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

Multiple generations of vampires serve as a metaphor for the Chicano experience in this provocative outing from Romo (El Puente/The Bridge). In 1099, in the Indus Valley, a bathhouse attendant named Shandor is bitten by ancient vampire Kali. “Drink,” says Kali, offering her own blood, “or you will die”—a phrase that becomes a refrain throughout the centuries-long story of Shandor’s lineage. Next, in late-15th-century Spain, Shandor, now a vampire, turns Radamés, the idle and illegitimate son of a local courtier. In 1864, Radamés makes local laborer Carlos his servant. Using Carlos’s ability to walk in daylight, Radamés leaves Spain for the New World, where he meets Tepín, a vampire of Aztec descent, possessed of a deeper and more ancient power than Radamés’s European vampiric lineage. These Filth Eaters are unhurt by silver and can wed and bear children. The two fall in love and bear a son, Doro, whom the reader meets as a violent, drug-addled livestreamer in a postapocalyptic 2070s New York City. The product of centuries of colonization, domination, and survival, Doro is unsure if he wishes to continue living. Romo adds texture to the narrative with evocative descriptions of Tepín’s Mesoamerican vampire culture and the suffering her people endured at the hands of the Spaniards and the Catholic Church. This postcolonial novel teems with intriguing ideas. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Nigerian author Awoke (The Liquid Eye of a Moon) offers a captivating and magic-fueled adventure set in contemporary Africa. Ten-year-old Ekwe defies his father’s warning that if he touches a forbidden leaf called an ekwukwonju, he will “be blown away by wild wandering winds.” Not long after, Ekwe falls asleep on a bus, arriving unintentionally in Maidaguri in northeastern Nigeria after riding all night. He’s taken in by a cow herder, Danjuma, and slowly learns the family’s language. One evening, as the family sits down for supper, Muslim extremists burst into their home and open fire, injuring Danjuma and killing one of his wives and a daughter. Afterward, Danjuma migrates with his surviving family to the south, where they briefly find peace, until local tensions between farmers and cow herders erupt in violence. Ekwe is then borne away by a large owl to Central Africa, where he is mentored by a mercenary named Jafari. When he and his fellow mercenaries are abandoned by their employer, Jafari and Ekwe resort to petty crime, until Jafari accepts a proposal from a shady war profiteer who makes him swear allegiance to the Mesopotamian goddess Lamashtu. Then, suddenly, Ekwe wakes up at home, “confused and dizzy,” and learns that a much older, richer man is courting his 12-year-old sister, Oyibo. Awoke weaves his immersive and lyrical tale with folklore and vivid scenes of real-world violence. This one hits hard. Agent: Annie DeWitt, Shipman Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A repatriation case against a New York City museum forces a lawyer to revisit troubling memories from her college summer abroad in Lemle’s suspenseful debut. The Italian government is seeking the return of an ancient cup made from rare glass that it claims was looted from a Roman villa. The investigation into the cup’s provenance resurrects memories that estate lawyer Lena has largely suppressed of the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps 18 years prior, during which her professor, Cyrille, disappeared. In alternating chapters, readers see a 19-year-old Lena fall in love and under the sway of a mysterious local. As multiple people from that summer converge in present-day New York City during Lena’s investigation, she confronts her own complicity in the sprawling market for antiquities, which encompasses criminals and preservationists alike. Along the way, Lemle sharply interrogates notions of cultural heritage and ownership (“Museums are mausoleums built to house the spoils of a bunch of rich people”). Keeping track of the overly complex cast of characters can be challenging, and the unrelated subplots on Lena’s upbringing slow the pace. Still, armchair travelers will enjoy themselves. Agent: Sabrina Taitz, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Unferth’s remarkable third novel (after Barn 8) takes place in a distant future where a severely depopulated Earth has turned mostly to sand. At the outset, protagonist Dylan is being raised by her mother, Rosemary, in an underwater pod. Rosemary is a researcher, part of a team from a lab back on Earth’s surface who are working to preserve the DNA of the planet’s many species in an effort to eventually recreate Earth as it once was. The original collection, known as Earth 2, and its copies, 3 through 5, have been lost to looters, and the team is now compiling Earth 6. Though Dylan finds the work of the lab “irritating and absurd, all this so-called Earth-saving,” it offers her an escape from the suffocation of her mother and the depths of the ocean when she lands an internship on the surface. Tasked with sweeping sand, she makes a miraculous discovery of “micro-animals” that appear lifeless and can be used to hide DNA. Over the course of the satisfying narrative, Dylan, as an adult, carries on Rosemary’s work. Unferth shines in her ability to craft relatable characters in extraordinary circumstances, and the novel remains accessible even as it explores deep ontological questions about the nature of life. This is profound. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Four-year-old Marili learns about life and death and discovers the beauty of the natural world in this deeply perceptive and sensuous 1951 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer (The Wall). The story takes place over the course of a year in an idyllic alpine forest, where Marili is being raised by her maternal grandparents. Her grief-stricken grandmother explains that she’s not Marili’s mother, who died along with her four sons—three in war, and the youngest, Max, at five, from diphtheria. Sadness hangs over the house during the gloomy winter until the first ray of February sunlight lands in a “yellow rectangle... on the kitchen floor.” In summer, Marili explores the surrounding meadows by herself, pushing past her fear of the unknown, and is enchanted by the flowers, especially the fire lilies, which “seemed to come to life under her breath.” The strong-willed and curious girl, who prays with her back turned to the painting of Jesus in her bedroom and beats up a neighbor boy who threatens to drown a litter of kittens, carries glimmers of the adult heroines in Haushofer’s fierce later work, and the story grows unsettling when Marili alarms her grandparents by catching a fever like the one Max had. The main event, though, is Haushofer’s painterly depiction of the landscape, as when she describes how the fog lifts as winter approaches and “a different color... shimmered yellow and red through the milky veils.” It’s a stunner. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

The diverting latest from Léger (God Loves Haiti) traces a Haitian soccer hero’s rise and fall. Gilbert Chevalier’s story unfolds in reverse, while he’s facing a firing squad in the late 1950s for an unspecified offense. The son of a well-off businessman, Gilbert adores soccer and uses his endless charm to woo women, including firebrand Aurélie. As a favor to his father, who hopes for a financial windfall, Gilbert marries Elizabeth, the daughter of a rich Nazi hiding in Haiti after WWII, before leaving alone for New York City to study finance at Columbia. While away, Gil promises to focus on his education, but he quickly joins pickup soccer games in Central Park and gets recruited for the 1950 U.S. World Cup team, despite not being an American (“a small technicality,” he’s told). After he scores a game-winning goal against England, he becomes an overnight sensation. As the years pass, he slouches around Europe and his soccer career declines. Called back to Haiti to visit his ailing father, he learns that Elizabeth has taken up with another man, Aurélie is raising his nine-year-old child, and his life is in danger. Léger sustains the momentum with energetic set pieces, which often involve Gilbert’s Zelig-like encounters with celebrities, as when he rescues Miles Davis from an angry spurned lover. It’s a blast. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink