This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar (author), Max Gladstone (author), Cynthia Farrell (narrator), Emily Woo Zeller (narrator)

Simon Schuster Audio, ISBN 9781508207056, July 2019

This is a wonderful, complex, beautifully constructed novella, a love story between two operatives from opposite sides of a time war.

Red, we gradually learn, is an operative of the side that's building a technologically advanced future culture. Blue is an operative of the side that relies on biological science, the side that is called Garden. They encounter each other, at a distance at first, as they work on their respective assignments, increasingly assigned--as the best operatives each side has--to undo each other's work.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers

Harper Voyager, ISBN 9780062936011, September 2019

This is a standalone novella unconnected to Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series.

Climate change accelerated to a severe crisis that drained the ability and willingness of governments to support space exploration. Yet the drive to explore is not dead, and a private institute forms, to crowd-fund continued research and exploration. With contributions coming from anyone, anywhere in the world, who wants to support it, and all contributions, tiny or enormous, acknowledged, it works.

This story follows Lawki 6, a mission to a red dwarf system with four planets that may be habitable. Five missions to other star systems were launched before them, but results from the first weren't yet received when Lawki 6, ship name Merian, departs.

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4), by Seanan McGuire (author), Cynthia Hopkins (narrator)

Macmillan Audio, January 2019

One of the students at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children in Every Heart a Doorway is Lundy. She's unusual even by the standards of the school, in that she is aging in reverse, growing younger, at least in body, rather than older.

This is Lundy's story. Her world, the world she stumbles into through a doorway that shouldn't be there, is the Goblin Market.

It's a strange and magical world, and everything rests on a system of barter and the principle of Fair Value. The Goblin Market also allows people to go back and forth between their world of origin and the Goblin Market freely until the age of eighteen.