Three Books About Myth That Actually Know What Year It Is

By Andy — 2026-07-04 — fantasy books adults

I notice three fantasy novels showed up in my inbox within ten days of each other last July. All different publishers. All built the same way.

You could call it coincidence. You probably shouldn't.

E.M. Anderson's The Lord of the Wood, Elizabeth Lim's Fishbone Cinderella, and H.G. Parry's The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood all landed in late July, and they're doing something deliberate together. They're taking fairy tale scaffolding — you know, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, the whole Arthur mythology — and holding it up against actual, documented, catastrophic history. Not vague medieval times. Not some floating fantasy past. 1941. 1940s Hong Kong. The specific things that happened and broke people.

Anderson's the quietest of the three, out July 21 from Hanover Square Press. Arthur Throckmorton is a clockmaker, which already tells you something about what this book cares about — precision, mechanism, time that moves forward whether you want it to or not. He crosses into an enchanted forest and meets the Lord of the Wood, a man slowly turning into a beast because the land he guards is dying. It's a Beauty and the Beast retelling, yes, but it's also queer, it's also cozy in the way only older characters getting a proper love story can be cozy, and the protagonists are people the publishing industry doesn't usually bother centering. Anderson wrote The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher before this, which should have already told us she knows how to put the people publishers ignore front and center.

The comparisons to TJ Klune and T. Kingfisher are fair enough. Though it finds its own thing.

Lim's novel—actually, let me get this right—Fishbone Cinderella runs on two timelines because that's the only way to tell a story about a mother and daughter split across a war and then across an ocean. Ha Yut Ying gains the ability to turn invisible when the Japanese soldiers come to 1940s Hong Kong. Her daughter Marigold appears in 1960s San Francisco watching her mother disappear, trying to pull her back. You can see the Cinderella bones in there if you're looking: the fishbone bracelet with broken links, the stepmother who crushes her singing dreams, the father who doesn't intervene. But the bones are just structure. The actual story is about a mother who became invisible and whether her daughter can call her back, more or less. Library Journal picked it as their SFF book of the month when it landed July 28 from Penguin Random House, which is the sort of thing that actually matters to people working in libraries.

The ambitious one.

That's Parry's novel, from Orbit. 1941 Wales, and the conceit is that people across the world start dreaming of King Arthur — it spreads like a contagion, dragons get spotted in the London Underground, prophets emerge saying Britain's greatest king is about to return. Parry wrote The Magician's Daughter, which did something not many literary fantasy writers manage: made the whole thing genuinely move. She gave her protagonist, Elaine Ambrose, a librarian at the British Museum sent to catalogue a professor's private collection on the North Wales coast, the smartest position in the room. She doesn't dream of Arthur. She dreams of Nimue, the woman who trapped Merlin in a tree.

Smart because Churchill consciously framed the Second World War as defending something ancient and specifically British. The Arthur myth in 1941 isn't neutral ground. It's already political, it's already working. Parry's novel is really about what happens when people reach for legend to cope with things that terrify them, how they romanticize the past when the present won't stop burning. It's a literary argument wearing a plague-narrative mask.

None of them are extraordinary, as far as I can tell. Two of them might be. What's actually notable is that publishers released all three within ten days, which means they've decided adult fantasy readers want myth and history tangled together, not kept separately in different shelves. It means they think there's an appetite for this thing these three books are doing. Something like that.

If you're making a summer reading list, July 21 through July 28 is your window.

Tags: E.M. Anderson, Elizabeth Lim, H.G. Parry, adult fantasy July 2026 releases, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood review, Fishbone Cinderella Elizabeth Lim debut