A grieving woman loses her tether to reality in the alluring if uneven latest from Fu (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century). Therapist Eleanor impulsively buys her first house as a kind of homage to her mother, Lele, who has recently died. Before long, the rashness of the purchase, which Eleanor could barely afford after exhausting her modest inheritance, becomes apparent. She struggles to maintain the house and keep up her obligations to clients, and a return visit to the apartment she gave up only increases her buyer’s remorse. Fu explores her protagonist’s difficulties in coping with grief via the tropes of psychological thrillers and horror novels. The narrative keeps a tight and sometimes claustrophobic focus on the increasingly disassociated Eleanor, who perceives the rain that floods her home as endless, while servicemen arrive like invaders to repair the damage. The significance of Eleanor’s devotion to her mother’s memory remains hazy, though Fu sketches a vivid portrait of mental fragility in the face of such an overwhelming situation, one that will resonate with any new homeowner. This offbeat tale has its moments. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Scodallero’s mesmerizing and challenging debut novel (after the story collection Some of Them Will Carry Me) focuses on a film screening in a near-future intentional community of women. The group members have found deep meaning from their common experiences as working-class mothers, caregivers, homemakers, and lovers, and the film depicts six of them. Told in sections labeled “the film,” “the text” and “the sound,” the scenes that make up this hybrid of fiction, essay, and verse are intimate in scale yet sociopolitically resonant: “The community is made up of predominantly black people... it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Often, passages are written like recitations of a spell. The novel has little by way of plot, but much to offer in terms of beauty. For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, “we are lost in the potential of this scene.” The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Screenwriter King debuts with the clever tale of a vengeful woman whose ex-boyfriend winds up dead after she casts a spell on him. Lillian lives in Boston, works in marketing, and spends her weekends drinking and hooking up with Henry, whom she met in a bar. Determined to convince him to settle down with her, Lillian only succeeds in pushing him away. When he breaks up with her, she gets drunk, urinates on his doorstep, and, borrowing from a witch influencer she knows from work, performs a hex to ensure he’ll never be with anyone else. That same night, Henry is stabbed to death outside a bar, and the police identify Lilian as a suspect based on a text she sent him the night before: “You’re going to get what you deserve.” Following the case online, Lillian learns Henry was in a long-term relationship with another woman, Nora. Desperate to clear her name and insert herself as the real grieving girlfriend, Lillian wages an internet war against Nora. King raises thought-provoking questions about performances of victimhood and the desire for justice, and the propulsive narrative careens through some surprising twists. It’s equal parts thrilling and chilling. Agent: Nicola Barr, Bent Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

This family tragedy from bestseller Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) is captivating and distressing in equal measure. Set on a sheep station in remote Western Australia, where the MacBride family leases nearly one million acres and tends to 20,000 sheep, the novel begins in 1958 when a truck accident kills the family’s patriarch and eldest son and leaves the youngest son, 17-year-old Matt, severely injured. Saddled with cognitive issues and memory loss, he faces a long road to recovery under the care of his mother, Lorna, and 20-year-old sister, Rose. Months later, a confounding drunken incident exacerbates the tragedy, forcing Matt to cover up terrible secrets. It would spoil the novel to reveal more, beyond that during this time, Lorna’s grandson, Andy, enters the picture, brightening the MacBrides’ gloom with his youthful enthusiasm and love of geology. By 1969, new arrival Bonnie Edquist, a surveyor for a mining company, threatens to upend Matt’s safe and quiet way of life, while a nosy postmistress and a self-righteous police officer start to uncover his closely guarded secrets. Stedman conveys the staggering scale of the sheep station’s isolated sprawl, and it’s impossible to look away from the grim series of events. Readers will be transported. Agent: Susan Armstrong, Conville & Walsh. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

This delightful and dark picaresque from Kennard (The Transition) follows a mid-career English actor struggling to make ends meet. Looking for acting gigs, the unnamed narrator stumbles on an ad for a psychology experiment, which leads to steady work in which he zips himself into a black leather bag from head to groin and sits in on university lectures given by his employer, Dr. Blend. He is instructed to speak to no one in the class and not divulge that he is part of an experiment. Still, he engages in a submissive relationship with English professor Justine, in which he remains silent and zipped-up while she experiments with having sex with an “absence.” The narrator’s best friend, Claudio, an online gaming influencer with an appetite for rare hallucinogens, senses a way to monetize the experiment by creating Bag Coin NFTs and allowing online fans to track the narrator’s movements around town. Throughout, Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae (“We talk endlessly about sexual identity but isn’t sex more an escape from the self?” Justine argues). It’s a hoot. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hochhauser’s splendid debut retells the “Cinderella” story from the stepmother’s perspective. Twice-widowed Lady Etheldreda Tremaine Bramley has a title and a manor house but virtually no money. Her daughters Mathilde and Rosamund face bleak futures if they cannot marry well, so Etheldreda sells some of her possessions and, with her daughters’ help, takes on household chores to keep up appearances. Meanwhile her shy and sanctimonious stepdaughter, Elin, who has never taken to her father’s second wife, stays aloof. When the queen hosts a ball for her only son, Etheldreda asks the three girls to sew themselves suitable gowns and earn extra money for their adornments, such as feathers. Elin, who neither sews nor sells the household ashes for lye-making as requested, stays home until the fateful night, when she borrows a dress, makes a late appearance, outshines her stepsisters, and wins a proposal from the prince. Though royal connections will be advantageous, Etheldreda grows alarmed by the haste and secrecy of the prince’s wedding plans, the reason for which she uncovers with the help of a trusted court adviser. Hochhauser grounds her tale with a convincing depiction of the medieval setting and offers a stirring exploration of maternal instinct and female strength. It’s a winner. Agent: Alyssa Reuben, WME. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

