Maurer’s dazzling debut chronicles a boy’s coming-of-age in rural Michigan. Everett, born into a sheep farming clan in Sault Ste. Marie, plans to spend the rest of his life on his family’s land, which goes back generations. He’s 17 in 1995 when he meets Mary, the daughter of a Coast Guard officer, who’s lived in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Puerto Rico. Living in town for her senior year in high school, Mary has her sights set on leaving what she perceives as a stultifying rural community for art school in California. The author paints a tender portrait of their growing romance against the backdrop of the myriad travails of sheep farming. Everett is a thoughtful soul and Mary finds him delightful, but when she gets pregnant, their plans go awry. Maurer’s artful prose evokes the characters’ deep feelings for each other as well as a strong sense of place (“Her braids caught the wind and blew out behind her like kite tails”). Along the way, she builds tension as Everett tries to convince Mary to give up her dreams and spend her life with him. The result is a deeply felt examination of the heartbreaking choices people make for love. Agent: Carrie Howland and Zoe-Aline Howard, Howland Lterary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Heywood follows up The Shadow of Perseus with an uneven retelling of the life of Dido, Queen of Carthage. Growing up motherless in Tyre, Princess Elissa absorbs lessons in strategy and patience from her doting father, King Mattan, who wills that she and her half-brother Pygmalion shall succeed him and rule together as equals. After Mattan dies, powerful merchants substitute the real will with a forged one that excludes Elissa, and Pygmalion becomes sole ruler. To avoid an arranged marriage and possible exile or murder, Elissa marries a priest, but Pygmalion has her husband killed. A heartbroken Elissa vows never to remarry, and she and her supporters sail to North Africa, where Elissa founds the city of Carthage and becomes Queen Dido. When a vessel from war-torn Troy is shipwrecked off the coast, Dido offers the passengers aid and meets handsome warrior prince Aeneas and his young son. Dido then partners with Aeneas, but their nonmarital union threatens her political power. Heywood offers a more hopeful outcome for Dido than Virgil provides her in the Aeneid, a divergence that will be stirring to some readers and strike others as fanciful and simplistic. Still, the narrative convincingly portrays Dido as strong-willed and shrewd. Diehard fans of feminist retellings will find plenty to enjoy. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The beautiful latest from British author Shearer (River Sing Me Home) follows a young woman transplanted from Jamaica to Nova Scotia in the late 18th century. Orphaned Cora grows up in Jamaica’s Maroon community of free Blacks, whose ancestors escaped from slavery and integrated with the Indigenous Taino people. When the British colonial authorities forcibly relocate the Maroons to Canada, Cora winds up there with her foster family. Resisting her family’s pressure to marry, she wanders the “glittering world” of the forest, where she meets the formerly enslaved Agnes. Also orphaned, Agnes was taught as a child how to survive in the woods by the Indigenous Mi’kmaq people. The narrative toggles between 1797, as Cora and Agnes gradually fall in love, and a murder trial that takes place the following January, the details of which are concealed for most of the novel. Shearer thoroughly grounds her story in the realistic details of a history most readers won’t be familiar with, and she conveys the joys and dangers of life in Nova Scotia, where humpback whales leap in the ocean and bear attacks can be fatal. It’s a subtle and morally complex depiction of the price of freedom. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

A woman grapples with her husband’s infidelity in the delightful debut novel from Gallagher (The Divorce Party Handbook). Ruby Bixler is making spaghetti carbonara for her newscaster husband, Brad Diamond, when she answers his cellphone. It’s a receptionist at a hotel, announcing that Brad left his watch there earlier that day. At first, Ruby believes Brad’s lies, but when irrefutable proof emerges that he’s having an affair with his 25-year-old assistant, Natasha, Ruby transforms from people pleaser to diabolical enforcer of marital justice. After her husband forces her out of their home, Ruby goes ballistic, sneaking back into the house to hide shrimp in curtain rods and dump dirty cat litter on their bed. She also seduces Brad into sex, which she secretly films with a nanny cam, planning to share the footage with Natasha (“Ruby knew that she had in her possession a nuclear bomb, a powerful weapon which must not be squandered but must be implemented with great respect”). At times, Gallagher leans a bit heavy on exposition, but she keeps the reader on Ruby’s side with wicked humor and playful irony, as when Ruby sees a billboard advertising Brad as “the newsman you can trust.” Readers are in for a treat. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Nemens’s busy second novel (after The Cactus League) follows five women as they enter their 40s and attempt to hold on to the mutual friendships that have bound them together since college. Novelist Carson is fretting over whether to contact her father, who’s in prison; bipolar corporate litigator Bella is handling a make-or-break case and a husband with a roving eye; former management consultant Reba is trying and failing to get pregnant; Texas politico Gregg is coping with marital strains and trying to decide whether she’ll run for Congress; and physician Hillary is raising her troubled son while her husband is in rehab for heroin addiction. Over the course of the novel, the five reunite for a vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., and later for a funeral and a birthday party. Otherwise they’re on their own, trying to keep their friendships going via text messages (“Hey B—coming to Bklyn tonight? Caviar etc & ive got a surprise,” Carson writes to Bella at one point). Nemens’s narrative focus occasionally wobbles: Carson and Reba, with their less dramatic story lines, are often sidelined, and the conclusion strains credulity. Still, Nemens captures the complexity of maintaining friendships while reckoning with the challenges of middle age. It adds up to a chatty and sometimes insightful riff on The Big Chill. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Goodman (Isola) delivers a bighearted linked story collection about a family’s travails. In the opener, “Apple Cake,” cancer-stricken Jeanne Rubinstein lies on her deathbed, stubbornly refusing to accept her terminal prognosis. As the family sits vigil, the baked goods provided by Jeanne’s older sister, Helen, a consummate homemaker, are upstaged by middle sister Sylvia’s superior apple cake, which sets off a feud that underscores the dramas playing out in subsequent entries. Sylvia’s son, Richard, goes through a divorce in “New Frames” and then embarks on a new romance in “Poppy,” while other stories trace the spats and reconciliations between Helen’s daughters, Wendy and Pam, as when Wendy frets over not hearing from Pam after knitting and sending her a “pussy hat” following the 2016 election. Also chronicled is the bickering between Jeanne’s sons, Dan and Steve, particularly in “Redemption Song,” when they each host the family seder on alternating nights. Meanwhile, the youngest generation of Rubinsteins—in their teens and 20s—try to find their way, with free spirit Phoebe embracing her interest in music. Each story succeeds on its own; taken together, they reveal how a family’s bonds are shaped and tested by tradition as well as by each individual’s recurring patterns. In their messiness and constant striving for harmony, the Rubinsteins are wholly relatable. This is one to treasure. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

