Trapped in contemporary Denver, Christa, a Celtic musician who had been imprisoned for centuries by the faery Sidh and the musician Orfide, sets out to rescue her lover from the barriers of time with the help of a heavy metal rock band called Gossamer Axe

Winner of the Tiptree Award and a Mythopoeic Award finalist, Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic fable that invites revisitation.

*Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer* is a 1909 feminist utopian novel by the English lawyer, writer and activist Irene Clyde—who is remembered as non-binary, transgender, or as a trans woman—about a time traveller who discovers a lost world, which contains a postgender society. It has been described as a successful example of defamiliarization, in that it places the reader in a world initially without any indications of gender and this places strain on the reader's attempt to apply existing social paradigms which require gender categorisation