A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. As a coordinator of sea rescues in the English Channel, the unnamed narrator is regularly forced to decide whether to send or withhold assistance for sinking boats. Most often the doomed crafts are carrying refugees making the perilous crossing to the U.K., and her decisions frequently come down to whether the craft is in her country’s waters, among other calculations. One evening, she communicates with a man on a raft of refugees drifting somewhere along the line between French and English waters. He calls her 14 times over the course of a couple of hours as the boat slowly sinks. All the refugees end up drowning. The news causes intense hand wringing on both sides of the Channel, and most of the novel consists of the narrator replaying that night as well as her subsequent exchange with a police investigator. The narrative takes on intriguing layers as the investigator grills her about her decisions and the recordings of her radio calls with the man, in which she attempts to absolve herself of guilt (“I didn’t ask you to leave”). It’s a satisfying exploration of a moral gray area. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rufous, the Canadian cartographer and former wildlife technician at the center of this immersive story from Butler (The Wild Heavens), is losing his memory due to an unspecified terminal illness. Over the course of the novel, Rufous journeys to the British Columbia Interior, where he grew up, and recovers memories of his childhood there. Abandoned by his mother, he was raised by his grandmother along with his twin sister, Calliope, and their three older half siblings. Their grandmother died in 1979, when the twins were five . Determined not to be split up by social services, the children fled to a campground in the wilderness, where they lived in a tree house and survived by taking odd jobs as apple and blueberry pickers. Eventually, Rufous contracted pneumonia, and his siblings left him with a lesbian couple who took him in. Butler’s depiction of the children’s off-grid life sometimes strains credulity, but there is a surprising plot twist, and Rufous’s mental decline and physical pain are artfully conveyed, as when he’s gripped by a migraine and remembers how his grandmother described them as “grief trapped in your brain, twisting into strange shapes as it tries to break free.” It’s a stimulating tale of a fading man’s journey into the past. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Grant (Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home) spins a gritty tale of a girl’s coming of age in rural New Hampshire in the 1990s. Twelve-year-old Maggie Thompson, who lives with her dad in a trailer home, is reeling from her mother’s sudden departure when she witnesses Rachel Mann, 16, drowning in a nearby lake. One year later, Rachel’s mother disappears (her car is found abandoned near a bridge), and Maggie and her friend Sarah team up with Rachel’s younger sister, Erin, to find out what happened to Mrs. Mann. They suspect she ran off with a local judge and probate attorney who disappeared around the same time after he was caught embezzling money from his clients. While out looking for clues, the girls run into three high school boys, who invite them to a party. There, Maggie, now 13, is pressured by the boys into sexual activity and finds her friendships tested in the aftermath. Grant delivers an unflinching depiction of the sexual exploitation faced by the girls, and she offers a sensitive account of Maggie’s burgeoning desires. (Remembering the lifeguard who tried to save Rachel, Maggie reflects, “I’d hoped the lifeguard noticed me—not as someone to save, but as someone he might want to touch.”) There’s plenty to savor in this intense novel. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A miserable cool girl sighs through life in Newton’s bold if tunnel-visioned debut. It’s 2014 in New York City, and 30-something Agnes Maurer—nepo baby, former model, current magazine staffer, and muse to her famous novelist-filmmaker boyfriend, Nathan—is looking for someone to kill her. Agnes pursues her miserable end over the course of one day, seeking a would-be killer by reaching out to exes and old friends on Instagram, trying to buy a gun from the counterfeit bag sellers on Canal Street, flirting with bartenders who might have criminal urges, and pressuring an ex to stab her with her boss’s stolen letter opener. Agnes recalls the protagonists in other recent fiction about young women burdened by their beauty, wealth, and intelligence, but the material feels underdeveloped, and the many secondary characters are intentionally left two-dimensional, which heightens the effect of Agnes’s solipsistic spiral but becomes redundant given the large cast of potential murderers. Still, the novel sustains a humorous edge, as when Agnes reflects on her devotion to Nathan (“I’ve been completely dedicated to the career of dedicating myself to his career”). As Agnes’s desperation increases, the story builds to a great crescendo. At its best, this is a clattering ode to millennial womanhood and the ravages of New York City. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A transplanted Londoner in contemporary Paris struggles to write an essay on Gertrude Stein in this arch novel from Levy (August Blue). The unnamed narrator is captivated and frustrated by her subject (“Gertrude transmits some sort of misery to me. The exhaustion of reading her prose. The never getting to the it of it”). Her two friends in Paris are bemused by the Stein obsession. There’s Fanny, a promiscuous Frenchwoman who works in finance and is “in a constant state of amorous flush,” and Eva, a Danish graphic artist whose cat has run away. The missing cat prompts the narrator to muse over Stein’s famous description of her cohort as a “lost generation,” the narrator’s inability to locate Stein as a subject, and the modernity Stein helped fashion. Much of the novel consists of brief biographical glimpses into the lives of Stein and the artists and thinkers in her orbit—William James, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, and many others—along with extracts from Stein’s self-described “clear as mud” texts. Levy’s attempt to draw a connection between Stein’s milieu and the narrator’s friendships feels a little forced, but the novel comes alive in the narrator’s riveting efforts to grapple with Stein’s idiosyncratic life and work. There’s much to admire. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

The 30-something daughter of a famous novelist looks back on her traumatic Vermont childhood in the eerie and assured adult debut from YA author Albert (The Hazel Wood). Guin and her older brother, Ennis, now an artist, spent six years in an old house in the woods after moving there from New York City. Their mom, author Edith Sharpe, cared more about her fictional characters than her own children, and their dad dedicated himself to seducing young women who wandered into his orbit. Guin, adrift since Edith died in a fire when she was 11, is now publicizing a sanitized, ghostwritten memoir, cashing in on the enduring popularity of Edith’s fantasy series, which was inspired by Guin and Ennis. When Guin learns that Ennis, whom she hasn’t seen since the night of the fire, has made an art installation entitled Mother, she decides to attend the opening, which looms on the calendar for much of the novel until a climactic scene at the gallery. Albert evokes the power Edith’s work holds for those who grew up reading it, such as the “misfit kids” who preferred to live in its world, and she tantalizes with suggestions that the Sharpe family might have supernatural powers. The fantastical material complements the fairy tale quality of the pastoral Vermont setting, where “summer felt like a myth, then a creeping tide.” Even more intriguingly, Albert explores the potentially destructive role of art on its makers, subjects, and consumers. It’s a sensuous delight. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Playwright Raicek debuts with a seductive literary thriller about a writer picking up the pieces after an accident kills her fiancé. Two weeks before Liv and Graham’s wedding date, news breaks during a cocktail reception hosted by Graham’s company that he has been accused of bullying his subordinates, and he’s promptly fired. He and Liv leave the party, held on the Northern California coast, and he roughs her up, then drives drunk with her in the car. They go over a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway and only Liv survives. After the accident, she moves back to New York and runs into a married neighbor, Damon, at a party, along with his charming friend, Isobel, who Liv suspects is Damon’s lover. The pair invite Liv into their circle, calling her their “stray.” Damon takes Liv on walks and to museums, and they start hooking up, unbeknownst to Isabel. Meanwhile, Liv is pulled back to the night of the accident in California when she receives a photo of her and Graham leaving the party from an unknown phone number, causing her to wonder if it’s from a journalist intent on digging up more of the story. The plot is propulsive, and Raicek keeps the reader guessing at the characters’ true intentions. It’s a diverting tale. Agent: Margaret Riley King, WME. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Palestinian exile faces the impossibility of the American dream in this melancholy novel from Murr (The Perfect Man). Hailing from Gaza, Jack and his wife, Dimra, live in a shabby condo in 2000s Chicago. Jack serves as the building’s board president, since he’s the only one capable of handling the relentless maintenance problems and the other residents’ demanding personalities, especially Vietnam prison camp survivor May, who levies fines for other residents’ petty infractions while neglecting her troubled son. Dimra, who suffers from endometriosis and sequesters herself in their apartment, wants nothing more than to have a child with Jack, despite multiple miscarriages and failed treatments the couple can ill afford. Meanwhile, Jack, who works as a flight attendant, poses as gay to fend off advances from women colleagues. As Jack deals with the strain of Dimra’s worsening condition and his neighbors’ needs, he reflects on his past in Gaza, contemplating his first sexual experiences with a male cousin, his mother’s struggle for acceptance as a disowned Coptic convert, and the perpetual threat of violence from Israel. Murr’s sharp observational skills and steady hand keep the story flowing. This humanizes the pain of displacement and the trauma of war. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

First published in 1955, the stimulating second novel by Bessette (Lili Is Crying) to be translated into English centers on a murder, though it’s no simple whodunit. In the middle of the night, a 15-year-old boy kills his father. Twenty minutes later, a doctor is fetched. A motive is offered (“I killed to be rid of anxiety,” says the unnamed boy, before retracting this statement), and the location of the murder weapon is disputed (“The revolver was in the car. The revolver was not in the car”). In a metafictional aside, Bessette even collapses the novel’s very premise: “The characters in this story are not solid, they are falling apart. Why? Because they are fake characters. They are what dummies are to living bodies.” Ultimately, the reader feels more compelled to sink into its addled atmosphere than grasp for an increasingly elusive logical thread. Bessette sustains the mood with hypnotizing language (“There are two kinds of people: Those who accept being slapped, those who don’t”; “I am high strung. Don’t ever tickle me. I am very ticklish”). This slippery and satisfying novel probes the unresolvable mysteries of life. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cleeton (The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes) delivers a heartrending yet hopeful story of an astronaut’s wife holding on to her husband’s memory in the wake of a mission gone wrong. In 1968 Cape Kennedy, Fla., Vivian Mitchell faces her worst fear: her husband Joe’s Moon-bound shuttle has lost contact with mission control. As Vivian struggles to come to grips with NASA’s report that he and the rest of the crew are lost in space, she seeks to counter suggestions that Joe, the mission’s commander, is responsible for its failure. To that end, she agrees to an on-air interview with TV news anchor Graham Carlson, whom she once dated when she was a budding journalist in Washington, D.C., and explains that she hopes to prevent future mishaps by holding NASA accountable. Meanwhile, Vivian begins finding mysterious handwritten messages that seem to be from Joe. One of them reads, “Wait for me,” prompting her to seek answers from a scientist who has written about wormholes and time travel. Cleeton drives the narrative forward with her well-crafted time travel conceit and touching depictions of Joe and Vivian’s once in a lifetime love. Readers won’t want to miss this. Agent: Kevan Lyon, Marsal Lyon Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink