Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the time of year when curling up with a book—or a stack of books—is pretty much mandatory. If you're wondering where to start, we've got a list of new novels from 2016 to help you escape and make you think strange new thoughts. Many of these are part of longer series, so you can come back for more and more and more.

Four Roads Cross, by Max Gladstone

This is the fifth standalone novel in Gladstone's utterly riveting Craft Sequence, a series about lawyers and financial experts in a world where magic takes the form of contractual obligations and market forces. Most of the gods in this world have been overthrown, but a few remain. Talented lawyer Tara Abernathy has to represent the interests of one whose creditors are trying to mount a hostile takeover of his church. Unfortunately, she already has her hands full trying to help a moon goddess recover control of her seized property, while her friends in the local police force are trying to stop a rash of demonic possessions. Smart, funny, and action-packed, this is fantasy writing for people who love politics and economics.

Because Gladstone is a complete weirdo, he decided to write this series out of order, so the first novel is actually the third, the second is actually the first, and so on. You can tell the actual order from the number in the title (so this is the fifth novel released, but it's fourth in the cycle). The good news is that you can read them in any order, because they stand on their own. Characters do recur, however, so if you want to encounter them in chronological order, feel free to start with Last First Snow and make your way up to Four Roads Cross.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead is the award-winning author of a number of brilliant novels, including satirical zombie tale Zone One. Now he's turned to alternate history with The Underground Railroad, which tells the story of Cora, a slave who escapes her brutal masters in Georgia on a literal railroad that winds its way beneath the southern states and takes her on a Gulliver's Travels-style adventure through North Carolina, Illinois, and Tennessee. Though grim and often horrific, this novel is impossible to put down. Cora's flight reads like an intense thriller, intercut with deep dives into the characters who populate the antebellum South, from underground railroad workers and abolitionists to sadistic slave catchers and freemen who betray their escaped brothers. Whitehead refuses to give any easy answers, and he never lets his characters off the hook.

Underground Airlines, by Ben Winters

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers

Earlier this year we gave a stellar review to Winters' novel, which ups the ante on alternate histories of American slavery by imagining that abolition never happened. Here, Lincoln was assassinated in 1861, the Civil War was never fought, and the US has taken a different path. As the novel opens, it's 2016, and four Southern states still practice slavery. Activists on the underground railroad are using airplanes to deliver slaves to freedom, and meanwhile, the United States is scarily similar to what it's like today.

Maybe you're just not ready to read heavy novels about the legacy of slavery in the US. Fair enough—luckily, Chambers' novel is perfect, delightful escapism to lift your spirits. It's the tale of a misfit Martian clerk who loves to file paperwork and is running from something tragic in her past. In fact, she's running so hard that she decides to change her name, leave her beloved home planet, and set out for the stars with a group of ragtag engineers and techs who are freelance tunnelers, people who punch wormholes in space for interstellar traffic. When they get offered a job working with a mysterious and warlike civilization, they go on a terrifying adventure to the core of the galaxy, finding love and cool spaceship hackers along the way.

With its adventurous tone and oddball characters (including a polyamorous lizard, a friendly AI, a many-legged chef/doctor, and two maniacal techs), this novel will remind you of the much-loved series Firefly. It's also just good, old-school space opera, which was so popular with online readers that Chambers got funding to finish it with a successful Kickstarter campaign. Chambers' standalone sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit, is also available for you to gobble up.

The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross

Recommending this novel is just a sneaky way of recommending that you read the entire Laundry Files series leading up to it. This latest tale is the seventh in Stross' ever-expanding universe about the Laundry, a secret organization devoted to preventing the apocalypse. That task is actually harder than you might think, given that computer scientists, data analysts, and other number-crunching weirdos are constantly dabbling in demonic sorcery just to do their jobs. Stross combines the intricacies of technology with magic, much the way Max Gladstone combines law with magic in his Craft series. The results are hilarious and inventive, especially if you're one of those people who spends all day conjuring beasts with a command line. You can begin with The Nightmare Stacks, the tale of a young vampire with tons of student loan debt who's been drafted into the ranks of the Laundry, or go right to the beginning of the series with The Atrocity Archives . Either way, you're in for a very diverting read.