Del Rey's Next Reads Sampler 2020 Edition

Max Brooks is an author, public speaker, and nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. His bestselling books include Minecraft: The Island, The Zombie Survival Guide, and World War Z, which was adapted into a 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt. His graphic novels include the #1 New York Times bestseller The Harlem Hellfighters.

Peter F. Hamilton is the author of numerous novels, including A Night Without Stars, The Abyss Beyond Dreams, Great North Road, The Evolutionary Void, The Temporal Void, The Dreaming Void, Judas Unchained, Pandora’s Star, Misspent Youth, Fallen Dragon, and the acclaimed epic Night’s Dawn trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God). He lives with his family in England.

Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles, the Ink & Sigil series, and the Seven Kennings series, and is co-author of The Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novels Velvet Was the Night, Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, and a bunch of other books. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award–winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu’s Daughters). She has been nominated for the Locus Award for her work as an editor and has won the British Fantasy Award and the Locus Award for her work as a novelist.

Simon Jimenez is the author of The Vanished Birds. This is his second book.

Jenna Glass made her foray into epic fantasy with The Women’s War, but she wrote her first book—an “autobiography”—when she was in the fifth grade. She began writing in earnest while in college and proceeded to collect a dizzying array of rejections for her first seventeen novels. Nevertheless, she persisted, and her eighteenth novel became her first commercial sale. Within a few years, Glass became a full-time writer, and she has never looked back. She has published more than twenty novels under various names.

Zack Jordan is a compulsive learner and creator. He holds half an art degree, two thirds of a music degree, and about a quarter of a philosophy degree. He’s worked on projects for FEMA, the U.S. Army, and the Department of Defense, none of which elevated his security clearance. He was a designer on several video games including World of Tanks and the F.E.A.R. series, but he’s more proud of the indie games and music albums he’s released under the name U.S. Killbotics. He lives in Chicago with his wife Tara, and spends his evenings playing various Super Mario games with their two daughters, London and Brooklyn.

Bob Proehl is the author of The Nobody People and A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a Booklist best book of the year. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, a DJ, a record store owner, and a bartender. He was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. His work has appeared on Salon, as part of the 33⅓ book series, and in American Short Fiction.

Micaiah Johnson is the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds. Her debut novel was an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times and named one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science-fiction books of the last decade by NPR. She was raised in California’s Mojave Desert, surrounded by trees named Joshua and women who told stories. She received a bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and a master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers University–Camden. She now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University, where she focuses on critical race theory and automatons.

Emily Skrutskie is six feet tall. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Skrutskie is the author of The Salvation Gambit, Vows of Empire, Oaths of Legacy, Bonds of Brass, Hullmetal Girls, The Abyss Surrounds Us, and The Edge of the Abyss.