Featured on the Wigleaf Top 50 list for “You Won‘t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women”

Longlisted for Story Prize for collection And I Do Not Forgive You

Debut collection May We Shed These Human Bodies named Best Indie Book by The Atlantic

Books named best of the year by The Washington Post, NPR, Bustle, Tor, Good Housekeeping, and others

Praise for Happy People Don’t Live Here

"Amber Sparks' long-awaited debut novel is almost here: 'a story about secrets, and buried trauma and little goth children’.... ‘In my writing, there’s a ghost in everything, because IRL there is a ghost in everything,” Sparks adds. “Even if the ghost is just me, haunting myself and my fiction forever.’"
― People

"Equal parts ghost story, mystery, and family drama―a little Only Murders in the Building, a little Pushing Daisies.... What unfolds is a quirky, surrealist tale that has some of the most engaging character work I’ve seen in a long time. It is just a goddamn delight through and through."
― Christina Orlando, Rector Magazine

"The long-awaited debut novel from Sparks looks like a delightfully autumnal read, about a mother and daughter who move into an apartment building that used to be a sanatorium and the weird people (living and dead) who they encounter there. Everything about it reminds me of Ray Bradbury and Annie Hartnett and I already know I’m going to want to stay in the Pine Lake Apartments forever (and maybe I will???)."
― Drew Broussard, Literary Hub, "Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

"As a longtime fan of Sparks, when her debut landed on my desk, I stopped everything I was doing to read the first few chapters, where an unforgettable cast of characters call a peculiar apartment complex home. If you love And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World, you’ll love Happy People."
― Adam Vitacavage, Debutiful, "Most Anticipated Debut Novels of 2025"

"Sparks works within a highly stylized mix of quirky and eerie―but from within her own idiosyncratic vision, she celebrates the power and strangeness of weird women and girls. For anyone who has ever wished they made Nancy Drew novels for grown-ups."
― Kirkus Reviews

"Playful . . . beneath the spunky girl detective plot is a finely crafted novel about fraught relationships, both between a mother and daughter and between the living and the dead. It’s a cozy supernatural delight."
― Publishers Weekly

"Amber Sparks is one of my favorite living writers, and Happy People Don’t Live Here is just as searing, funny, and unforgettable as I hoped. In the world of Amber Sparks, ten-year-old girls are extraordinary and ghosts are regular as rain. This is an enthralling novel about how mothers haunt their daughters and vice versa, and the beautiful fact of love after death. Alice and Fern feel like they have always existed and always will. Get ready for your new favorite novel."
― Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland

"Strange and surprisingly uncanny, Amber Sparks’s new novel is a twisty, delicious trip down the rabbit hole. Every family story is a haunted house, and this one gives us everything spooky and so much more. A beautiful book, and a slippery one, too―Sparks has built something terribly, wonderfully fascinating with Happy People Don’t Live Here. A stunner."
― Kristen Arnett, author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

"With the fantastical inventiveness of Karen Russell and the cutting social wit of Shirley Jackson, Amber Sparks spins a moving tale of a mother and daughter finding their way amid a community of (mostly) loveable weirdos. A smart, funny, and unforgettable debut from one of my favorite writers!"
― Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

Praise for And I Do Not Forgive You

“Every story pulls off a convincing blend of the ordinary and the surreal, and altogether they offer an eye-popping range. One piece will tumble along full of event, and the next will stretch the mind, bit by bit. A single page may erupt in a cornucopia of feeling: groans of heartache, yips of delight, a fine wisecrack or two and the rage of a woman wronged. As a reader, I was so won over I pressed the book on strangers on public transportation.” —John Domini, Washington Post

“What joyful play and heart and movement in these stories, full of permission and the thrum of ideas bursting and growing on the page. To read one is like a bon-bon on a silver platter with a lit sparkler stuck inside.” —Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master

“Each story feels like it belongs here, but also like it stands alone so well you want to read it on repeat, and while the range of emotions evoked in the collection as a whole is broad, I found myself most often sitting with that indescribable ache that characterizes the bittersweet. . . . With writers like Sparks around, the present, at least, is a little nicer than it was.” —Ilana Masad, NPR

“Re-appropriating fairy tales, urban legends, and supernatural fantasies, Amber Sparks' startling kaleidoscopic visions re-cast familiar heroines in their own stories. Reading this was a delight!”—Ling Ma, author of Severance

“As this collection points out again and again, we don’t live in a reasonable society, but Sparks is doing her best to make sure at least some of the women of our history have their revenge.” —Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com

“These stories are fiercely funny, heartrending, enraged and enraging, redemptive―in short, essential. They’re also some of the most inventive stories I’ve read. I loved every one.”—Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned

“With sharp, lyrical wit, Sparks lays bare the inherited violence and misogyny our culture levels at female bodies. While magic ebbs and flows—sometimes working in tandem with technology—no power seems strong enough to put the families and lovers back in their proper place anymore.” —Nancy Hightower, The Brooklyn Rail

 “The characters in this third collection of short fiction from Sparks exemplify the famous quote from Muriel Rukeyser that made the social media rounds in the wake of the #MeToo movement: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.’ These are stories of that split-open world. . . . A collection with a goth heart beating beneath a cheerleader’s peppy exterior.”  ––Kirkus Reviews  

“Few readers will encounter with any frequency such bold, bizarre, and brutally honest content as is in Sparks’ new collection. . . . Sparks’ imagination seems limitless, her approaches to style and form without boundaries…. At once timely, wickedly funny, and uncomfortably real, Sparks’ singular stories have the power to shake us wide awake and shatter every last happily-ever-after illusion.”  ––Janet St. John, Booklist

  “In this genre-bending new collection, Amber Sparks has once again shown herself to be fearless and cutting, the insistent voice that breaks through the hand trying to silence it. I had a lot of fun reading these fresh, sharp, delicious stories, even as my neck prickled with doom.”—Lindsay Hunter, author of Eat Only When You’re Hungry

“[Sparks] impresses with her exceptional collection of wry, feminist stories.... Some stories smuggle incredible emotional impact into surprisingly few pages.... Sparks’s sardonic wit never distracts from her polished dismantling of everyday and extraordinary abuses. Readers will love this remarkable, deliciously caustic collection.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

 “Irreverent and clever characters take center stage in Sparks’s latest collection.... The pieces here are beyond the classification of any one genre, borrowing from fairy tales, fantasy, coming-of-age, modern life, and social commentary.... Each story is vivid, unexpected, and satisfyingly weird.” —Emily Hamstra, Library Journal

Praise for THE UNFINISHED WORLD

The Huffington Post: “…she invents her own otherworldly motifs, like a werewolf-hunting tradition shared by fathers and daughters, or a paleontologist exploring the surreal wonders of the West. Each story has its feet firmly planted in the real world, but serves as an epicenter for swirling fantasies.”

The Kenyon Review: "...a glittering array of literary curios...Sparks is a good rummager: energetic in every direction, and willing to find her treasures where they lie."

Paris Review: “So many of these stories read in this spirit: as observational field notes for Sparks’s characters, with narratives that arise only from the delicate reportage of their eccentricities. Every scene is, almost always, softly and meticulously arranged, like tableaux of preserved butterflies. And yet, as real as these characters are, everything about The Unfinished World remains somehow fantastic, dreamed up in Sparks’s own terror of an imagination…”

The Washington Post: “Sparks uses the surreal and fantastic in stunning, surprising ways. Like Carola Dibbell’s “The Only Ones” and Emily Mandel’s “Station Eleven,” the book is a masterful work of speculative fiction.”

The New York Times: “Sparks’s stylish second collection is the work of a young writer whose voice feels far wiser than her years, as she engages with ancient themes: the Greek myths, the rituals of death, the small tokens that lovers trade over a lifetime of experience. Sparks has no fidelity to realism; she plays with both fantasy and form. No one story sounds like another, yet her singular voice floats through the collection, tying it together with opulent prose that draws heavily on history and the macabre.”

The Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Sparks recognizes perverse mythology uncovers the most innate truths about human nature and connection. When the stories you’ve been told aren’t enough, make up your own. Forged in an evocative and sensual fire, these tales transcend tradition to shine new light onto timeless complications.”

Chicago Review of Books: “The Unfinished World and Other Stories entices readers through its fabulist premises, but the pleasure gleaned from the stories isn’t cursory: it’s meticulous, the kind of joy that crawls under your skin and lives for days, driving you mad for more.”

The Rumpus: “Sparks’s stories are like these uncanny objects contained within them: the impossible looking out through the eyes of the ordinary.”

Bookforum: “Readers who enter The Unfinished World themselves arrive from “the new,” the “modern,” but the stories again and again encounter “the oldest things”—they return to awe.”

The Masters Review: “Sparks’s short works are exquisitely crafted and entirely unique.”

LitReactor: “Sparks blends the lines between dreams and wakefulness, the living and the dead, and speaks to all of us who get caught somewhere in the middle, unable to choose which world we belong to.”

JMWW: “There is something about these stories that makes them so familiar, like my mother’s hand on my forehead, yet so fantastic and even a little dangerous.”

Electric Literature: “Sparks proves that often what is most compelling in fantasy situations is their normalcy; we can’t out-invent our baser desires, even in fiction.”

Barnes & Noble: “Sparks deftly brings whole fantastic worlds to life in the space of as little as a few short paragraphs.”

Vol. 1 Brooklyn: “Amber Sparks continues to evolve as an idiosyncratic storyteller, offering nineteen stories that crisscross genre and mood and that elevate her to the upper echelon of young American short fiction writers.”

Powell’s Books (for Indie Next): “The beautiful stories in Sparks’ debut collection have an ephemeral quality that is difficult to categorize. Comparisons can be made to Haruki Murakami or George Saunders, but the writing is honestly unlike anything I have ever read. The otherworldliness of these stories will transport you beyond the minutiae of your everyday life and alter the way you look at the world.” —Shawn Donley

Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review: “The images tumbling from Sparks’s mind in her extraordinary second story collection (following May We Shed These Human Bodies) are fantastical and sublime…. In present-day, historical, and fantasy settings, the author is assured; her spare but colorful prose takes the reader on journeys of longing and mystery, often into uncharted territory, all the while capturing setting and character in a few words…. [T]he breadth of her imagination never ceases to amaze.” 

Kirkus Reviews: “Sparks’ stories, too, function much like the curiosities in the cabinet: finely wrought, strange, and sometimes inscrutable. When Inge wonders, “Was the world crowded with ghosts?” the collection answers for her: yes. Luckily for readers, we have Sparks to guide us through the underworld. Stylish and deeply imagined.”

Karen Grikitas: “Amber Sparks has created an extraordinary collection of tales that go far beyond everyday experience. Some of the stories are strange, fantastical and seemingly not of this world, touching on mythical themes, while others, although grounded in the real world, have a haunting quality that is at once moving and disturbing.”

It’s Either Sadness or Euphoria: “You’ll be intrigued, you’ll be moved, you’ll shake your head at Sparks’ creativity, but most of all, you’ll get to witness her storytelling talent and her deft skill with language and imagery first hand.”