At the centre of Aliya Whiteley’s The Loosening Skin (Unsung Stories, £9.99) is an intriguing premise. In a world very much like our own, people shed their skins every seven years and, along with them, their pasts, feelings and associations: their old lives are, effectively, replaced. However, a new drug, Suscutin, allows users to maintain their skins and so retain their current life. Rose Allington, a former bodyguard for actor Max Black with whom she had a troubled love affair, has a rare medical condition that causes her to moult more often than average – so she undergoes rapid and regular emotional upheavals. When Max comes back into her life, wanting her to help him track down an old skin of his that has been stolen, Rose is forced to reassess everything. The Loosening Skin works as a quirky new weird thriller, but its triumph lies in the way Whiteley uses the metaphor of shedding skin to examine the tortured process of love and attachment.

Michael Cobley writes vast, sprawling space opera in the wide-screen tradition of Iain M Banks, replete with mega-starships, exotic alien worlds, artfully rendered extraterrestrial species and much swashbuckling derring-do, all carried off with an up-to-the minute political sensibility. Splintered Suns (Orbit, £9.99) is a stand-alone, but set in the universe of his Humanity’s Fire trilogy, and featuring its recurring cast of characters. On the planet Ong, Captain Brannan Pyke and his crew have been hired to carry out a museum heist; they run into an old enemy, Raven Kaligari, who purloins an arcane detection device, the Angular Eye, from under their noses. What follows is a thrilling action adventure as Pyke and his cohorts track down the remains of a lost starship in Ong’s desert, rumoured to be overflowing with the treasures of a vanished alien civilisation. They must also pursue Kaligari in an attempt to forestall her plan to unlock an ancient nano-horror that threatens the galaxy. Splintered Suns is a pageturner with a high-octane sense of wonder, full of gloriously described technology and fabulous settings.

NK Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month? (Orbit, £8.99) collects 22 fantastical stories, many appearing in print for the first time, which fuse magic realism, fantasy and science fiction to tell emotionally freighted stories about embattled protagonists up against the odds and, for the most part, winning through. Jemisin’s style is wonderfully economical and she has an instant empathy for her characters. She brings a unique twist to various genres: the ghost story in “The You Train”, about a woman plagued by visions of very strange spectres on the New York subway; science fiction in “Walking Awake”, where the protagonist finds herself taken over by enigmatic aliens; and fantasy, typified by “On the Banks of the River Lex”, a freewheeling, wildly imaginative look at what the gods might get up to when humans are no longer around. How Long ’til Black Future Month? is an important collection by a rising star.

Frank Owen’s North (Corvus, £12.99) charts the terrible consequences of civil war. Thirty years before the novel opens, the US was torn in two. Northern dictator Didier Renard sowed devastation in the form of biological weapons that annihilated the population of the southern states, while citizens of the north were protected by water-borne antiviruses. Now Renard has constructed a great wall dividing north from south – sound familiar? – to keep out the few survivors. The novel follows a group of desperate characters as they aim to join up with resistance fighters plotting to topple the dictatorship. Renard’s pregnant daughter is among them, and her quest for revenge on her genocidal father is at the heart of the book. North is fast paced, slick, and relentlessly bleak – though some hope is offered in the finale.

The central idea behind Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series is that in an alternative London a team of gifted workers are employed by the eponymous library to rescue literary texts from a multitude of alternative worlds. In the fifth book of the series, The Mortal Word (Pan, £7.99), the inhabitants of these realms – dragons and fairy folk with magical abilities – are on the verge of war, which threatens to bring chaos to the co-existing realities. When librarian Irene Winters hears about a dragon being stabbed to death at a peace conference in 1890s Paris, she and her team must travel back in time in a bid to find the culprit and prove that the library was not itself involved. Cogman fills a captivating story with animated characters and propels the narrative at a cracking pace, planting perfectly timed plot twists and reversals of fortune along the way.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Buying Time (Solaris). To order these titles go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.