A family struggles to survive in Appalachian mining country in the intense latest from Steele (Greasewood Creek). In the 1960s, 16-year-old June Branham is pregnant and unsure which of two boys is the father. She’s in love with one, Ellis Akers, but the other raped her, and she doesn’t know where to turn. Ellis and her brother, Tom, have gone to fight in Vietnam, and her stepfather, Isom, has long held a hateful grudge against Ellis’s mixed-race family, out of both racial prejudice and resentment over the affair June’s mother, Bethel, had with Ellis’s father. After June gives birth to her daughter, Grace, Isom kidnaps the baby and hides her, prompting June to make a series of life-altering decisions that are both courageous and dangerous. Along the way, Steele conjures a stark sense of place, depicting the strip-mined landscape, where heavy rains cause the overworked hills to collapse and floods swallow up homes and people, as forlorn at best and malevolent at worst. Though the ending feels rushed, Steele mostly sustains the epic proportions of her ravishing story. This is worth a look. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

The propulsive debut novel from Madden, author of the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, explores the aftermath of child sexual abuse. In summer 2013, former reality TV star Linzie King publishes a memoir, written by a ghostwriter, detailing how Calvin Boyer, the 25-year-old son of her school bus driver, molested her when she was 13. Linzie’s book contains stories of Calvin’s other victims—including Birdie Chang, whom he abused at 17 when Birdie was nine. With the book attracting media scrutiny, Birdie leaves the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her girlfriend, Trace, for a digital detox on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. On the ferry to Whidbey, she meets an enigmatic man who presses her to explain her trip. She tells him about Calvin, and he offers to kill him. Meanwhile, on tour for her book, Linzie grapples with how her ghostwriter, Yale, spun her trauma into a marketable tale by flattening Calvin into a monster and portraying Linzie as purely resilient. The truth, which Madden slowly untangles, is more complicated. The novel takes a turn when Calvin’s mother, Mary-Beth, who viciously defended him over the course of multiple criminal trials, learns he has been murdered. As the mystery unfolds, each woman reckons with the void left by Calvin, culminating in a dynamic, twist-filled third act. Fueled by biting observations and empathetic characterizations, Madden’s novel reveals how the nuances of sexual trauma are often dismissed in favor of commodified narratives that flatten both victims and abusers, perpetuating a system that fails to protect survivors. This is unforgettable. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

The bucolic, self-sequestered life of a mother and daughter is unceremoniously interrupted by a curious stranger in Heller’s lush latest (after Burn). Hayley, a celebrated professor and translator of Chinese poetry, retreats from public life to rural Vermont, where she homeschools her bookish seven-year-old, Frith, in their off-the-grid cabin. Haley chose the rustic setting to escape the burdens of her career and the pain of intimate relationships, and Frith, who narrates, is comfortable with the pastoral arrangement. Things change with an unexpected visit from Rosie Lattimore, a local weaver, who reintroduces Hayley and Frith to the pleasures of social interactions, the notion of fun, and the bounties of true friendship. The unhurried narrative is flush with themes of motherhood, family, the healing properties of poetry, and the kindness of strangers, and periodically flashes forward to Frith as an adult recalling her youth and the way Rosie opened new worlds to her and Hayley. Heller brings the setting to life with lyrical prose (winter icicles “extended their glass fingers,” and pop-top cans of beer issue “sharp sighs”), and delivers an emotionally charged, heart-wrenching conclusion. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: David Halpern, David Halpern Literary. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kelly and Thorne follow up Starlets with another tale of intrigue and subterfuge, this one set in 1883. Thirteen years ago, Alice Archer’s father was duped into an investment opportunity that wiped out his finances and left the family destitute. To exact revenge on the five scions of New York City’s upper crust responsible for his ruin, Alice, now 28, hatches a clever plan to upend their lives by getting them to invest in phony emerald mines. Posing as Grand Duchess Marie Charlotte Gabriella of Württemberg, she engages coconspirator Ward McAllister to introduce her to Manhattan society. She also recruits a German woman named Dagmar to be her cook and a sweet lady named Béatrice to serve as her maid. By happenstance, Alice meets Coraline O’Malley, aka “Cora Mack,” an accomplished pickpocket and crew member of a traveling magic act. In Pygmalion fashion, Alice transforms Cora Mack from a street-smart country girl into a refined lady who will play her cousin in the scheme and snare one of the younger scions. Readers will trip on a few anachronisms—Victorians didn’t tell each other to “stay in your lane”—but the authors pack the suspenseful plot with entertaining twists. There’s plenty to enjoy in this fast-paced romp. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink