A Native American girl discovers her sexuality and reels from sexual abuse in this frank outing from Hart (Native Love Jams). Winnow Sticks is five when she and her friends mimic a sex scene from a movie they glimpsed their parents watching. At 10, Winnow is sent by her parents, who are getting divorced, from their Red Lake Nation home in Minnesota to live with her aunt Shelly in Arkansas. There, she befriends a girl named Sarrah, who kisses her. Shelly gives Winnow a pornographic magazine to explain sex, which she and Sarrah look at. Then Winnow moves with her aunt to Texas, where Shelly forces her to attend a weekly Bible study session at a local church, during which Winnow regularly locks herself in the bathroom to masturbate. The narrative blends Winnow’s coming of age with harrowing episodes of sexual assault, as when she’s abducted as a preteen by two boys who threaten to kill her if she doesn’t have sex with them. Here and elsewhere, Hart’s gritty and plainspoken chronicle glimmers with poetic insight—Winnow, humiliated by the attack, spends the night outside, “staring up at the stars, wondering how far my pain and fear stretched out beyond my body. It felt like it was traveling to at least the edge of the solar system.” This bracing tale is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Riffing on Doctor Doolittle, the exciting and hilarious debut from Isaacs follows a 28-year-old New Yorker who suddenly develops the ability to hear what animals are saying. Henry Parsons is on a first date in Central Park with a woman named Molly when he hears a magnolia warbler tell the couple to “fuck off.” Henry is the only one who can hear the bird, and soon he’s hearing other animals: the betta fish his housemate owns, two dogs talking while he’s waiting for a bus, and two rats conversing in the subway about dead human bodies being dumped in an abandoned tunnel. The rats’ story leads Henry to leave an anonymous tip with the police, and he tells Molly what he heard, omitting the source. She proposes they search for the body, and when they do, late one night, they overhear two men with Scottish brogues dumping another corpse. Henry loses his smartphone as he and Molly flee, causing the pair to worry the men will find it. Isaacs, who ushers the mystery to a surprising final twist, effectively combines absurd humor with literary references (evoking Kafka, Henry shudders to “imagine the weltschmerz of a cockroach”), and it’s satisfying to watch Henry evolve from milquetoast to man of action. This is a hoot. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this arresting posthumous novel from Kraf (Find Him!), who died in 2013, washed-up writer Marlane Frack attends a mysterious retreat for former artists. In residence are “ex-artists” of various disciplines: poets, composers, ballerinas, choreographers, the “original abstract expressionists” and their “silenced and battered” wives, preeminent physicists, and even a dentist who invented a surgical procedure for nuclear dental transplants. Some seek rehabilitation and “creative rebirth,” while others are “permanent residents” who staged their deaths to “resign” from their work. Having left behind an erratic husband haunted by combat in the Vietnam War, Marlane reignites an old rivalry with fellow resident and former friend Nadia Lagoon, a poet who forces her to confront her tortured relationship with her father. She undergoes a series of surreal treatments, including an olfactory “memory rejuvenation and excision” from Doctor Amazing, a tall, smiling man in a striped dashiki who stuffs her nostrils with cotton soaked with the smells of her childhood. An eerie dreamlike logic expands Marlane’s struggle for creative agency into a hypnotic consideration of how memories can distort or shape reality. In this funhouse narrative, meaning slips away into an accelerating spiral of bizarre events. Readers will find it an impressive exploration of an artist’s inner life. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Suzanna, the narrator, was raised by her grandparents in New York City. Now a young woman, she recounts how she spent her early childhood regularly visiting a hilltop prison outside the city where her mother was serving a life sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the killing of a guard. The mother, a former revolutionary, is a cause célèbre, but as a child Suzanna doesn’t understand the details. Her grandfather, with whom she visits the prison, describes the crime as a “misguided attempt... to steal from the rich and give to the poor.” He dies when Suzanna is nine, and her unyielding grandmother, disgusted by and ashamed of her daughter, refuses to take Suzanna to the prison or read her daughter’s letters, even as her own health deteriorates. A sympathetic nun from the prison arranges for Suzanna’s regular visits, and as she grows up, she begins to question what she wants for herself. Vexed by her push-pull relationship with her mother, she wonders if she’s continued visiting the prison only at the nun’s insistence, and sense that her grandmother, who pushes her into skipping the seventh grade, is impatient for her to become the successful young woman she’d wanted her daughter to be (“Everywhere I turned in my seventeenth year someone was saying, Go”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Guatemalan writer Halfon (Canción) reflects on his time at a nightmarish summer camp in this resonant autofiction. At 13, narrator Eduardo and his younger brother are sent by their parents from Florida to their native Guatemala to attend a remote camp for Jewish students. Expecting to learn a few survival skills and sit around a campfire, Eduardo is shocked and unsettled when they’re subjected to a “military” regimen, complete with hazing, surprise 3 a.m. drills, and Zionist sing-alongs, which he gathers are intended to indoctrinate them into supporting the Israeli state. This disturbing ordeal has stayed with Eduardo, now a writer raising a family in Berlin. He remembers trying to escape, feeling so frightened that “my own shadow was trying to get away, that it no longer wanted to follow me across the mountain.” A chance meeting with a former camper puts him back in touch with their sinister and unapologetic counselor Samuel Blum, who, in Eduardo’s memory, carried a snake in his pocket and a tarantula on his arm. As the dreamlike story shifts back and forth in time, Eduardo confronts a chilling realization about the camp’s abuses and reflects on the effects of inherited trauma and victimhood. It’s a breath of fresh air. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A 77-year-old Texan grapples with the astonishing news that she’s pregnant in the amusing latest from Frankel (Family Family). Pepper Mills, a straight-talking Brooklyn native, blames her silly name on her ex-husband, Roger, whose surname she took when they married. After getting into a fender bender, she loses her driver’s license and reluctantly moves into the same continuing care community where Roger lives. She starts up a new relationship with a charming British man named Moth and describes their new home as “like moving back into your college dorm, if your college dorm had been a Hampton Inn.” Feeling queasy and lightheaded, she sees a doctor, wondering if she might have dementia, only to learn that she’s pregnant. After the initial shock, the doctor assures her the pregnancy will probably terminate naturally. While she wonders if her body can handle giving birth or an abortion, which is illegal in Texas, word gets out about a pregnant septuagenarian, stirring the public into a frenzy over what she should do. Frankel blends humor and gravitas in her portrait of an expectant mother who’s also facing her own mortality. Fans of the author’s quirky family stories about hot-button issues will find much to enjoy. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the hypnotic sophomore outing from Williams (The Doloriad), a professor’s personal assistant gets drawn into a strange triangle with her boss and a male student. Four years after graduating from the university where the unnamed professor teaches, Agathe, who studied literature, is disillusioned by academia and holds a low opinion of herself. The professor, who hails from an unnamed foreign country, originally hired Agathe for childcare and then sought her help with English grammar. She now tasks Agathe with befriending troubled new student Adam, a native of the professor’s city whom the professor defends from a colleague’s claim that he’s “disruptive.” Afraid Adam is on a “path of self-destruction,” the professor tasks Agathe with reporting back to her all the conversations she has with Adam, an arrangement that has profound effects on all three. Though the plot takes a backseat to the prose, Williams is an accomplished stylist, and her writing accrues a magnetic rhythm, calling to mind Clarice Lispector or Marie Redonnet. “Everything I saw was wooden and ugly,” Agathe narrates. “I was speaking automatically too. At this point I had accepted my failure. I no longer believed in my capacity to learn anything from Adam.” It’s a singular and arresting work. Agent: John Ash, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A middle-aged widow’s life is upturned when intimate details of her marriage become fodder for a TV show in the well-plotted latest from Lanchaster (The Wall). After Kate Hittlestone’s husband, Jack, suddenly dies, she’s consumed by grief. Months later, she hears about a hit new series called Cheating, which chronicles an affair between a man Jack’s age and a much younger woman. The dialogue eerily echoes Kate and Jack’s “private language” (“Want your body, disco doll” means “please hurry up, we’re going to be late”), causing Kate to conclude that Jack must have had an affair with the show’s millennial writer, Phoebe Mull. Awash with shame and humiliation, Kate revises all her happy memories with Jack until she realizes there might be another explanation. The true story of the show’s genesis slowly comes out in a parallel narrative following Phoebe’s relationship with her mother. Both plotlines come to a head when Phoebe, worried she won’t be able to repeat her success, becomes convinced someone is targeting her with bad online reviews. Lanchester blends the emotionally layered revenge story with a satirical battle of the generations, summed up in a magazine profile of Phoebe (“She’s so sharp she could cut herself. Except... she’s much more likely to cut you. Especially if you’re a boomer”). This satisfies. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A pair of Victorian servants plot to make their employers fall for each other in this witty upstairs-downstairs double romance from Waldman (Love and Treasure). Alice Lockey is the smart, ambitious personal maid of Lady Jemima Alderwick, a spoiled aristocrat eager to marry. When Lord Nigel Wynstowe visits the Alderwick estate in 1879, Alice falls in love with his valet, Charlie Wells. Hoping to find a way to be together and keep their jobs, they sour Lady Jemima on her current suitor by exposing his philandering, and attempt to turn the attention of ancestry-obsessed Lord Wynstowe to romance. Meanwhile, Lady Jemima’s aunt, recognizing Alice’s intelligence and drive, introduces her to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, as well as her friends in the suffrage movement. Much as Alice loves Charlie, she begins to wonder if his desired future—marriage, children, and owning a rural shop—will be enough to fulfill her. Waldman evokes Jane Austen in her clever observations (“It was impossible to be frivolous while scrubbing stains out of another’s dirty underclothes”), and adds a fresh and modern edge to the story’s familiar material via Alice’s involvement with the period’s “radical” ideas. There’s much to enjoy in this tale of balancing love and ambition. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans, Inc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Ditlevsen (The Copenhagen Trilogy) published this aching and accomplished work of autofiction about love and punishment in 1975, one year before her death by suicide. Lise, a successful middle-aged writer, has recently been left by her cheating husband, Vilhelm, and now tries to move on from their life together. Shortly before her release from a psychiatric hospital, Lise publishes a desperate and deadpan personal ad: “Recently escaped a long, unhappy marriage—aged 51, but youthful in spirit—wonderful son, aged 15—household literary name—summerhouse—large flat in the city centre—temporarily incapacitated by a nervous breakdown—prefers a motorist.” The ad is answered by Kurt, a man “who did not really live.” He moves in with Lise, who begins writing a series of tell-all articles about her relationship with Vilhelm, just as his latest lover starts to consider leaving him. Ditlevsen’s descriptions often paint her protagonist in the most unflattering light (“She had the habit of admitting herself to hospital, because the role of patient satisfied so many of her infantile needs”). It’s a haunting and deeply felt portrayal of intimate catastrophe. (May)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misdescribed the subject of protagonist Lise’s series of tell-all articles.

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink