I came late to these novellas, and during a difficult month this year I read almost nothing else. Murderbot’s voice, a beautiful blend of exhausted cynicism and deep, helpless love, was the only thing that felt like both a match to my mood and an appropriate response to the events provoking it. Murderbot has no illusions about the way the world works and will say so blisteringly, but remains so passionately committed to the people it loves and doing what’s right that I kept welling up in response. Its angry, poignant point of view, wrapped up in sharp, short bites of space adventure, is utterly addictive, and I’m genuinely delighted — as well as a little relieved — that the series’ success has greenlit a full-length Murderbot novel, so that I don’t yet have to bid it goodbye.

Maria Romasco Moore’s GHOSTOGRAPHS: An Album (Rose Metal Press, paper, $15.95) is an eerie, intimate sequence of flash fictions illuminating the author’s carefully curated collection of vintage photographs. Each story takes up a single page opposite an image, and these linked snapshots offer glimpses into one child’s life in a surreal small town where girls glow, people grow stalk-still in tall grass and babies are occasionally delivered by mail.

A delicate thread of continuity connects these flashes of story, each complete and perfect in and of itself but accreting meaning like nacre on a pearl. Characters recur; the girl who glows becomes the girl whose light went out, while the woman who only appears in winter surprises everyone by staying through into spring. The narrator meditates on qualities of light and time throughout, and the impressions they make on us and each other: “You’ve got to be careful with light,” the narrator’s grandfather says, and then later, “Time is a kind of light,” while in the last few pages the narrator reflects that “light dreamed us up. Light switched us on.” Sometimes those musings put forward an argument (“Every story is a ghost story. Even the ones you tell about yourself”); sometimes they tap into deep, resonant experiences of childhood timelessness (“In the summer we never slept and no one could stop us”); frequently they overlap, entwining physics and optics and language into something moving and strange. Each vignette is effortlessly precise and endlessly evocative, a formula that’s also a poem, and a story first and foremost.

The photographs are, themselves, fascinating artifacts: some torn or cut, some in pieces, some overexposed or water-stained. They, too, have accreted layers over time, and one of the book’s keen strengths comes from interacting with those layers instead of flattening them beneath label or frame. I forgot, reading it, that it’s subtitled “An Album,” but the significance of that returns by the end: The experience is very much that of sitting with a distant family member and turning fragile pages, telling tales as remote in time as they are rooted in memory. “Ghostographs” felt profoundly unsettling in its familiarity. I’ve never read anything like it.

THE MONSTER BARU CORMORANT (Tor, $28.99), by Seth Dickinson, is the highly anticipated sequel to his brilliant 2015 debut, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant,” a tense and mesmerizing geopolitical fantasy that asks whether it’s possible to destroy an empire from within without it digesting you first. When Baru Cormorant was a child, her nation was colonized by the Republic of Falcrest (more commonly called the Masquerade), her three-parent family torn apart in accordance with its “incrastic” doctrines of sex and gender. Baru, at horrific cost, chose to attend its schools and rise up in the Masquerade’s ranks in order to bring about the Masquerade’s downfall from within. She cemented her position by leading and betraying a rebellion to bring the fractious nation of Aurdwynn more thoroughly under the Masquerade’s control, culminating in the execution of her lover, the Duchess Tain Hu. “Monster” picks up where the first book left off, with a brain-injured Baru on the cusp of being exalted into the Masquerade’s secret authority (called “cryptarchs”) and taking the code name Agonist.