Parmar (Vanessa and Her Sister) brings to life 1930s Hollywood with this revealing biographical novel about Katharine Hepburn. Daughter of a prominent Connecticut suffragist and a physician, Kate is devastated at 13 by her older brother Tom’s death by suicide. Eventually, she manages to move forward, graduating from Bryn Mawr, marrying her college sweetheart, and embarking on a theater career in New York. A screen test for RKO Pictures leads to an offer for a part in the film A Bill of Divorcement, and Kate accepts, leaving for Los Angeles with her friend Laura Harding. As she and Laura try to hide their romantic relationship from the press, Kate embarks on an affair with her agent, Leland Hayward, while maintaining a friendship with producer David Selznick’s wife, Irene, and megastar Cary Grant, who dispels rumors about his romantic relationship with Randolph Scott by marrying a starlet. Parmar sensitively explores Kate’s sexuality, which she keeps hidden throughout her career, as well as her vulnerability following Tom’s death and her quest to remain true to her artistic vision despite pressure to adhere to the Hollywood image of a female star. Historical fiction fans will be drawn to this immersive portrait of the legendary actor. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Susanna Lea Assoc. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

Semple (Where’d You Go, Bernadette) delivers an energetic caper about a woman who gets roped into blue-blooded family drama and a potential smuggling scheme. Among the terms of philosopher Adora Hazzard’s fellowship at the Lockwood museum in New York City is that she provide “moral training” to owners Layla and Lionel Lockwood’s tween twins. Adora, who is divorced, lives nearby in the famed Ansonia building with her surly 15-year-old daughter, Viv, where she has assembled a “coven” of fellow middle-aged single ladies who live on the same floor. The plot kicks into gear when Adora gives an extra ballet ticket to the mysterious David Ignatius “Digby” Beale, and the pair begin a romance, threatening to break the rules of her coven. Soon Digby reveals they met not by chance but because he was following her, and he wants her to deliver a sealed letter to Layla. Initially convinced Digby is attempting to recover a stolen artwork from the museum’s collection, Adora sets out to investigate, and a series of increasingly alarming misunderstandings ensue. Some readers will have trouble keeping up with the freewheeling plot, but Semple’s writing is as limber as ever (defining stoicism for Digby, Adora says, “It’s not Keep Calm and Carry On. It’s Change Your Perception So You Never Have to Keep Calm and Carry On”). There’s plenty to enjoy in this rollicking adventure. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

A wild music scene and an illicit affair propel Scott’s entrancing English-language debut, which was originally published in France in 2000. In 1990s Paris, 31-year-old Louise has spent a year hanging out with a group of queer 20-something women who are fixtures in the city’s techno scene, including her roommate Pallas, with whom she occasionally hooks up, and well-known DJ Alex, her ex-girlfriend. Perpetually broke, drifting between clubs, raves, and lovers, sometimes in a drug-fueled haze, Louise sees a chance at a different kind of future when she lands a major record deal that gives her enough money and time to break free from her close-knit circle and make her own music, “an electro record with lots of rock in it.” But leaving the techno world behind is difficult, in part because of Alex’s current girlfriend, Inès, a seductive student with a serious drug habit and a serious crush on Louise. There is also the pull of Louise’s ex-boyfriend Nikki, a rocker and former heroin user. As Louise careens between these choices, Scott’s addictive narrative offers a kaleidoscopic look at a lively milieu and a woman’s struggle to overcome heartbreak and obsession, and make a life for herself as an artist. Readers will be thrilled. Agent: Alex Reubert, HG Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/30/2026 | Details & Permalink

Clarke debuts with an alluring fever dream of a novel about a young woman who enters an alternate reality. From a young age, Ada hears voices that tell her about things before they happen, such as her parents’ divorce. Years later, in London, she meets an older American man named Atticus at her apartment building’s pool. Seeing him makes her think she should have been him. After he returns to his family in the U.S., Ada can see and inhabit Atticus’s life when she looks in mirrors, where she sees his face instead of her own. Later, she wakes up in a white room where she meets a man named Don who confirms her suspicion that the voices she hears in her head come from an implant placed at the back of her mouth when she was a child. He offers to switch her body with an “identical synthetic copy” to help her cope with her feelings of dissociation. Ada agrees, and things get even weirder, as when she notices during a swim that she’s leaking saltwater from the back of her head. Clarke grounds the bizarre details and vivid imagery in meticulous prose (“At first she thought the voice had come out of the radio, but then she realized it was inside her head, as if somebody had put it there”). Readers will find much to dissect in this intriguing story of an existential crisis. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kosik debuts with a biting satire of megachurches and online marketing. The story revolves around four members of Moral Mavens Mainframe, a volunteer social media team for Moving Word, a megachurch in Charlotte, N.C. Kristin, the office assistant, still lives at home with her parents. Camryn, the team’s unofficial leader, struggles with massive debt due to a shopping addiction. Savannah, a costar with her family on a Christian reality TV series, is desperately trying to get pregnant, while Trishy, a young single woman, has a habit of taking gifts from the Mavens’ sponsors. Together, they are helping to promote a fundraising gala for an anti-human-trafficking organization. The plot thickens when Kristin suspects their pastor has been siphoning money from the church, which may account for his 62 pairs of sneakers and rumored indoor swimming pool. Hoping to save their reputation amid a brewing scandal, they plot to reveal the truth during the gala. The first half is bogged down in discussions of content strategy and details of the women’s livestreams, but once it gets going, the narrative tackles meaty questions about the aspiring influencers’ true motives beneath their sheen of righteousness. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Claire Friedman, InkWell Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