This painfully beautiful story of love and loss from Page (Mornings with Rosemary) is an emotional tour de force. Six months after her American husband Joe Carter’s death from cancer, London book editor Matilda “Tilly” Nightingale copes by throwing herself into her work. She then receives an unexpected call from bookseller Alfie, who informs her that before Joe died, he selected 12 books, one for each month of the year, for her to pick up at Alfie’s shop. Each book also contains a handwritten note from Joe to Tilly. The notes encourage her to begin living again, inspiring her to travel to Paris, try camping in the wilderness, and learn how to cook. As the months pass, she and Alfie become close friends. But when Tilly’s mother-in-law asks her to come to Connecticut for a visit and the lease on Alfie’s store is canceled, the two must decide what the future will hold. Page crafts a taut plot and makes her characters achingly real; readers will be crying in some places, laughing in others, yet always in thrall to the story. This heartbreaking tale is sure to find a wide audience. Agent: Robert Caskie, Robert Caskie Ltd. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

An aging woman unburdens herself of a story she’s carried for decades about her family’s links to a secret history of Hawai`i in the muddled sophomore effort from Hakes (Hula). In August 1992, teenager Mo`opuna falls at Queen’s Bath, a treacherous tide pool on Kaua`i, and slips into a coma. She’s visited in the hospital by her grandmother, who tells Mo`opuna a story beginning with the 1777 birth of Maui royal child Ka`ahumanu, whose stillborn twin, known as the “stone child,” becomes a sacred stone called the pōhaku. Ka`ahumanu is raised by nursemaid Kaluaua, Mo`opuna’s ancestor, who’s entrusted with protecting the pōhaku. Decades later, with the arrival of more and more foreigners to the Hawaiian islands, Kaluaua sends the pōhaku to California with her granddaughter, to keep it from being discovered by colonists. As Mo`opuna’s grandmother reveals in her monologue, she is now the keeper of the pōhaku, and the duty will fall to Mo`opuna if she recovers. Hakes successfully evokes the grandmother’s conflicted feelings about her burden, which contributed to her strained relationship with her daughter as well as Mo`opuna, but the novel is hard to follow, due in part to the jumble of Hawaiian terms and the drawn-out yet sketchy historical details, particularly of California’s 19th-century development. It’s a mixed bag. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Curtis’s affecting debut finds a married woman trying to hold onto the love of two men. It begins with Lily Webb’s painful adolescence in 1970s Rhode Island, when she loses her mother to breast cancer at 13. In high school, she dates a promising football player known only as “the boy.” During the summer before college, the boy finds Lily drunk at a beach party, where their classmate David McCarren, whom the boy had previously punched for groping Lilly, claims he’s just had sex with her. Believing David raped Lily, the boy attacks him, leaving him disabled, and is sentenced to three years in prison for aggravated assault. Lily moves on and, years later, falls for her former university professor Marshall Middleton (“His love had an undeniable pull, and maybe even the capacity to extract her from her past”). They marry, but while she’s reeling from the news that Marshall is infertile, she attends her high school reunion and reconnects with her old beau, whom she still calls the boy, now out of prison and living in a sailboat in her hometown, and they have sex. Curtis sustains tension as Lily is tormented by guilt over deceiving Marshall, and she skillfully conveys the power of Lily’s lifetime bond with the boy. This one is book club catnip. Agent: Gráinne Fox, UTA. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Oshetsky’s potent latest (after Poor Deer) dives into the volatile inner world of a young woman who fantasizes about a life beyond her abusive marriage. Celia Dent, 19, works as a billing operator for the phone company in 1970s San Francisco. Each night, she takes the train home to Redwood City and her controlling husband, Drew, a surgical technician 11 years her senior. Their marriage was brokered by Celia’s mother, who’s since died. When a grisly workplace scandal—an adulterous affair that ends in a murder—ripples through the phone company, Celia becomes enthralled by the mix of danger and desire. She begins to crave “revolutionary changes” in her life, “violent changes, even,” and she imagines attacking Drew with her mother’s old nail file, burying it “deep inside [his] ear.” She takes increasingly bold steps toward fulfilling her homicidal and sexual fantasies, from buying a knife in a pawn shop and accepting a ride home from an attractive train passenger to arranging an assignation with a frequent caller at the phone company. Celia’s mounting frenzy is rendered in razor-sharp prose, and Oshetsky blends noir sensibilities with their signature surrealism, effortlessly slipping between dark humor and unnerving sensuality. The result is thrilling. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Feb.)

Correction: A previous version of this review used the wrong pronoun to refer to the author.

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink