Simon Jimenez Books

Simon Jimenez has published two novels, and both of them made serious readers sit up. His debut, The Vanished Birds from 2020, is a literary space opera about a starship captain who loops through time-dilated trade routes while everyone she loves ages without her, and about the strange silent boy who falls into her care. It was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and earned Jimenez a nomination for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Then came The Spear Cuts Through Water in 2022, and the quiet buzz became a roar. The Spear Cuts Through Water won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Crawford Award, and it has become one of those books that readers press on each other with unusual intensity. The story follows two warriors, the disgraced guard Keema and the stoic Jun, escorting a dying moon goddess across a brutal empire ruled by Jun's own family. It is told through a dreamlike frame: you, the reader, are watching the story performed in an inverted theater outside of time, with the voices of the dead interrupting in the margins. That sounds difficult, and for the first fifty pages it is. Then the technique disappears and you realize you are reading one of the great fantasy romances of the decade.

Because that is the secret of the book: under the mythic structure and the body horror of the emperor's Terrors, it is a love story between two young men learning tenderness in a world built on cruelty. The romance is a true slow burn, built from small gestures, a shared spear, a hand offered at the right moment, and its payoff hits harder than a hundred pages of declarations. Readers who came to fantasy through The Song of Achilles will recognize the shape of this ache immediately.

What defines Jimenez as a writer is formal daring in service of feeling. The second-person frame, the chorus of dead voices, the time-slipped narration in The Vanished Birds: none of it is decoration. He uses structure the way other writers use plot twists, to make you feel time, loss, and memory in your body. His prose is precise and unhurried, and he trusts readers to keep up.

Heat-wise, expect a 1, maybe a soft 2, on our spice scale. There is on-page intimacy, handled with the same care as everything else, but this is not a book you read for spice. It is a book you read for the feeling in your chest at the end, the one that has flooded BookTok with teary reviews.

For a romantasy audience, Jimenez is the literary end of the pool, the author you reach for when you want the romance to devastate rather than sizzle. He is a palate cleanser in the best sense: different enough from a standard enemies to lovers arc to reset your reader brain, romantic enough to satisfy the same hunger.

A practical warning that doubles as a recommendation: this is not a book to read in five-minute gaps. The theater frame, the second-person address, and the braided timelines ask for real sessions of attention, and readers who bounce off it almost always bounced in fragments. Give it evenings, not commutes. The reward for that attention is a final hundred pages that most readers describe with the same word, devastating, and an ending that recontextualizes the entire performance you have been watching. Jimenez is currently one of the most exciting stylists working in fantasy, and getting in now, two books deep, is the reader equivalent of finding a band before the stadium tour.

Start with The Spear Cuts Through Water; it is a standalone and the stronger entry point. Give it fifty pages of patience before you judge the frame. If you finish it and want more of his voice, The Vanished Birds is waiting, quieter and sadder, with a final act that lands like a held breath released.