Uncertain Sons and Other Stories

NYPL's Best Of 2025 Uncertain Sons is a startling and masterful collection exploring familial love and trauma; societal and technological anxieties; identity and class; and alternate near-future irrealities. Sharp, incisive, imaginative, and visionary, Thomas Ha's debut heralds the arrival of a vital new voice. PRAISE FOR UNCERTAIN SONS "You! Yes, you! You need this book! The stories in Uncertain Sons already feel like classics of the uncanny. As inventive as Ray Bradbury, as unsettling as Thomas Ligotti or Carmen Maria Machado, Ha knows how to produce that peculiar, pleasurable, creeping sense of wrongness and dislocation so particular to weird horror. I am such a fan of Thomas Ha's writing-and I expect that you will be, too." -Kelly Link, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Book of Love and Get in Trouble "Thomas Ha's first collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, offers a unique voice and stylistic range. Engaging characters in believable yet off kilter realities will remind readers of their own lives. One of the very best new collections I've seen in a while." -Jeffrey Ford, Author of A Natural History of Hell and Crackpot Palace "A devastatingly good book of stories. Thomas Ha offers glimpses of weird worlds that continue to bubble and spread in your mind long after you finish the stories, slowly seeping into every crevice of your brain. This is a collection I wish I'd written. This is weird horror at its very best." -Brian Evenson, Author of Good Night, Sleep Tight, and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell "A perfect puzzle box, beautifully constructed and impeccably watertight. Together these stories drop us into a world agonizingly like our own-but we mustn't let our guard down once we're in. Wise as well as clever, sharp as well as tender. Ha is a virtuoso." -Premee Mohamed, Nebula Award-winning author of The Butcher of the Forest "This book is all the evidence you need that Ha is one of the powerful emerging voices in short fiction." -John Wiswell, Nebula Award-winning author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In and Wearing the Lion "I loved Uncertain Sons and Other Stories. Ha is one of our absolute best working right now. Go get it!" -Arkady Martine, Author of Rose/House "Ha is one of the most exciting writers of short fantastic fiction to come along in years, and Uncertain Sons and Other Stories is highly recommended." -Steve Rasnic Tem, Recipient of the H.W.A.'s Lifetime Achievement Award "Uncertain Sons is sure to be a collection that reverberates through the horror scene, and if you haven't read Ha's work before, you need to remedy that ASAP." -Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot "[A]n engaging, kinetic, and profoundly well-crafted set of stories....[I]t marks him out as one to watch." -William Shaw, Strange Horizons

Thomas Ha is a Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated writer of speculative short fiction. His stories can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade plus of living in the northeast, now resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.