When the father who abandoned her eleven years ago shows up on her doorstep, Qianze isn’t sure she’s ready to forgive him or to believe the wild and horrifying stories he begins telling her about his childhood, seemingly untethered from his past and present. He speaks of a prophecy, one he returned to warn his now-adult daughter about. But as Qianze struggles to take care of her ailing father through his alcoholism and wandering mind, she must decide whether the supernatural tale he eventually weaves is fact—or just another excuse for all his past mistakes.

This is the story of Cortés’ invasion of Tenochtitlan like you’ve never heard it before. Skipping around from the perspectives of the men and women in Moctezuma’s court, like the princess Atotoxli, to those in Cortés’ party, including their Nahua translator Malinalli, we witness a psychedelic turn-of-events as they never, but maybe could have, happened. What if Moctezuma never died? What if Tenochtitlan never fell?

An aging detective tasked with sniffing out the truth about a dead woman, rumored to have been killed by fox spirits, finds himself following in the path of a mysterious woman named Snow. Snow was once a mother, but now she’s just a woman out for blood, seeking decades-old vengeance on the man who murdered her child. As she chases a killer from China to Japan, Detective Bao follows behind, trying to untangle the complicated threads of a murder mystery hounded by spirits.

Two siblings, orphaned and set adrift in the American West after the death of their father, struggle with how to proceed. Their vastly different experiences and relationships with their late father cause tension, especially for Lucy, who just wants to bury his body anywhere and leave the past behind. But when the ghost of their father recounts the events that brought them to this point, we realize the story is far more complicated than his children ever could’ve realized.

A classic of both historical fiction and fabulism, Beloved is a must-read filled with lyrical prose and a haunting story based on American history and a real woman named Margaret Garner. Something is haunting the home that Sethe made for herself after escaping enslavement at a house of horror, ironically called Sweet Home. It’s not just the memories of the past that cling to Sethe and her daughter, Denver, either. There is a ghost here; the ghost of a baby whose tombstone is inscribed with only one word: Beloved.