At birth, the women of the Novak family are given a silver ticket that allows them one chance to turn back time, in this disappointing tale from Serle (In Five Years). When Lauren’s mother was 15, she used hers to save Lauren’s father from a deadly car crash, and her mother has worried about his ailing heart ever since, knowing she’s used up her only chance to save him. Lauren, who grew up surfing with her father near their modest Malibu house, is 37 and dealing with expensive and grueling fertility treatments. While Leo, her husband of three years, spends a summer in New York City to advance his film career, Lauren visits her childhood home with her parents and grandmother. There, she takes up surfing again and rekindles a romance with an old flame, Stone. Feeling disconnected from herself and pushing Leo further away, she wonders if perhaps there is a past choice she can undo. The author introduces heavy themes of family bonds and fertility struggles, but the story is undone by clunky characterizations—especially that of Stone, who’s described as “humble” and vain in the span of a paragraph—and by an ending that feels unfaithful to the plot. Serle’s clever concept doesn’t quite translate into magic on the page. Agent: Erin Malone, WME. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Witchcraft and family strife animate this uneven 1996 novel by NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. In suburban France, twins Maud and Lise have turned 12, and the time has come for their mother, narrator Lucie, to pass along her inherited sorcery powers. Lucie’s gift allows her to see faint glimpses of the past, present, or future, but her daughters’ powers turn out to be much stronger, like Lucie’s mother before her. She’s overcome by the pair’s “bored disdain,” now that they always know what’s going to happen, and worried they’ll only use their magic for “practical purposes.” Meanwhile, tension with her frustrated and unkind husband comes to a tipping point when he skips out and steals their savings. NDiaye has a knack for surrealism, as when she imbues quotidian domestic scenes with supernatural imagery such as the “vaporous carpet of tiny dark feathers” left by the twins in their wake. Unfortunately, Lucie’s conflicts remain underdeveloped, and the work feels more like a collection of vignettes than a satisfying narrative. Diehard fans ought to take a look, but this doesn’t have the power of NDiaye’s best work. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Franklin (The Lioness of Boston) impresses with this historical novel featuring Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Godwin and the least celebrated member of their circle of Romantic poets and writers. In spring 1816, 17-year-old Claire is living in London with Mary, her future husband, Percy Shelley, and their infant son. She’s written a novel and works assiduously on her journal, but unlike Mary and Percy, she’s unsure of her vocation. Fascinated by the notorious Lord Byron, she introduces herself to him and the two begin a secret affair. Claire, passionately in love, hopes to join Byron on his summer stay in Switzerland. Instead, he ends their relationship, and she persuades Mary and Percy to relocate near Byron’s villa. As the others immerse themselves in writing, she feels isolated, beset by the doubt of “knowing I was not gifted as the others” and heartache over Byron, especially after their affair resumes but he insists on keeping it secret. Franklin captures the timeless quality of a young woman’s desire for purpose as well as the gloomy weather of that summer, when the fierce cold and damp resulting from the eruption of an volcano in Indonesia isolated the group and provided a suitably gothic backdrop for their work. This offers a fresh perspective on a famous moment in literary history. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Aevitas Creative Management. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Korean teenage runaway tries to reinvent herself during the 2008 recession in Yeun’s remarkable debut. At 17, the unnamed narrator flees her family’s cramped Seoul apartment, where her frustrated and underemployed father, a former financial manager, physically assaults her kindhearted mother. She rents a room at a women’s boarding house across town and befriends Juju, a 30-year-old sex worker with a doll-like appearance, platinum blonde hair, and false eyelashes. Drawn to her housemates’ consumer lifestyles, the narrator rapidly depletes her savings but shrinks from the idea of performing sex work, in large part because Juju incurs physical abuse from clients. Juju shows the narrator a way out: securing high-interest loans with counterfeit paperwork attached to her parents’ credit history. The narrator’s transformation is complete once she buys an assortment of cosmetics and dyes her hair blonde (“I felt like a new species. And now that I felt like one, I could start living like one”). Yeun offers a no-holds-barred view into her narrator’s hardscrabble life, from her family home where “the boil of our underwear warmed our rooms,” to the ways in which men’s rage and shame over their financial failure manifest into violence against women. This is incandescent. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Spanish writer Hernández (Anoxia) chronicles in this searching autofiction his attempt to write a novel about his boyhood best friend, Nicolás, who killed his older sister, Rosi, when he was 18, before jumping off a cliff to his death. The events took place on Christmas Eve 1995, when Nicolás’s parents found Rosi dead in their home in the remote region of Murcia in southeastern Spain. They initially believed someone broke in, and that quiet former altar boy Nicolás had been kidnapped. Soon, though, Nicolás’s car was found along with his body, and everyone but his mother came to accept that he killed Rosi. The reason for the crime, though, remained murky. Hoping to get to the truth, Miguel seeks court records related to the case, and talks with a local judge who speculates that Nicolás was sexually abusing Rosi and was jealous that she had a boyfriend. Though Miguel doesn’t solve the mystery of Nicolás’s motive, he offers a weighty reflection on the repressed Catholic lowlands of his and Nicolás’s childhood, where “cold sinks into your bones and the damp into your brain.” It’s an impressive reckoning. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lin debuts with a perceptive story collection about the unsettled lives of characters who were born in China and are now scattered around the world. Often, her protagonists observe life from a distance, such as the petty thieves looking for victims on the streets of Shanghai in “You Won’t Read This in the News” or the obsessed woman in Pittsburgh spying on her lover and masseur in “Shangri-La.” An elderly woman living in late 21st-century New Zealand who was raised in 1990s China by parents who met at the Tiananmen Square protests thinks back on childhood visits to her grandpa’s village in “Scenes from Childhood.” A couple in the middle of a divorce in “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” ends up on vacation together in Morocco. In the title entry, Beijing technicians form a bond over sense memories collected and stored in cyberspace sometime in the future. Lin evokes her characters’ abstract thoughts and feelings with simple, matter-of-fact writing, as when the protagonist of “Shangri-La” remains silent years later about her affair with the masseuse, fearful of “how her memory might change if she tried to put it into words.” Each of these stories conveys an indelible emotional truth. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rowell (Slow Dance) delivers a big-hearted if imperfect second-chance love story. Recently separated from Tom, her husband of eight years in Omaha, Neb., Cherry feels a spark when she runs into her college crush, Russ. Unlike back then, this time the attraction is mutual, and the two strike up a fast-moving romance. Though she appears to cheerfully accept being fat (“She could say it out loud. She didn’t hide from it”), Cherry suffers from persistent self-doubts, especially as she embarks on this new relationship. Meanwhile, Tom has been in Los Angeles helping produce a feature film based on his webcomic about a Cherry lookalike named Baby. When Tom returns to Omaha to pack up his things, Cherry’s forced to confront her lingering heartbreak. Rowell punctuates her appealing conversational style with parenthetical asides on such subjects as Cherry’s favorite Midwestern foods, while also thoughtfully exploring internalized fatphobia and the notion of self-acceptance in the age of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Unfortunately, the characters’ emotions and motivations remain unclear, especially Russ’s, and a late flashback that finally explains the circumstances of Cherry and Tom’s breakup feels both confusing and anticlimactic. This is a mixed bag. Agent: Christopher Schelling, Selectric Artists. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Colombian author Abad follows The Farm with a mesmerizing chronicle of Luis Cordóba, an opera-loving priest and film critic, based loosely on the life of Luis Alberto Alvarez (1945–1996). After spending Christmas and ringing in the new year of 1996 in a hospital’s cardiology ward, Luis, 50, is expressly forbidden by his doctor from climbing stairs while he awaits a heart transplant. This means he won’t be able to live in the Medellin house he’s shared for the past 20 years with his fellow priest and best friend, Aurelio “Lelo” Sánchez, who narrates the novel. As a result, Luis moves in with their mutual friend Teresa. While awaiting his transplant, he watches movies, listens to opera, organizes a weekly gastronomy club, and teaches and entertains Teresa’s children. Abad offers a remarkable depiction of the harmony sustained in the priests’ secular interests and spiritual devotion. In his narration, Lelo flits seamlessly from references to film, literature, and music to frank accounts of the hypocrisy and sexual abuse he witnessed and experienced at his first seminary, which drove him to the seminary where he met and befriended Luis. Most moving is Lelo’s affection for Luis, as when he describes how Luis’s passion for a Pasolini film starring Maria Callas caused Teresa to fall in love with opera. The novel builds to a poignant conclusion, as Luis says before his operation: “Life is the possibility of being near others, with love.” It’s an immersive and affecting tale. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Djabbarova debuts with a potent portrait of illness and gender oppression in contemporary Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. Growing up in Russia in an Azerbaijan household, the unnamed narrator begins seeing doctors at an early age for a mysterious debilitating illness that is eventually diagnosed as generalized dystonia, a movement disorder that was initially thought to be multiple sclerosis. As a young woman, the condition relegates her to spinsterhood, which she considers a mixed blessing, as it points her toward a life devoted to literature. With each chapter titled after a specific body part, she conveys the various ways that she and the other women in her life are sequestered from society. For example, in “Tongue,” she reflects on how women “held back the most important, large, brave, lavish, and truthful words” when speaking to men, and how her outsider status as Azeri isolates her even further at school, where others speak Russian. In “Hair,” she describes her maternal and paternal grandmothers shaving their hair while terminally ill in Georgia and Azerbaijan, respectively. The novel ends with a tender depiction of the narrator’s birth, showing her mother stoically enduring the pain of a difficult delivery. This passionate and lyrical work packs a stinging punch. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Author duo Kelly and Thorne follow My Fair Frauds with an immersive tale of a journalist investigating the death, 40 years earlier, of a young cast member on an SNL-like comedy show. Madeline Cohen, a Rolling Stone writer and failed comedian, is certain an article about Lillian Martin’s death and the misogynistic culture surrounding The Midnight Show in the 1980s will win her a cover story. She interviews early players on TMS such as Lillian’s close friend Gina Ross and likable rising star Bobby Everett, who dated Lillian. Madeline also talks to cutthroat head writer Sally Schumacher and the show’s dictatorial creator and producer, Aaron Adler. Stories differ about what happened in the hours after Lillian’s final broadcast, and whether she died by suicide, accident, or something more sinister. Told through interviews, emails, articles, and Madeline’s notes, the novel assembles contradicting views of Lillian and her rise to fame, during which she competed for airtime with the other two women in the cast, and the story offers both an engrossing mystery and a convincing depiction of the challenges faced by women in show business in the 1980s. Fans of Daisy Jones and the Six should take a look. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink