A middle-aged Englishwoman seeks fulfillment while reflecting on her choice not to have children in the insightful if diffuse debut novel from picture book author and illustrator Haworth-Booth (The Last Tree). As the unnamed narrator enters menopause, she revives a childhood obsession: “Horses began to return to my thoughts at the same time that change began to happen in my body.” She answers an ad to become a “sharer” of a white and black horse owned by another woman (the “true mother”), tending to the horse a few days a week. In between caring for the horse, writing children’s books, and attending a residency, she looks after her neighbor’s children, who she refers to as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” As the months pass, her relationship with the horse blossoms from a chosen chore to something deeper and more sustaining. Stretches of self-reflection are punctuated by chipper emails from a child-free friend who espouses the wonders of their lifestyle: “What’s your favourite thing to do instead of the school run?” Some readers will find themselves wanting more from the fragmentary narrative, which often leaves thoughts half formed, but Haworth-Booth ably captures early middle-age disquiet and the soothing balm of animal companionship. Fans of Sheila Heti will appreciate this. Agent: Ed Wilson, Johnson & Alcock. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Cooper (Brian) delivers the plodding story of a fraught collaboration between a composer and a saxophonist. Nearing 50, Rebekah Rosen is “at once both innovative and indecisive,” feeling inspired one minute and sensing the “death throes of a failed composer” the next. Her agent sets up a meeting with Evie Bennet, a “star-to-be” who plays her saxophone in flashy designer sneakers and eventually agrees to perform Rebekah’s composition in progress at a prestigious classical music festival in London. Rebekah is possessive and resentful of Evie, attracted to her “glistening youth” and intimidated by her talent and confidence. The novel follows their relationship as the two very different women get a feel for each other and the evolving piece and discuss architecture, another of Rebekah’s interests. In third-person narration, Cooper dutifully describes the buildings and music Rebekah and Evie like and dislike, and he supplies potted biographies of numerous composers and architects as well as a parade of minor characters, like a shoe retailer, who enter the protagonists’ lives. As the concert approaches, there’s less of a crescendo than a steady drone of meetings and outings. Despite the formidable intelligence behind it, this novel never sings. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stoddard debuts with a breezy if superficial retelling of The Philadelphia Story set on modern-day Cape Cod. Tess Lowell, a Manhattan art agent and socialite, divorced her ex-husband, Peter Hyun, an artist, five years ago, over his alcohol abuse. Peter, sober for the past few years, is surprised to receive an invitation not only to Tess’s wedding but to the preceding week of festivities. He arrives on the cape with his acquaintance, Mitch, an aspiring writer, and pretends Mitch is his boyfriend, but it turns out the joke is on them: the invite was sent as a prank by Tess’s brother. Despite the Lowells’ longtime disapproval of Peter, they offer him and Mitch the use of their guest house. Over the disastrous week, Mitch, a stalwart member of the working class, verbally spars with the Lowells and Tess’s fiancé, a centrist politician and “safe” choice for her future, with whom she lacks the spark she had with Peter. While Peter and Tess remember what drew them to each other, Mitch falls for both of them. The novel’s epigraph borrows a line delivered by Katherine Hepburn: “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” Unfortunately, Stoddard’s characters never surprise the reader, hewing to stereotypes throughout. This one never quite takes flight. Agent: Aurora Fernandez, Trident Media Group. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In Shetterly’s breezy sequel to Pete and Alice in Maine, magazine writer Alice attempts to move on after her husband Pete’s infidelity, while recovering from cancer treatment. Accompanied by her daughters—angsty 13-year-old Sophie,and sensitive eight-year-old Iris—she travels to France, where she’s been commissioned by a magazine to write a story about camping. A tale of roughing it this is not—though the trio do occasionally pitch a tent, they spend most of their time sleeping in comfy rooms, swimming, and sampling luscious cuisine, while Alice falls for a hunky innkeeper. Though Shetterly dutifully divides her attention among the four family members, including a small section on Pete plodding along back home, this is primarily a story of Alice’s midlife crisis. A late drama involving Sophie seems tacked on for the sake of suspense, and Shetterly’s depiction of Alice can feel muddled, as when she attempts to elicit sympathy for Alice without examining the character’s tendency to neglect her daughters while out having fun. Shetterly is at her best when describing with affection and pleasure the food, scenery, and cheerfully welcoming residents of France. Flaws aside, this offers an inviting view into a lovingly evoked setting. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Kim’s uneven debut traces an unnamed protagonist’s complex relationship with her mother. The woman was born in 1998 Seoul to a mother whose philosophy revolves around the endurance and diligence drilled into postwar Korean citizens. The mother, also unnamed, relies on the wealth of her husband’s family to attend architecture school in Minnesota and send her daughter to private school to learn English. The mother keeps her daughter busy with math drills and violin lessons and doesn’t deal well with her turning into a teenager: they constantly fight, with mother telling daughter that boys will ruin her life and that she doesn’t study enough. The daughter stays in the U.S. for boarding school and college after her mother returns to Seoul to care for her grandmother. She only sees her depressed mother and her often absent father during breaks, when her mother is prone to giving her the silent treatment and threatens suicide when she isn’t helping to care for her elderly grandmother. While Kim ably captures the weight of a parent’s sacrifice and resentment, the narrative pulls its punches at the end, leaving readers frustrated and perplexed. It’s an evocative if undercooked story. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A struggling photographer falls further into a downward spiral when he fixates on a missing celebrity, in Diamond’s unsettling debut. At the outset, 20-something Ben toils at service jobs in Las Vegas while longing to be a wildlife photographer. After learning about the money to be made as a paparazzo, he moves to Los Angeles, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Ellory. Three years later, Ellory is out of the picture, and Ben has stoked controversy with a photo of pop star Mia Luna for reasons that come out later. When Ben learns A-lister Jack Whitlock has gone missing after he was caught having an affair with a much younger woman, he sets out to find Jack. Not only is Ben seeking a big payday, but he idolizes Jack and hopes to become part of his orbit. As Ben works his contacts in search of Jack, he ignores increasingly menacing text messages from angry Mia Luna superfans. The conclusion is abrupt, but Diamond convincingly brings to life the amoral Ben and his eroded sense of self (“I can watch the celebrity news without feeling like it’s the kind of hard-core pornography you’d switch off at the sound of keys at the door”). It’s a distinctive character portrait. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the nuanced if slow-paced latest from Christensen (The Great Man), a novelist returns to her alma mater for a book festival, where she reckons with her history of dysfunctional relationships. Julia Heimdahl, now in her 50s, is promoting a memoir about her sexual history with men and women, including her happy new relationship with a musician 20 years younger. She chalks up her rocky road to love to a misogynist father who physically abused her mother, Leni, and to Leni, who competed with her and her sisters for attention from men. At the festival, Julia is paired on a panel with biographer Ellis Blackwell, a charming Southerner who’s written a memoir about his own troubled family. Over the weekend, Julia has a series of uncomfortable run-ins with, among others, a woman she was attracted to in college who now publicly accuses Julia of “internalized misogyny,” multiple friends-turned-enemies who ostracized her after she cheated on her husband, and a former student of hers who is investigating Blackwell’s behavior with his former students. As the people in her life cross paths, Julia grapples with how well she really understands her own story. Christensen includes passages from the memoir, which lend context to who Julia is now, but sap the momentum. Still, Julia’s complex characterization will stay with readers. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the masterful debut story collection from Gibson, characters confront eerie and unexpected situations. A psychic animal whisperer receives a house call from an old acquaintance in “Pest Control,” and a young schoolteacher is drawn to a hillside village by apparitions of the Virgin Mary in “Our Lady of the Moonlight,” which evokes the gothic vibes and fierce intelligence of Flannery O’Conner. Elsewhere, a widowed train driver and a disenchanted academic find unlikely romance on a serendipitous train journey in “Light Tricks.” Gibson also pinpoints the particularities of art and gastronomy, such as the cascading shades of blue in a painter’s color experiment in “Blue Circle” and the rich, decadent secrets of an elderly chef’s French cookbooks in “Intake.” The action is often subtle, driven by subterranean tensions, as with the couple who tour a Cretan archaeological museum in “Linear A.” Liam causes Zoe to withdraw when he criticizes the museum, claiming it’s inferior to ones in New York and London, and dismisses prehistoric matriarchal societies as primitive in comparison to warring Bronze Age civilizations. Throughout, Gibson builds impactful stories out of richly evoked settings and airtight psychological insights. The author exhibits remarkable range in this inspired and deeply accomplished work. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rowbottom (Aesthetica) offers an intimate and kinetic tale of friendship and betrayal in the 1980s Los Angeles porn world. As teens, Jude and Winnie dream of escaping their backwater burb north of L.A., especially Winnie, who’s sexually abused by her stepfather. She runs away at 16 in 1980 and Jude follows two years later. In L.A., Jude shacks up with a slightly older guy named Laird in a seedy motel, doing heroin and pulling stick-up jobs. After Laird winds up in jail, Jude finds Winnie at a strip club. Her feelings for Winnie have never been strictly platonic, and she’s excited when they move in together. Winne doesn’t do porn (“those girls are tragic,” she tells Jude), but Jude tries it anyway, initially through Winnie’s boss, and believes she’s found “her destiny.” Soon Jude gets in deep, and after she makes a ruthless move, putting her career before the friendship, Winnie cuts ties. The novel’s second half, set 30 years later, revisits the events from Winnie’s perspective. Now a writer, she takes stock of what led to the friends’ break and the trouble she found in trying to make a life for herself. Rowbottom’s portrayal of the porn demimonde is exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and the novel doubles as a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It’s a knockout. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sutanto (Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers) delights with this tale of second chances. Mebel Tanadi, a “Chinese-Indonesian princess” whose “second and arguably most universal language is cash,” has spent the past 40 years as a happy trophy wife to Henk in Indonesia. When he suddenly runs off with the family’s 24-year-old private chef, she decides to attend culinary school at the Saint Honoré School of Culinary Arts in France in order to win him back, and heads to Paris loaded down with Birkins and designer shoes. After she arrives, she learns that she mistakenly enrolled at another branch of the school in a small town near Oxford, England. When she gets there and immediately has her handbags stolen, she considers turning around and going home, but decides to strap on her Louboutins, put on her Hermes suit, and see what comes next. Along the way, Mebel discovers a deeper sense of self, meets an apparently perfect man, and becomes a mentor for younger students, all the while wondering what she’ll do if Henk really does come back. Sutanto keeps the pages turning with tight plotting and thoroughly enjoyable characters. Readers are in for a treat. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink