The grieving unnamed narrator of Mexican writer Navarro’s spellbinding U.S. debut ruminates on the effects of migration. She and her younger brother, Diego, are raised by their grandparents in Mexico while their mother works as a cleaner in Spain. Nine years later, they reunite with their mother in Madrid, where a teenaged Diego struggles to fit in at his new school while the narrator pieces together a living as a babysitter. Eventually, she flees to Barcelona to start a new life, toiling as a live-in caregiver, cleaner, and delivery person while attempting to learn Catalan and English. When Diego visits her in Barcelona, she sees signs of trouble—he’s failing his classes, and he steals some of her money. Back in Madrid, he kills himself by jumping from the family’s apartment window. Afterward, the narrator considers what may have pushed him to suicide and visits the scene of his death, touching the pavement in search of a sign of him and imagining him “breaking like a musical instrument” and continuing on “like music, which only exists when it’s played or sung.” All the while, she grapples with her own fractured connections to those around her, wondering if her attempt to join a Barcelona hotel union will do any good. Navarro crafts a realistic depiction of memory’s free association, as her narrator bounces like a pinball from one idea to the next. This sorrowful novel teems with life. Agent: Sandra Pareja, Massie McQuilkin & Altman. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Riley’s exciting latest (after Island Queen) follows a young Haitian woman’s fight against slavery and her turn toward piracy. In 1675, 15-year-old Jacquotte Delahaye, the mixed-race daughter of a white Tortuga tavern owner, sets out to free a shipment of enslaved people with the help of pirate captain Michel Le Basque. When she next sees Michel two years later, Jacquotte falls for him and they marry before he heads off to attack the ships of the Mughul empire. She waits for him in vain for a few years, surviving a tragic act of violence, and flees in disguise as a man named Jacques, working as a day laborer on the docks of Petit-Goave. Determined to prove herself at sea, she joins a pirate crew as Jacques, knowing she’ll be killed if her ruse is discovered. As she works her way up from helmsman to captain on the Canopus, her resolve to lead a life of adventure sets the stage for another tragedy. Riley packs a great deal into her sweeping novel, all to memorable effect, including a gender-bending queer romance subplot and gritty action on the high seas. Fans of swashbuckling adventures will cheer. Agent: Sarah Younger, Nancy Yost Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Italian French writer Cagnati (Free Day), who died in 2007, dazzles and devastates in equal measure with this tragic 1976 novel of life in the French countryside. Marie, the narrator, is the young daughter of an impoverished woman known in her village as Crazy Genie because she “didn’t talk, didn’t answer when she was questioned.” Perpetually working, Crazy Genie lets Marie tag along as she assists neighboring farmers with harvests, animal husbandry, stall cleaning, and corn husking. They’re surrounded by a landscape of profound beauty, where chestnut leaves “misted the air,” as well as abrupt violence, as when farmers bury alive the kittens and puppies they can’t take care of, sparking crazed and fruitless rescue attempts by the mothers. Other dangers lurk: a mason menacingly waits on the path that Marie takes home from school, and the townspeople are only too happy to exploit Crazy Genie’s labor. When Antoine, a local man rumored to have fathered a child with his sister, proposes marriage to Crazy Genie, she negotiates terms that ensure Marie will be able to finish school. Cagnati captures the seasons of agricultural life in short, poetic chapters that use repetition to great effect, conveying the characters’ slim chances of escaping their brutal world. This will leave readers in awe. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Day explores the nature of parasitic and symbiotic relationships in her wondrous debut, which largely follows the deterioration of a couple’s beloved French bulldog. Gelsomina takes a turn after she drinks from the “murky backyard lake” in rural Virginia, where her owners, John and Wendy, retreated from New York City years earlier, when she was a puppy. Two worms enter her system, causing her to lose interest in food, and she registers the worms’ “desire to take what is not their own” as a “violat[ing] her beliefs of right and wrong.” The couple, an architect and a designer, chose their glass house, which “sits like a trinket on a peninsula surrounded by pine trees,” out of their mutual love for minimalism, born out of a “desire for control,” and Gelsomina’s presence there completes their pastoral ideal, “like a painting that was meant to frame a lounging woman but instead featured a French Bulldog.” As Gelsomina founders, she observes the couple’s love for each other and, given that her own instinct for mating was “written out of her body at a young age,” she “seeks to learn from the worms how to love.” Day’s arch depictions of Gelsomina’s owners contrast poignantly with the dog’s earnest and searching reflections. This unique novel invites the reader to see the world anew. Agent: Zoe-Aline Howard, Howland Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Laqueur (The Man I Love) unspools an evocative if meandering tale of a sex worker questioning his sexuality. As a teen growing up in 1970s Queens, N.Y., Javier “Jav” Gil deSoto is caught having sex with a male cousin by his father, who beats him and throws him out. Working as a waiter, Jav comes across a woman named Gloria who mentors him as a male escort. He then meets a young man named Alex Penda, who fled Chile as a young boy without his parents after Pinochet’s military coup. Alex introduces his foster sister, Valerie Lark, to Jav, and she hires him for sex multiple times. Jav is just as interested in Alex, and wonders whether he’s bisexual. In 2006, Jav learns that his estranged widowed sister has died from a fall, and that her will names him legal guardian of her 17-year-old son, Aaron. When Jav travels from New York City to meet Aaron in the Hudson Valley, he runs into Alex, who is now married to Val, and much drama ensues. Laqueur offers colorful insights into sex work (“Everyone has something fascinating about them, Jav,” Gloria tells him. “Your job is to find it. Then you can fuck it”), but the novel becomes overly sentimental as it barrels toward its climax. This sprawling tale is a mixed bag. