THE BOOK OF M By Peng Shepherd, William Morrow, 496 pages, $33.50

In The Book of M, we find ourselves travelling through an American landscape ravaged by a plague that steals people’s memories along with their shadows. In the wake of this great Forgetting, various survivors, including an archery champ and a man looking for his shadowless wife, set out on an eventful pilgrimage to New Orleans to meet a mysterious figure.

In her first novel, Peng Shepherd keeps the journey interesting, makes us care about her characters, and invites us to think about how we are all the stuff of dreams. SUMMERLAND By Hannu Rajaniemi, Tor, 304 pages, $33.99 In this alternate history, the year is 1938, and death is no longer the end. Instead, lucky stiffs have their “Tickets” punched to an afterlife in the ethereal dimension next door. From there they can still communicate with the land of the living by way of pseudospiritual technologies.

It’s a complicated premise, and Hannu Rajaniemi layers an even more complex spy story on top of it, with agents from the Winter Court (Britain’s secret service in this world) liaising with the Summer Court (its counterpart in the ghost world). Together, the living and the dead have to unravel a plot involving lots of international (not to mention interdimensional) intrigue.

Summerland suggests that uploading our consciousness to the “cloud” might not be such a great thing, or will at least involve us in complications we need to consider more deeply.