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I've had a few brilliant reads already in 2026 and here is a little review of one that made a big impact: The Witch Who Chases the Sun, by Dawn Chen. Enjoy my intense fan art featured below!

It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to realise this, but I’m calling it: fantasy is my favourite genre.

Here’s a very brief history of my relationship with fantasy before getting into this review, but it’s all relevant I promise: My mum is a voracious reader of classic, historical and contemporary fiction, and (not to throw her under the bus, since I do love her), she has an innate snobbery about fantasy that I think is quite common. In a nutshell, she thinks that it’s for children. I think I had this idea incepted into me when I was an older teenager, because that was the age I suppose the world started expecting me to read “serious” books. I had to leave books and series that I loved behind. Then, I made the grave mistake of studying literature at university and by the end of my degree, it felt like my life as a reader for pleasure was kind of done and dusted. Fast-forward twenty years, and the heady combination of grief, anxiety and a mid-life crisis had this effect: I read my first queer fantasy novella. It was The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo, and it unlocked the adjoining doors between three aspects of my brain: my queerness, my desire to write, and my love of fantasy. Returning to fantasy as an adult, having started with the Empress of Salt and Fortune (roughly two years ago) the overwhelming sensation I have when reading in this genre is one of ease. Which probably sounds strange, but I mean it in the following sense: rediscovering fantasy feels like finally coming home.

So, now to my review of The Witch Who Chases The Sun. It was deeply pleasurable to relax into a world where I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen, and there are some extremely good twists that I won’t spoil here, which in hindsight were beautifully telegraphed since they answered subconscious questions I had about the world instead of raising infuriating new ones (which is what *bad* twists tend to do to me). The writing was vivid and playful, and there was a strong vein of humour running through the book which I really enjoyed.

The main characters are Ying Cai-Li, a legendary alchemist from Aixauh and Anne Barberry, a powerful oracle from Inabri. They’re estranged ex-lovers, survivors of an obliterating magical war between their two home countries. It’s not an easy book in terms of themes and the things it depicts, but even so this is my favourite kind of fantasy: rich and surprising but with a sense of inevitability, where you always feel confident that the things that end up happening, even if they’re tragic, will always have a poetic logic to them. I talked before about how reading fantasy gives me a sense of ease, and it was true in this book from the very first sentence, which had a confidence and mysteriousness about it that made me feel right at home.

The lead up to and aftermath of the war, which was driven by Inabri’s racism and its devotion to religious and economic supremacy, is not told in a linear way. Instead it is pieced together across the course of the book and interspersed with Cai-Li and Anne’s attempts (and refusals) to reconnect in the present. I think it’s a really masterful way of showing the fuzzing effects that trauma has on how you experience time, like everything is happening at once. It’s a really powerful technique because its apt not only for depicting the intense joy and breakage of Cai-Li and Anne’s relationship, but also how the abomination of war destroys people and cultures beyond repair, for generations into the future. It was very sobering to read in this way and something that hit home for me a lot. Even though the story was sometimes harrowing, I found it really inspirational, and I think the ending was hopeful and meaningful. One of the main messages that I took away from it is that understanding history and predicting the future are the same thing, and that is difficult work, and takes sacrifice, but it’s worth doing.

I loved this book and it’s a great example of everything I love about fantasy; it’s innovative, beautiful and feels liberating to read.