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historical trauma, unusual figures, and marginalized outsiders shape this kaleidoscopic volume of vignettes, prose poems, and fables from Swiss writer Mehr (Words of Resistance), who died in 2022. In the title story, Mehr draws from the abuses she and her own family endured as Yenish people under Switzerland’s Charity for the Children of the Country Road, a program of forced assimilation and eugenics that removed Yenish and Sinti children from their parents and sterilized adults. The story’s unnamed narrator recounts her experiences in orphanages and foster homes, where she is subjected to psychiatric experimentation by doctors who deem her “hereditarily polluted.” Some stories render the horrors endured by the Yenish in stark realism, as when a Romani woman in “The Souls of my Sisters and Brothers” faces discrimination at a Holocaust remembrance event. Others showcase a stylistic playfulness that often subverts narrative logic, as in the surreal “Island Body,” which takes the perspective of an island’s beach grass and sand dunes to portray the end of a love affair. In the closer, “Dorian Dreamed,” 13-year-old Dorian and others at a children’s home are led by dreams, along with Earth’s animals and plants, to the safe, joyful new planet of Lux. Mehr bears witness to the traumas suffered by the Yenish community and immortalizes their enduring joy and resilience in this masterfully translated collection. It’s not to be missed. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The clever English-language debut from late Argentine writer Copi unfolds in letters to the author by a Parisian rat named Gouri. After Gouri and fellow rat Rakä impregnate the daughters of a local rat queen, the couples marry, allowing Gouri and Rakä to join the royal court in a willow tree along the Seine. When a curious toddler interrupts the rats’ lives, however, it sets off a series of incidents that leave the child’s mother and another human dead. Fleeing the scene, the rats bob down the river with the child, coming ashore only to encounter an amnesiac escaped murderer, Mimile, who takes the group in until the police arrive and blame him for the two deaths upstream. A trial ensues, the rats escape, and an encounter with the Rat Devil results in Paris’s Île de la Cité breaking free from the mainland and floating away, providing the rats opportunity to found the City of Rats. Unfurling like a classic film serial, Gouri’s account of his breakneck voyage one-ups itself in ridiculousness with every new letter, and Copi guides the expedition with a steady hand and his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. It’s a memorable depiction of Paris life in miniature. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Assadi (The Stars Are Not Yet Bells) spins a beautiful and heartbreaking novel out of a Palestinian man’s deathbed reflections. Sufien is five in the spring of 1948 during the Nakba, when he and his family are forced from their home in Safad. His lifelong odyssey as a refugee begins in a camp in Damascus, then proceeds in Kuwait, where he grows up, and university in Florence, Italy. After his father runs out of money for tuition, Sufien is forced to abandon his studies. He meets Bernardo, a rich Jewish American, who will become a lifelong friend and cajole him into moving to New York City. There, he lives in a cramped Harlem room and works in a bodega. In moments of need, he calls on Bernardo for help, as when he loses the job and becomes destitute. He meets and marries a Jewish woman, Sarah, from a moderately wealthy family, and Bernardo buys him a taxi medallion, but after he goes bankrupt, they wind up in Arizona. They raise a daughter, Layla, and he dreams of finishing his education and writing a memoir. Assadi writes with astonishing fluidity, using Sufien’s story to illustrate the legacy of displacement without losing sight of the character’s humanity, as Sufien, now dying from cancer in his 70s, considers how his “homeland had been stolen, was being stolen, cast to the dustbin of history.” Most wrenching is his ambivalence over Layla’s acceptance to Columbia University and eventaul departure from home (“He was devastated. And he was proud. It was a terrible feeling”). This is remarkable. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cecília Matzenbacher, the Los Angeles–based taxidermist who narrates this intriguing outing from Bensimon (We All Loved Cowboys), views her trade as “history, storytelling, allegory, spectacle.” Cecília’s credo could also describe Bensimon’s fragmentary and genre-blurring novel, which blends snippets on the evolution of scientific study with a tender coming-of-age story and tense political thriller. As a girl growing up in Brazil, Cecília’s life was upended in 1988, when her father, Raul, then a congressman, was accused of murdering his fellow representative and friend, João Carlos Satti. Now, pushing 40, Cecília learns that Raul has had a stroke. As she pieces together what happened all those years ago, she also grapples with her own marital problems—her husband is a frustrated musician who wants kids while Cecília does not—and reflects on how she turned to taxidermy to cope with the possibility that her father is a murderer, finding “comfort in the idea of repetition” at her L.A. museum job. The tangled memories, troubled relationships, and well-crafted depictions of Cecília’s museum dioramas all hang together in Bensimon’s skilled hands. There’s much to admire in this layered work. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

The fascinating and sardonic latest from Volodine (Bardo or Not Bardo) plays out in the mind of a schizophrenic who lives in a postapocalyptic psychiatric hospital among the living and the dead. Breton, the narrator, alternates from first- to third-person, as when he describes himself as a decrepit man who “could pass unnoticed amid a group of seventy-year-olds being led to the slaughterhouse.” He believes his fractious country’s once-reigning political party has tasked him with tracking down a foul-mouthed female paramilitary group called the Monroe Girls. Thirty years ago, Breton was madly in love with their leader, Rebecca Rausch, whose apparent suicide was perhaps the cause of his mental spiral. The funhouse narration flips through Breton’s myriad alter egos, including a bounty hunter named Kaytel. As Kaytel, he relies on informants including Breton himself and a “warlock, shaman, or clairvoyant” named Borgmeister, a stooge for the cops who gives his “dregs” to Kaytel. Later, the narrator reunites with Rebecca and the two team up to find Borgmeister. Volodine maintains control of the vivid images and wild flights of fancy, which range from spiders and sea urchins sprouting from human flesh to talk of cosmonauts and telepathy, thanks to his grounded and ironic prose. It’s a delight. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink