Galveston

Galveston is set on the real island city off the Texas coast, in a near future where magic has come back into the world. In 2004 a Flood of magic broke over Galveston during Mardi Gras, and it split the city in two. On one side is an ordinary Galveston of survivors. On the other is Carnival, a Mardi Gras that never ends, full of people and creatures bent into strange shapes and presided over by Momus, the god who rules that part of the city. Two women built and still keep the boundary between them: Jane Gardner, who runs the ordinary city, and Odessa Gibbons, known as the Recluse.

A generation on, both are old, and Jane is dying. Her daughter Sloane, in her early twenties and dreading the job she is meant to inherit, makes a bargain with Momus to save her mother, and the bargain goes badly wrong. Josh Cane, a bitter young apothecary whose family lost everything in a poker game, and who was fond of Sloane as a child and is embittered that she has forgotten him completely, becomes tangled in the consequences. He and his loyal friend Ham Mather are falsely accused and banished to the mainland, where they have to survive the wild coast, its people and a hurricane. The storm lets magic loose through the city Jane and Odessa kept safe, and the line between the two Galvestons dissolves.

Stewart is most interested in character, and in the way people's flaws have real consequences. Josh is hard company for much of the book, and Sloane's choices are infuriating, which is the point. The writing about Carnival is vivid and often funny, and the mainland chapters are grim. Readers differ on the pace: the reviewer Rich Horton found it "an absorbing book, a wonderful read" but noted that it "doesn't really end so much as stop," while a later reader found it "incredibly slow." It suits readers who like fantasy with an adult, morally serious edge, and anyone who knows the Gulf Coast.