In Martin’s impressive and off-kilter debut, a strange infection causes more than 700,000 young women to migrate west across the U.S. The phenomenon begins in 1973, when the women’s skin grows itchy from a fungus, which also makes them lethargic and forgetful. College student Aimee Wallace learns that her best friend Ginny has been infected after she fails to show up for Aimee’s graduation from the University of Maryland. Aimee takes off in search of Ginny, desperate to bring her home. While traveling across Lake Michigan on a ferry packed with infected women, she begins to hear voices and see visions, which she soon realizes are of murdered women’s final moments. Meanwhile, Eve, a disgraced 26-year-old journalist, meets up with a “westward woman” in Asheville, N.C., where she hears about a mysterious man known as “the Piper,” who drives women to the coast. Hoping to restore her reputation, she heads west, following his trail and looking for a scoop. Martin’s second-person narration offers intriguing clues to the story’s meaning (“Some people say you stop being yourself, stop caring about what you used to care about, start acting like some kind of mindless growth inching forward. But don’t you already feel a bit that way?”), and the propulsive plot culminates in a shocking twist. Readers will revel in this layered and mysterious tale. Agent: Maria Whelan, InkWell Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

An Irish nurse must choose between patriotism and self-preservation in the stirring latest from Robards (Some Murders in Berlin). On Christmas night 1918, 22-year-old Rynn Carmichael is working a shift at Ballyshannon Court on the cliffs of northwest Ireland. A convalescent hospital during WWI, the mansion brims with British officers who have turned their focus to crushing the Irish resistance. When Rynn overhears the officers planning an ambush on a boat of Irish gunrunners, she races to warn them from the shore, knowing from her friend Molly Kincaid that her sweetheart Donal O’Reilly is onboard. Both the shipment and the ambush are botched, and Donal vanishes. Rynn returns to nursing, but when Molly’s body mysteriously washes up on the beach, she’s questioned by the British Crime Special Branch. To deflect suspicion, she accepts a marriage proposal from British lord Thomas Dunne. Though half British, Rynn feels out of place in her new London home with Dunne and is relieved when they return to Ireland less than a year later to avoid the Spanish flu. Robards crafts a well-rounded character in Rynn, who struggles while back in Ireland with whether to sacrifice her comfortable life for the cause of the country she loves. The result is a gripping portrait of the final years before Ireland’s 1921 independence. Agent: Robert Gottleib, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The unnamed narrator of this intense and recursive work from Sajko unfurls an angst-fueled account of his train trip from Croatia to Berlin. He has left in a rush, driven by emotional turmoil over the deaths of his violent father and self-involved mother, as well as a recent breakup with his girlfriend. His memories are vivid, and as the train makes its way up the coast, he circles through fond recollections of his grandmother, who lived in a rustic village and doted on him, and memories of his confusion as a teen during the Balkan Wars. A journalist by trade, he’s chronically afflicted with writer’s block, and fancies himself a modern-day Baudelaire. He peppers the narrative with cultural references, from Jean Genet’s theories about war photography (the narrator agrees with Genet that “a photograph’s precision doesn’t make you a witness”) to Pearl Jam, remembering how their song about a classroom suicide played years earlier during a nightclub shooting. The sluggish train suffers multiple delays and route changes, a perfect metaphor for the narrator’s aimlessness and anxiety, “meandering and circling around what hurts the most and yet cannot be changed as it shrinks into nothingness behind me.” Sajko’s blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The protagonists of these finely crafted stories from Tóibín (Long Island) reflect on their lives and how they wound up where they are. For the aging Irish narrator and his younger Jewish American lover in “Sleep,” it was “Germany, Ireland, the internet, gay rights, Judaism, Catholicism: they have all brought us here. To this room, to this bed in America.” In “The Journey to Galway,” an Irishwoman grapples with grief in the wake of WWII. The story begins with the unnamed woman noting an “unusual silence,” and her tale comprises painful recollections of those she lost in the war. “A Free Man” follows Joe, a failed Maynooth pontifical student and former math teacher, from Ireland to Barcelona, where he hopes to start a new life following a lengthy prison term for molesting teen boys. “The Catalan Girls,” a novella, centers on discreet and resolute Montse, who, as a 10-year-old, migrates with her mother and elder sisters Conxita and Núria (“the rude one”) from Spain to Argentina only to return 50 years later. The quiet humanity of Tóibín’s characters is as arresting as his knack for rendering relationships and place. This collection offers much to admire. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this sweet novella from Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound), Sato Reang’s devout father guides him to become a pious Muslim boy, a direction he chafes at as he grows older. At seven, his father decides to get him circumcised. Though Sato feels anxious about the procedure, he’s excited to be like his friends (“Finally!”). He begins learning to recite the Quran without understanding the Arabic, and going to the mosque every day. After a grand prayer recitation, Sato meets Jamal, the grandson of a local Muslim scholar, with whom he is forced to become friends. Sato becomes increasingly frustrated and sad as he sees his old friends going to the movies and getting girlfriends, and grows to despise Jamal. After his father suddenly dies, Sato worries he’ll turn into his dad, and is gripped by the impulse to urinate on a truckload of fruit (“an idea... begging to be brought to life, begging to bring me even farther astray”). Kurniawan flips effortlessly from first to third person, creating a fun and textured style, which blends a clear-eyed perspective with moments of visceral emotion. This brims with humor and heart. Agent: Carla Briner, Pontas Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink