The Paradox Hotel

January Cole runs security at the Paradox Hotel, a luxury facility adjacent to a time travel terminal where the wealthy come to vacation in the past. January is experiencing temporal drift, a condition caused by proximity to the timeport that is slowly fracturing her grip on reality, including visions of a body in room 526 that appears to be both there and not there. When the government convenes billionaires at the hotel to bid on privatizing the time travel technology, January realizes the corpse and the auction are connected.

Emily Woo Zeller narrates with the controlled disorientation that the novel's perspective demands, giving January's fractured temporal perception a texture that makes the unreliability feel genuine rather than gimmicky. The Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ speculative fiction recognizes a novel that centers a queer protagonist's interior life without reducing her identity to the plot's dramatic engine. The mystery structure and the science fiction premise are unusually well integrated.