Two Korean American women wind up on a disastrous collision course in the complex if melodramatic debut from Sanders. When ambitious Columbia law student Shelley Hu is accosted by fellow subway rider Amy Cloverfield over a vacant seat, she goes on an embarrassing tirade. Soon, a video of the incident captured by journalist Auggie Flores goes viral, causing Shelley to lose her spot at Columbia and be fired from her law firm internship by her boss, Gene Struzik. Unmoored and humiliated, Shelley flees to her Florida hometown to work in a nautical-themed motel with her overprotective mother. One night, mysterious stranger Sophia Moon checks in with her family and tells Shelley she’s come there specifically to see her and has suffered the same kind of shame and mortification. Sophia offers to correct Shelley’s “karmic imbalance” by exacting revenge on Amy, Auggie, and Gene. As Sophia guides Shelley toward vengeance, she pushes her to change her name. Meanwhile, Sanders reveals Sophia’s duplicitous history in flashbacks. After they arrive in New York City, Shelley and Sophia’s machinations spiral out of control. The bonkers ending strains credulity, but Sanders proves adept at building tension, and she offers a meaty exploration of feminine rancor. It’s a wild ride. Agents: Jessica Macy and Erin Niumata, Folio Literary Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

The vitriol is strong in Self’s devilish latest (after Elaine), which takes place in his familiar middle-class milieu of boorish bankers, blocked artists, and hack writers. Among the multiple narrators is has-been novelist Will, who says of his interchangeable friends, “Their only salient feature were their dicks.” One of them, Phil Szabo, dies in his flat early in the novel, while hosting a dinner party. The subsequent chapters repeat Szabo’s death and its aftermath, becoming more sordid in each telling, especially when Phil narrates from the afterlife. Then, ex-psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s work, turns up and discloses the experiments he’s been conducting with a secret cabal of mad scientists, who use a semi-sentient organic computer named Margaret to measure people’s “morality quotient,” or “propensity to do things they hold to be either right or wrong.” Self’s caustic style is on full display, particularly with Busner’s entertainingly misanthropic philosophizing, as when he claims that psychotherapy makes self-obsessed people think they’re “good,” even as “their actions would be judged as entirely useless, selfish and harmful to one and all.” The novel retreads much of Self’s catalog but that’s hardly a bad thing when exhaustion and regurgitation are the point. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/16/2026 | Details & Permalink

The riveting debut by Scieszka sees a 213-year-old woman set out to uncover the cause of her eternal youth so she can finally die in peace. Vera Van Valkenburgh was raised in her family’s Catskills home in the late 18th century. At age 26, something happened that rendered her; her older brother, Eli; and their mother immortal. Afraid of alarming their neighbors, the family flees the area in 1826 before going their separate ways. Now, in 2014, Vera returns for the first time, having scored a job as a forest ranger as cover for her mission to reverse her immortality. At a town planning meeting, she learns that a billionaire-funded LLC called Fountain of Eternal Youth has been buying up land in the area. Eli, whom she hasn’t seen for nearly two centuries, is also in attendance. It turns out that he’s shacked up with the LLC’s biochemist, Lydia, who claims in her presentation that she plans to harness the source of immortality as a cure for deadly diseases. As Vera tries to grasp what Eli is up to, she warns Lydia about the danger of her discovery getting into the wrong hands. Scieszka adds gentle humor and romance to the tense plot, as Vera settles into her new life among bougie urban transplants and falls for a rugged local EMT. Readers will find plenty to admire. Agent: Ali Lake, O’Connor Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Haydu’s wonderful adult debut (after the middle grade fantasy One Jar of Magic) explores the interwoven lives of two families. After free-spirited Joni Dyer moves from Manhattan to suburban Sommersette, Mass., with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, Mae, she becomes best friends with neighbor Beth Ann Sullivan, a more conventional woman whose own daughter, Sydney, is also three. As the girls grow up, only Sydney is aware of the affair between her father, Barrett, and Joni, which ends in tragedy when Joni dies from a bee sting the night of Mae’s high school graduation. The girls keep in touch until their early 20s, when Mae finds out about the affair and ends their friendship. By the time they’re in their 30s both are pregnant and living in New York City. Sydney is married and has joined her mother at a midlevel marketing company that sells pashminas, while Mae, an artist, is single and living off the sale of a painting depicting her and Sydney as girls, which she made shortly after their rupture. Mae and Sydney eventually reconnect after Sydney reaches out via email, and they sift through their parents’ failed relationships and their own. Haydu expertly seeds the narrative with clues about the consequences of Joni and Barrett’s affair and stacks the plot with surprises. It’s a beautiful tale of complicated friendships. Agent: Victoria Marini, High Line Literary Collective. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Notorious 1920s medium Mina Crandon comes to life in the beguiling latest from Biaggio (Gun Girl and the Tall Guy). The novel is purportedly narrated from beyond the grave by the spirit of Mina’s older brother, Walter, who protects Mina from their father’s abuse as they grow up together on a bleak Ontario farm. After Walter dies in an accident at 28, Mina marries affluent Boston doctor Roy Crandon. Walter’s ghost still wants to help Mina, but he fails to make contact until she attends her first séance and invites him to connect. The siblings begin communicating telepathically, and Walter persuades Mina to hold séances herself. The combination of her feminine allure and his paranormal assistance (in addition to moving tables and stopping clocks, he uses her vocal cords to banter with attendees) makes “Margery,” Mina’s nom-de-séance, famous. She loves meeting illustrious fans including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but her celebrity also poses dangers. Roy, hoping to exploit her renown with a book, begins faking supernatural phenomena, and celebrated anti-spiritualism crusader Harry Houdini vows to prove her a fraud. Walter’s narration is brisk and sassy—he calls Houdini a “shifty weasel”—and Biaggio cleverly leaves its provenance in question, like so much else relating to Margery. This fun story offers an enlightening view into spiritualism and the grip it once held on America. