In Zeldis’s nuanced story of friendship and heritage (after The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights), two American college students grapple with their Jewish identity in the wake of WWII. In 1946, Miriam Anne Bishop drops her first name when she enrolls at Vassar College, choosing to pass among her gentile classmates. Delia Goldhush, on the other hand, doesn’t hide her Jewishness and ignores the snubs and rude remarks made by Anne’s friends. Anne is intrigued by Delia and they form a secret friendship, which implodes when Anne chooses her gentile friends over Delia. Anne feels terribly guilty, however, and leaves her snobby clique to study in Paris for her junior year. Delia is also drawn to Paris, where she was living with her family on the eve of the German invasion. There, she searches for answers about her French sculptor mother, Sophie, who stayed behind when the Goldhushes fled back to the U.S. and may have been killed while fighting with the Resistance. Anne and Delia meet by chance in a Paris gallery, and Anne offers to help Delia, hoping to renew their friendship. Zeldis adds depth to the brisk story in her portrayal of the characters’ complex feelings about their Jewish heritage. It’s an appealing historical. Agent: Susanna Einstein, Einstein Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Estima’s inspired if clunky latest (after the story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society) explores a Czech woman’s long-ago romance with novelist Franz Kafka. The story takes the form of an interrogation of Milena Jesenská by SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in a Prague jail in 1939, where she’s being held by the Nazis for her role in smuggling Czech Jews into Poland, and for having a Jewish husband. Milena begins by recounting her unhappy marriage to banker Ernst Pollak, who has a mistress on the side. She’s enchanted by Kafka when she meets him in a Prague café during a visit to the city, and she writes to him from Vienna, offering to translate his short story “The Stoker.” Kafka agrees and the pair arrange to meet in Vienna for a four-day tryst. While some of the writing is stilted (“Milena’s heartbeat was spilled ink”) and the novel is a touch too long, the interviews with Heydrich culminate with poignant revelations about the fate of Kafka’s family during WWII and intriguing suggestions about Milena’s connection to his unfinished novel The Castle. Kafka devotees ought to take a look. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel) offers a revelatory career-spanning collection of 30 fantastical and speculative stories, all but 11 of which have appeared in previous volumes. Among the often-melancholy characters are “Sleepy People” protagonist Judith Map, who finds a sleepwalking man on her doorstep and takes him into her apartment. She has sex with him while he sleeps, and afterward seeks answers about his provenance from a militia who hangs out at a nearby bar. Other characters endure alienation, such as those in “Program’s Progress” who aspire to upward mobility in a weird world where cars are the highest order of being; or disembodiment, like the party guests in “Forever, Said the Duck” who arrive as virtual reality simulations of themselves. In the standout “Red Sun School of Thoughts,” a 13-year-old boy visits a commune in 1976 San Francisco, and his desire for answers from the Founder leads to a strange and disenchanting encounter. The imagery is often suggestive, hovering in a genre-defying space between literal and metaphorical, as with the predatory teen gang members referred to as dinosaurs in “Sleepy People.” In large doses, the effect can be exhausting, but the repeating motifs—claustrophobia, desire, malevolent chaos—provide keys to understanding Lethem’s often elliptical tales. The author’s fans will find much to love. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

The touching debut from Ramage focuses on a young Cherokee woman’s struggle to become the first Native American astronaut. In 1990s Oklahoma, 13-year-old Steph Harper longs to attend Space Camp and applies to a private school, hoping it will put her on the path. Rummaging through her mother’s purse, she finds a scholarship offer from the school and is bereft to realize she’s missed the deadline to accept, and that her mother kept the news from her (“I saw my mother holding me back, so afraid... that she’d force on me a small life”). Steph never loses her ambition to travel to space and eventually attends a private college in rural Connecticut, where she has a tumultuous romantic relationship with fellow Indigenous student Della. After drifting through a series of online hookups in graduate school, Steph is chosen for astronaut training in Hawaii, but tensions arise when her younger sister arrives to protest NASA’s installation of a large telescope on sacred Indigenous lands. While Ramage sets a leisurely pace at the beginning, readers will be rewarded once Steph starts to achieve small victories in her quest. It’s a satisfying exploration of a woman’s determination to realize her potential. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bromiley debuts with a remarkable portrait of a jobless single mother as she navigates an impending eviction, pregnancy, and the watchful gaze of child protection services. Over the course of three days, Jude Woods attempts to keep her sanity and shield her nine-year-old twins, Evan and Virginia, from the harshest realities of their poverty. When she goes into labor, she makes the painful decision to abandon the twins to fend for themselves in the trailer park where they live, fearing they will be taken from her by CPS if they accompany her to the hospital. Other characters in the family’s down-and-out world include a young man at the hospital who carried his girlfriend there after she overdosed on fentanyl, and who provides Jude with unexpected and much-needed companionship in the ER as she patiently waits to be admitted. In lyrical and pared-down prose, Bromiley toggles between the complex points of view of each family member, from Virginia’s innocence to Evan’s burgeoning sense of responsibility and Jude’s poignant reckoning with their precarity (“Through these thin walls trickle bedtime stories, lullabies, whisper-fights. The good smells of cooking.... All, all, all this to be taken”). It’s a knockout. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Masad (All My Mother’s Lovers) spins an affecting tale of aliens, alienation, and archives. It’s anchored by the workday assignments and converging obsessions of an assistant at a library, known only as the Archivist, who begins reading a manuscript about real-life interracial couple Barney and Betty Hill. In 1961, the Hills claimed to be abducted by aliens in the New Hampshire woods upon returning from their honeymoon in Canada. The manuscript, held in the library’s Queer Writers Archive, embellishes the story of the media-shy couple, who gained notoriety among UFO followers. The Archivist also reads letters addressed by lesbian Phyllis Egerton, who left her homophobic mother in 1962 New Hampshire to start a new life as a proofreader at a Boston newspaper and aspired to become a science fiction author, to her estranged girlfriend. The material gives the Archivist solace as they deal with chronic pain from a genetic disorder and angst at a world that doesn’t always accommodate their gender nonconformity. Moreover, the story of the Hills reminds the Archivist, who also hails from New Hampshire, of their own close encounter with aliens as an elementary school student in 1996. The interconnected narratives reveal the power of stories and archival material to reach across time and help an isolated person find themselves. Readers will be swept away. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

The debut novel from Vazquez (The Hand of the Hand, a poetry collection) offers a stimulating and surreal exploration of thought patterns and internet addiction. Teen poet and vlogger Salim lives in public housing somewhere in France with his older sister, Sara; their cleanliness-obsessed father, who is unemployed; and their paralyzed grandmother. Salim has dropped out of school, much to the chagrin of a concerned social worker, and spends his days posting on social media and hanging out online with his lone friend, Jonathan, who’s often high on pills. When his grandmother’s nurses reveal that she will die without a blood transfusion, Salim begins searching for his long-absent mother, hoping her blood will heal his grandmother. Vazquez’s novel is less concerned with plot than with getting inside each character’s head, whether it’s Jonathan as he texts (“Emojis bounced in Jonathan’s hand. Their teeth were a straight, white line. If you looked at them long enough, you couldn’t tell anymore if they were crying or laughing”), or Salim after he posts a poem (“Words were invented by the dead. All the words that travel through our throats have traveled through the throats of the dead”). Vazquez’s commitment to swerving from one bizarre idea to another pays off. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

The vivid sophomore novel from Harris (The Sweetness of Water) follows a formerly enslaved brother and sister in the tumultuous aftermath of the Civil War. June has done her best to protect her dreamy, bookish younger brother, Coleman, from the Harper family, who enslaved them in Baton Rouge before fleeing the estate during the battle for New Orleans. Now, in 1866, without any options, the two continue working for the Harpers in exchange for room and board. Mr. Harper hopes to make a killing in a Mexican silver mine, and after he takes June west, Coleman follows with Mrs. Harper and her strident daughter Florence. In Mexico, June falls in love with charismatic Black Seminole Isaac, flees Mr. Harper, and finds her way to the Black community of Amity. Coleman, meanwhile, endures a shipwreck, a kidnapping, and imprisonment by a Mexican general, who then enlists him to find Mr. Harper. All the while, Coleman hopes against hope that he will find June. Much of the novel is narrated by Coleman, whose sly humor and sharp observations cut others down to size (Mrs. Harper’s “exaggeratedly robust” hoop skirt makes her look “as though she were seated in an upturned soup bowl”), and the well-developed plot generates strong suspense. It’s an indelible slice of postbellum border history. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

Holsinger (The Displacements) plumbs moral responsibility in the age of AI in this twisty family drama. Seventeen-year-old lacrosse star Charlie Cassidy-Shaw is behind the wheel of the family’s self-driving minivan, traveling with his parents and two younger sisters to a tournament, when they collide with another car, killing both passengers. Charlie and his family, however, sustain only minor injuries. In the aftermath, the family returns to a beach house on the Chesapeake Bay to recuperate. When the police hint that the car’s digital forensics might point to Charlie’s guilt, his lawyer father Noah retains a high-priced defense attorney, while his 13-year-old sister Alice texts with her AI-powered “friend” about a secret that would implicate Charlie in the crash, and the app pushes her to confess to their parents. The plot thickens when Charlie’s mother, Lorelei, a prominent AI ethicist, spends time with their tech billionaire neighbor, prompting Noah to worry that she’s having an affair (the truth turns out to be more nefarious). As each family member wrestles with their responsibility for the crash and how much trust they should put in AI, Holsinger grapples evocatively with the trade-offs of automated life. This timely tale leaves readers with much to chew on. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (July)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink

In her memorable debut novel, Yin expertly weaves together the stories of three Chinese women seeking to survive the Japanese occupation during WWII. The Tang family flees Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1938. Among them are Wei, his concubine, his wife Mingzhu, her maid and lifelong companion Biyu, and Mingzhu’s daughter, Qiang. Though Mingzhu lives in a wealthy household, Wei is prone to anger and physically abuses her. She finds solace in the love of books instilled in her by her scholarly father and in seeking stolen moments of happiness with her daughter’s British tutor, Henry Beaumont. When the Japanese invade Hong Kong, Biyu and Qiang escape to the home of a family friend in the mountains and find work at a factory, while Mingzhu works as a personal secretary for a Japanese official. The three women each participate in resistance efforts: Qiang moves to a resistance camp and learns how to fight; Biyu puts hyacinth pollen in the clothing of Japanese soldiers, causing them to develop rashes and fall ill; and Mingzhu sends encrypted messages to the resistance. Yin expertly brings to life each character, highlighting their varied perspectives on how to survive the Japanese occupation and revealing their love for one another and hopes to reunite. This strikes a chord. Agent: Rebecca Wearmouth, PFD Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 07/18/2025 | Details & Permalink