Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Jamie's mother, Serena, has been hiding in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, since her life fell apart. The death of her wife, to cancer, proved too much for Serena. And Jamie, well Jamie hasn't been doing too well either. But Jamie has a secret: she's a powerful witch, and now she's decided to teach Serena to cast spells, so her mother can get her life back. Her magic is a question of exchanges, of creating the world you want to live in. As the strains of her grief start to affect her marriage to Ro, Jamie realises she doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mothers all those years ago. With Serena heading down a destructive path with her magic, and the secrets Jamie is keeping from Ro piling up, it's only a matter of time before something gives. Desperately trying to hold it all together, Jamie seeks to understand the secrets of a three-hundred-year-old magical book, her mother and her wife, before it all falls apart.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster (August 2025). Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade/Shela Sexton, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.