An artist’s bohemian existence in Berlin implodes in this exquisite novel from Joseph (At Certain Points We Touch). Shortly after meeting handsome Berlin-based stranger Alexander at a London bar, Charli, an art-school graduate from a working-class family in Liverpool, impulsively follows him to Berlin. She joins an eclectic, hard-partying community of foreigners, including Polly, an Anglo-Irish artist Charli met in art school, and Finley, an American painter, DJ, and sex worker. As Charli falls deeper into a demimonde of drugs, parties, and sex, she devotes herself to supporting Alexander’s burgeoning career as a pop star. His rising fame brings out tensions in their relationship, leading to a series of betrayals that set the characters on a path to tragedy. Joseph’s pitch-perfect voice propels Charli’s story toward its bitter end, and her keen eye captures both the hardscrabble glamour of her characters’ lives and the dark underside of a dream come true. This fierce and original narrative has the feel of a classic. Agent: Zoe Ross, United Agents. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dark, strange, and gripping, Shannon’s debut revolves around the unnamed narrator’s obsession with cleaning. For the 20-something woman, an aspiring painter and art school graduate saddled with “an ungodly amount of student debt,” cleaning had long been a “nuisance.” But now, back living in a small English town with her parents, she becomes compulsive about tidying, starting in her parents’ house, where she grows attuned to “the art of each movement” and feels “light-limbed and coiled with energy” from simple tasks such as emptying a cupboard. After getting a job as a cleaner at an art gallery, she stumbles upon fellow aspiring artist Isabella doing coke in the bathroom and the two hook up. They get caught having sex by the owner, and the narrator loses her job. She urges the flighty Isabella to tell her live-in boyfriend, Paul, that she has been hired to clean their home, and after Isabella inexplicably disappears one day, the narrator assumes her place as Paul’s companion. Shannon’s writing is delightfully weird and witty as she tracks her narrator’s metamorphosis “from a daytime creature into a night-time hag” who spends her days sleeping, her evenings with Paul, and her nights in Isabella’s studio. It’s a memorably off-kilter portrait of a woman’s search for meaning. Agent: Helen Edwards, Helen Edwards Rights Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jones (An American Marriage) delivers a triumphant novel of two motherless girls from rural Honeysuckle, La., who follow very different paths into adulthood. Vernice “Niecy” Davis is orphaned as an infant and raised reluctantly by her free-spirited aunt Irene, who dispenses such advice as “If you ever get a chance in life, grab you a preacher, but just temporarily. Don’t fool around and end up being somebody’s first lady.” Before Niecy learns to talk, she befriends Annie Johnson, who’s being raised by her grandmother after her “trifling” mother, Hattie Lee, left her at one month old. In Annie and Niecy’s alternating narration, the women reflect on their abandonment—Niecy’s in a permanent sense, as her father killed her mother and himself, while Annie always hopes that someday Hattie Lee will return and grow to love her. After high school, Niecy leaves for Spelman College in Atlanta, where her wealthy roommate, Joette, nicknames her “country mouse” and chastises her for spending so much time thinking about her “other girlfriend,” Annie, who’s been writing to Niecy about her torrid misadventures on the way to Memphis in search of Hattie Lee with her ex-boyfriend’s cousin Bobo. Annie’s and Niecy’s paths continue to diverge, first when Niecy entertains a suitor at Spelman and later when Annie gets unexpectedly pregnant. Still, they remain the most important person to the other even as it feels like they’re on “different sides of a waterfall,” as Annie puts it in a letter. Throughout, Jones tells her protagonists’ stories with grace, humor, and pathos. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Argentine artist and poet Denis makes her English-language debut with a vivid yet scattered chronicle of a 20-something woman trying to make sense of her disordered existence. The lyrical novel unfolds in the second person, as the unnamed narrator addresses her ex-boyfriend, whom she first met when they were teens and she saw him breathing fire in a field, where “parts of you shone like a Vermeer.” Unemployed and living off an inheritance, the narrator moves into her ex’s apartment to look after his cats while he’s hospitalized for a mental breakdown. She yearns for the routine and stability of a full-time job, reflects on her miscarriage years earlier, and has one-night stands with other men. The fragmented chapters are sometimes awkwardly cut together, to the point that they lose cohesion or momentum, but Denis reels the reader in with indelible images and provocative hints at the connections between the narrative’s various strands (“That the cat I gave you attacked me is probably one big metaphor for something I don’t understand”). Along the way, the narrator considers how she might make a new life for herself and stop feeling like a ghost. Admirers of cross-genre works by writers like Kate Zambreno will find much to appreciate. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

A 30-something poet navigates the vagaries of freelance copywriting work in Poppick’s reflective and often funny debut novel (after the poetry collection Fear of Description), which unfolds as a series of journal entries. The narrator, D__, has devoted his life to poetry. His partner, Lucy, with whom he lives in New York City, is also a poet, as are his friends Ruth and Will. Though he’s invested in these relationships, something ineffable is missing from D__’s life. A “permalancer” for a failing consumer product company, he keeps a fire wall between his “stupid” copywriting and his poetry. Sometimes he tosses gigs to Will, who, hilariously, doesn’t make the same distinction and turns in product descriptions that read like absurd prose poems (“The era of normal umbrellas is over. That’s why this umbrella isn’t normal: it’s kind of cool. This is a cool umbrella”). After D__ is laid off, he and Lucy break up, and he finds he can’t write poetry anymore. He drives Ruth across the country to where she’s entering a PhD program, makes notes about the poems he longs to write, and reads Proust to try and understand the nature of time. D__ is a frank and companionable narrator, who endears himself to the reader with his devotion to the “parallel dimension” contained in poetry. This portrait of a modern-day Bartleby is a blast. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

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