Rivers Solomon Books in Order

Rivers Solomon is a U.S. writer of speculative fiction whose books place people at the edge of a system, then ask what survival, care, and freedom might look like there. They grew up in Indiana, New York, California, and Texas, experiences that fed an interest in place, belonging, and the rules communities make for themselves.

Their route into fiction included studying Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, followed by an MFA in fiction writing at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. That mix of social history, close reading, and craft shows up in stories that refuse to separate a strange premise from the real pressures facing their characters.

Solomon also published short fiction in a range of literary outlets before and alongside their novels. Their first novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, arrived in 2017.

Set aboard a generation ship organized around a cruel racial hierarchy, An Unkindness of Ghosts follows Aster, a healer from the lower decks, as she investigates a death tied to her own family history. The book mixes space travel with questions of class, race, gender, disability, and inherited harm. It won the Firecracker Award for Fiction and received a Stonewall Book Award Honor.

Then came The Deep, a compact collaboration with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, developed from the song by the group clipping. Its central figure, Yetu, carries the collective memories of an underwater people descended from pregnant African women thrown from slave ships. The novella is about memory as both burden and lifeline, and it won a Lambda Literary Award.

With Sorrowland, Solomon moved into a dark, rural Gothic story about Vern, a young mother fleeing a religious compound and raising twins in the woods. Her body begins changing in ways she cannot explain, pushing her toward the history of violence that shaped the place she escaped. The novel won the Otherwise Award.

Model Home takes on the haunted-house story through the Maxwell family. Ezri returns with their sisters to the Texas home they left behind after their parents die under troubling circumstances. The book brings together family conflict, racism in a gated community, childhood fear, and the uneasy question of whether a house can hold on to the people who suffered inside it.

Across novels, novellas, and short fiction such as Blood Is Another Word for Hunger, Solomon writes about people who have been pushed aside but will not stay silent. The work can be intense, often blending horror, science fiction, fantasy, and history, but it also makes room for chosen family, tenderness, anger, and change.

Solomon lives in the United Kingdom. Their books are a good fit for readers who like speculative stories with sharp social questions, complicated people, and no easy way out.