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kawakami (All the Lovers in the Night) unfurls a remarkable noir-tinged tale of female desperation. The story opens in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when narrator Hana, a single 40-year-old who works at a Tokyo deli counter, stumbles upon a web article about a woman named Kimiko, who once played a pivotal role in her life. Now 60, Kimiko has been accused of imprisoning a much younger woman in her home and assaulting her for 15 months. From there, the novel jumps back 25 years, to when a 15-year-old Hana is living with her often absent mother, Ai, a bar hostess in suburban Tokyo who’s prone to disappearing with boyfriends. Kimiko, an old drinking pal of Ai’s, steps in to fill the void while Ai is gone for a month, stocking the fridge with Hana’s favorite foods and charming her peers. Two years later, when they meet again, Hana leaves home and moves in with Kimiko, and together they open a small bar, Lemon. But Kimiko’s past and ties to Tokyo’s criminal underworld soon threaten Hana’s fragile stability. As the story hurtles toward chilling revelations in the present, Kawakami masterfully builds tension through her portrayal of Hana’s struggle to claw her way upward in a society where, as a runaway minor with no bank account or ID, she is nearly invisible. The author scales new heights with this gripping and propulsive novel. Agent: Amelia Atlas, CAA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this sometimes tender and often bitter outing from Korean Swiss writer Gremaud (All the World’s a Mall), a woman traces the footsteps of her “generator,” the father she never knew, from one nuclear power site to the next. The narrator, born Lee Hye-rin in Korea and going as Jennifer Ball where she now lives in Switzerland, travels to coastal Holyhead in Wales, where her father was born 82 years ago. From there, she travels to the nearby Wylfa nuclear plant, where he began his career, and on to Linkou in Taiwan, where he married a local Chinese woman and fathered two children. In Korea, she visits the site where the generator had an affair with her mother while he was there to help build the Kori I nuclear reactor. When the narrator was born in 1977, the generator’s career was at its zenith. By the late 1980s, after the Three Mile Island accident and meltdown at Chernobyl, his work dried up amid anti-nuclear sentiment. The novel offers intriguing insights into the nature of identity and one’s origins, along with pointed commentary on the generator’s achievements and the deep uncertainty left in his wake. This leaves readers with much to chew on. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Shriver’s jumbled latest (after Mania) blends a wicked satire of bleeding-heart liberals with a disingenuous parable about the dangers of unchecked immigration. In 2023, the New York City government offers a $110 per diem to residents who provide incoming asylum seekers with food and shelter in their own homes (in real life, a similar initiative was proposed but never enacted). Gloria Bonaventura jumps at the chance, having won her massive Brooklyn Queen Anne in a recent divorce and struggling with the cost of upkeep. She agrees to house Honduran migrant Martine Salgado over the strident objections of her do-nothing son, Nico, 26, who tells Martine the U.S. should have tighter borders. He’s suspicious when Martine claims that her three children have been kidnapped in Honduras, and that she needs $30,000 for the ransom. Meanwhile Gloria scrambles to come up with the money. The situation devolves into a nightmare out of a paranoid yuppie thriller after Martine’s brother Domingo joins the household, then invites a group of his “henchmen” to crash with them, and the story reaches a violent climax as the Bonaventuras’ fear clashes with the migrants’ greed. Some of the jokes land, as when Shriver bathes Gloria’s naive liberalism in self-satisfied patriotism (“We should be flattered so many refugees would rather live here”), but even readers who appreciate anti-woke provocations will be left scratching their heads. It’s a mess. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Menon’s dynamic debut traces a woman’s attempts to move on after surviving the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand. The narrative toggles between the lead-up to that disaster and the imminent landfall of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. As Marissa, now a 24-year-old travel writer in New York City, stocks up on supplies, she’s consumed by memories of the tsunami and her best friend, Arielle, who died in the flooding. Menon then jumps back to seven-year-old Marissa’s move with her family from the U.S. to a small island off the coast of Phuket. There, she meets Arielle, whose parents own a local resort, and the pair become fast friends. They grow up together, swimming with the manta rays in the reef and going on marine biology excursions. The day before the tsunami, they argue about whether to visit their school friends on the mainland or stay for a dive. Marissa insists that they go, which puts them in greater danger and makes her feel responsible for Arielle’s death. Menon crafts vivid depictions of tropical marine life and offers a visceral depiction of survivor’s guilt, which causes Marissa to regularly see and talk to her dead friend eight years later. This is sure to pull at the reader’s heartstrings. Agent: Sebastian Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this sly and visionary 1969 novel from Bodelsen (Think of a Number), reissued with a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, a 30-something magazine editor agrees to be cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal cancer. As Mackintosh points out, Bodelsen’s book was published in a world abuzz with the possibilities of cryonics. His everyman protagonist, however, is skeptical of the experimental procedure, in part because he isn’t sure whether he has reason to live. A lonely man, Bruno fills his time ginning up ideas for his magazine’s contributors and doubts his own ability to become a writer. But after falling in love with ballet dancer Jenny, he’s filled with enough zest for life to undergo the procedure. He wakes up in 1995, in a bifurcated world where a shrinking “now-life” class of people live off payments for serving as organ donors to the “all-life” class, who are so busy working to finance their transplants that Bruno worries people will stop reading literature. As Bruno schemes to reunite with Jenny, Bodelsen offers striking existential reflections on mortality and witty insights into the social cost of eternal life. It’s a revelatory thought experiment. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink