A HUGO AWARD FINALIST! WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL, 2020! A Pick on the 2020 RUSA Reading List! New York Times bestselling and Alex, Nebula, and Hugo-Award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in the standalone fantasy, Middlegame. Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own. Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained. A USA Today Bestseller, and named as one of Paste Magazine's 30 Best Fantasy Novels of the Decade! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Alchemical Journeys
8 books in catalog
The sprawling urban fantasy realm of Faerie and modern San Francisco collides in Rosemary and Rue, the debut novel that launched the long-running October Daye series. Author Seanan McGuire has built an extensive bibliography spanning urban fantasy, dark portal fantasy, sci-fi horror, and cryptozoology, earning multiple Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Alex Awards across her prolific career.
Writing under her own name as well as pseudonyms such as Mira Grant and A. Deborah Baker, McGuire has become one of the most versatile voices in contemporary speculative fiction. Her award-winning portal fantasy novella Every Heart a Doorway inaugurated the acclaimed Wayward Children series, examining the psychological aftermath of children who return to the mundane world after visiting magical realms.
Seanan McGuire was born on January 5, 1978, in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, many of which boasted dangerous native wildlife. She studied folklore and herpetology at the University of California, Berkeley, an academic foundation that directly influenced her later fiction. Before writing full-time, her diverse career path included working as a phone sex operator, a technical support engineer, an exotic animal rescuer, a process engineer for the communications company SBC, and a quality assurance engineer for a non-profit organization. Despite an almost magnetic attraction to venomous creatures and strange mishaps, she survived long enough to acquire a typewriter and begin submitting stories, noting humorously that surviving late-night typing at three o'clock in the morning was as notable as surviving her encounters with swamp wildlife.
McGuire was active in science fiction and fantasy fandom before establishing her professional literary career, earning wide recognition as a filksinger. She has recorded multiple CDs of her original filk music—including her Hugo Award-nominated album Wicked Girls—and won several Pegasus Awards for her songwriting. In addition to music, she is a cartoonist who drew the irregularly posted autobiographical web comic With Friends Like These... and created numerous original art cards. In 2010, McGuire won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. That same year, her medical horror novel Feed, published under the pseudonym Mira Grant, was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013, she achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Award ballot, a feat she repeated in 2022.
Residing in the Pacific Northwest—specifically Seattle—McGuire shares her home with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of horror movies, creepy dolls, and enough books to qualify her living space as a fire hazard. Her background in blurb-writing for convention program books established her habit of writing biographical entries in the third person. Outside of writing, her interests include long walks in swamps, reality television, comic books, collecting pennies, and watching horror films, famously using Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1980s as a personal checklist. She also maintains strongly held beliefs regarding the X-Men, the history of the Black Death, and the practical necessity of chainsaws in daily life.
McGuire's writing style blends deep folklore traditions with modern genre sensibilities, often incorporating detailed biological and ecological concepts derived from her herpetology and folklore studies. Her urban fantasy series, such as the October Daye books and the InCryptid series, combine procedural investigations with intricate mythical worldbuilding and cryptozoology. Writing dark science fiction and horror under the pseudonym Mira Grant, she explores epidemiological threats, parasite infections, and deep-sea terror with technical rigor. She also utilizes the pen name A. Deborah Baker for her Up-and-Under children's portal fantasy series.
A recurring theme across McGuire's work is the exploration of trauma, belonging, and alternative family structures among outcast characters. In her Wayward Children novellas, she examines the emotional and psychological displacement experienced by youth ejected from fantastical worlds where they finally felt complete. Her narratives frequently focus on resilience, monster biology, ethical dilemmas surrounding science and magic, and the absurdities of survival, reflected in her signature wit and sharp dialogue.
