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Sarah Gailey is an American comics writer, essayist, and bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author of speculative fiction and short stories.

They are best known for writing the alternate history novella River of Teeth (2017), which won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer the following year.

The author has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for several consecutive years.

As an essayist, their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic, whereas their work have been translated into seven different languages and published across the globe.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Gailey, who is non-binary, currently lives in Los Angeles with their partner.

More about Sarah Gailey

Genres: Alternate History, Fantasy / SF, Historical Fiction

United States

Website: https://sarahgailey.com/

Non Series

  • Magic for Liars (2019)
  • Upright Women Wanted (2020)
  • When We Were Magic (2020)
  • The Echo Wife (2021)
  • Just Like Home (2022)
  • The Fisher of Bones (2017)

Mothership Zeta Year 1

  1. Mothership Zeta (2015)

River of Teeth

  1. River of Teeth (2017)
  2. Taste of Marrow (2017)
  3. Worth Her Weight in Gold: A River of Teeth Novella (2018)
Mothership Zeta Year 1

Detailed book overview

Non Series

Magic for Liars

Ivy Gamble was born without magic and never wanted it.

Ivy Gamble is perfectly happy with her life – or at least, she’s perfectly fine.

She doesn't in any way wish she was like Tabitha, her estranged, gifted twin sister.

Ivy Gamble is a liar.

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister―without losing herself.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2019
ISBN: 978-1250174628
Publisher: Tor Books
Upright Women Wanted

“That girl’s got more wrong notions than a barn owl’s got mean looks.”

Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2020
Ebook: B07R8PCFN2
Publisher: Tordotcom
When We Were Magic

Keeping your magic a secret is hard. Being in love with your best friend is harder.

Alexis has always been able to rely on two things: her best friends, and the magic powers they all share. Their secret is what brought them together, and their love for each other is unshakeable—even when that love is complicated. Complicated by problems like jealousy, or insecurity, or lust. Or love.

That unshakeable, complicated love is one of the only things that doesn’t change on prom night.

When accidental magic goes sideways and a boy winds up dead, Alexis and her friends come together to try to right a terrible wrong. Their first attempt fails—and their second attempt fails even harder. Left with the remains of their failed spells and more consequences than anyone could have predicted, each of them must find a way to live with their part of the story.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2020
ISBN: 978-1534432888
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
The Echo Wife

It was meant to be an evening to honour and celebrate Evelyn Caldwell's award-winning, career-making scientific research - but Evelyn has things on her mind.

Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better, newer woman. A woman who is now pregnant - but shouldn't be - and is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence.

A woman who shouldn't exist.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2021
ISBN: 978-1529354515
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Just Like Home

“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories ― she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family.

Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting… but who else could it possibly be?

There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House. Vera must face them and find out for herself just how deep the rot goes.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2022
ISBN: 978-1250174710
Publisher: Tor Books
The Fisher of Bones

The Prophet is dead. The eyes of the Gods have turned to his daughter. But she isn't ready. Not for the whispers in her ear, for the divinations... for the blood. Her people's history and their future, carved by ancients into the bones of long dead behemoths, are now her burden. Only she can read them, interpret the instructions, and guide them to the Promised Land. 

Their journey is almost at an end, but now, without the Prophet, she must find a way to guide them to the place they will call Home. Through blood and through sand, against the will of her own flock, against the horrors that haunt the darkness, only she can bring her people Home. The Prophet is dead. Long live the Prophetess.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-0998778327
Publisher: Fireside Fiction Company

Mothership Zeta Year 1

Mothership Zeta

The first ezine effort from the popular podcast production company, Escape Artists, Mothership Zeta offers speculative fiction that has a focus on fun. Fun is subjective, naturally, but we hope these short stories, reviews, and nonfiction pieces offer a look at the lighter side of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Cover by Frank Wu, assistant edited by Sunil Patel and Karen Bovenmyer.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2015
Ebook: B017FC8Q0Q
Publisher: Escape Artists

River of Teeth

River of Teeth

In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true.

Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.

This was a terrible plan.

Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo wranglers from around the globe. It is the story of Winslow Houndstooth and his crew. It is the story of their fortunes. It is the story of his revenge.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-0765395238
Publisher: Tordotcom
Taste of Marrow

A few months ago, Winslow Houndstooth put together the damnedest crew of outlaws, assassins, cons, and saboteurs on either side of the Harriet for a history-changing caper. Together they conspired to blow the dam that choked the Mississippi and funnel the hordes of feral hippos contained within downriver, to finally give America back its greatest waterway.

Songs are sung of their exploits, many with a haunting refrain: "And not a soul escaped alive."

In the aftermath of the Harriet catastrophe, that crew has scattered to the winds. Some hunt the missing lovers they refuse to believe have died. Others band together to protect a precious infant and a peaceful future. All of them struggle with who they've become after a long life of theft, murder, deception, and general disinterest in the strictures of the law.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2017
ISBN: 978-0765395252
Publisher: Tordotcom
Worth Her Weight in Gold: A River of Teeth Novella

Worth Her Weight in Gold

Winslow Remington Houndstooth, notorious outlaw, handsomest heartbreaker in the American South, has just finished a lucrative job, but he's faced with a hippo-sized problem that would test even the most seasoned of hoppers. A slyly funny, raucous adventure in the alternate America of Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow.

Author: Sarah Gailey
First Release: 2018
Ebook: B07BK7THN4
Publisher: Tor Books