In the poetic English-language debut from Pihelgas, heroine Liine returns to her family farm to start over after ending an abusive relationship with Tarmo, whom she met 14 years earlier when he was her university professor. Back in rural Tsoriksoo from the city of Tartu, sometime in the near future with temperatures rising, she throws herself into improving the farmstead. She also becomes captivated by letters exchanged between her spinster great-aunt Elvi and a woman named Selma, who was the farm’s original proprietor, and who invited Elvi to live there with her before bequeathing the farm to her. The letters inspire Liine to imagine an alternative lifestyle for herself, especially as Tarmo pressures her to come back to him. Liine’s peace is intermittently disrupted by gunfire and explosions from nearby military training exercises, and she feels unsettled and vulnerable in the rural setting (“I need to run away from myself,” she reflects, recognizing that “being in the countryside turns you a little strange,” especially with the stultifying heat and unrelenting sun). As Liine yearns for independence, Pihelgas artfully traces her slow recovery from the bad relationship (“I breathe deeply, like a person who wants to be alive and dead at the same time, like someone who’s forgotten how to breathe and is now learning it again”). This one has much to savor. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A 20-something Korean American woman chafes at her immigrant parents’ expectations in this emotive and incisive debut novel. In 2002, third-year law student Jane Kim faces an existential crisis. Growing up in Napa, Calif., where her rage-prone father ran a string of businesses, Jane’s mother, a mink-wearing woman obsessed with Korean beauty rituals, subjected her to “unhinged bullying, the kind that made me numb, unable to think straight,” causing her to follow a career path she’d never desired for herself. Jane and her brother, Kevin, once excelled at tennis and piano, but when Kevin’s grades declined in high school, their father smashed his tennis rackets as punishment. Now a San Jose police officer, Kevin’s own anger gets the better of him, and he savagely beats a homeless man, undermining his successful career. When Jane announces that instead of taking the bar exam, she’s moving across the country to study Korean American history, the news is too much for her mother, who holds a “grieving party” to mark her departure. Lee’s character work is top notch, especially as she shows how each family member struggles with the Korean notion of han, an amalgamation of anger, grief, and regret over one’s decisions. It’s a remarkable achievement. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Strung together via dream logic, this startling experimental novel from Tse (Owlish) forays into a bizarre Hong Kong vanishing around its inhabitants. The unnamed narrator, now a young man, recounts his childhood when the world was whole and he lived with his parents, who fantasized about winning the lottery, and a younger sister whom everyone seemed to forget about. Things changed after his mother joined forces with other housewives to protest a local market’s shoddy produce, and police sprayed the women with a glitter powder that turned them into statues. Then his sister vanished out a bus window, only to return to him as a disembodied voice, and his father, who once worked at a toy factory and practiced tai chi in the park, became a couch potato, to the point of being absorbed into the home’s gigantic television set. Now, neighborhood vendors disappear around him, sidewalks turn to desert, and government checkpoints prevent easy travel. Tse risks incoherence with non sequiturs and ghastly images cramming each page, including an “island-shaped tumor” floating around the protagonist’s body, but a climactic twist ties it all together. For those willing to let these images wash over them, the novel offers a rewarding exploration of change and loss. Agent: Jessica Friedman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

At the beginning of this sensual and provocative novel by Mauritian writer Devi (Eye Out of Her Ruins), the unnamed but unforgettable narrator announces she’s about to livestream her own “sacrifice.” Exactly what this means is only revealed near the end. First, the narrator, who, at 16, weighs more than 400 pounds, flashes back to her gestation in her mother’s womb, claiming that she consumed her twin sister before her birth. Overwhelmed by the baby’s exceptional size (her birth weight was 22 pounds and eight ounces), the mother struggles to keep up with breastfeeding and abandons her not long after weaning. The narrator is then raised by her father, a food writer who slavishly indulges her with delicious meals. Her father also insists on addressing her as if she were two people, herself and her “disappeared twin,” claiming he has “two beautiful daughters.” She “play[s] along, even though it was no game,” and wryly observes that she “didn’t know that schizophrenia could be forced upon us.” Many painful scenes ensue, including a brief and heartbreaking reunion with her mother. After the narrator turns 16, she supplements her “morbid” and “orgasmic” eating with a life-affirming indulgence: a sexual relationship with a 30-something carpenter who seems to love her for who she is. From here, the narrative hurtles through a series of striking twists, driven in part by the pesky inner voice of the narrator’s twin sister. An epigraph from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer sets the carnal and gleefully filthy tone, and Devi never lets up. The reader won’t be able to look away from this singular work. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This three-part saga of the Apache Wars and the long shadow of imperialism constitutes a major work of historical reclamation from Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires). It begins in 1836 in border hamlet Janos, where widow Camila Ezguerra is kidnapped from her ranch. On their trail is Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga, who’s made a name for himself killing Apaches for the “fledgling republic of Mexico,” along with a motley crew of conscripts. Enrigue alternates from their expedition to the 1886 surrender of Geronimo and its aftermath, with chapters from historical figures like President Grover Cleveland, frustrated that Geronimo wasn’t caught before (“Our army is the biggest in the world,” he tells his secretary of war) and Geronimo’s revolutionary heir, Pancho Villa, who, in 1916, describes how he learned battlefield strategies from the elder’s spirt. Threaded throughout is the author’s record of a road trip he takes with his family in present-day America, stopping at such landmarks as Geronimo’s tomb in Oklahoma, and hoping along the way to rediscover the history behind the genocide of the Americas. “Westerns,” Enrigue writes in this urgent and painstakingly researched narrative, “are the fairy tales gringos tell themselves to assure the triumph of bureaucratic reason over the excesses of individual will.” It’s an eloquent rejoinder to the mythos that made two countries while erasing the lives of their original inhabitants. Agent: Ria Julien, Francis Goldin Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A stranger comes to town and gives purpose to a struggling young woman in this winning historical from Matchar (In the Shadow of the Greenbrier). In 1930s North Carolina, Millie Green has a mental breakdown while her younger brother dies from cancer. Three years later, still grieving and ashamed, the 25-year-old is living at home in the Jewish community of New Bern, where her mother tries to marry her off to a series of undesirable suitors. One day she discovers a girl lying bruised and dazed behind the Greens’ pickle warehouse. The family take in the young woman, who appears to be mute and unfamiliar with English. Millie tries to communicate with the girl, who eventually tells Millie she is Cecilia Aiken, a runaway from an institution that forcibly sterilizes young women deemed mentally or morally unfit. Cecilia begs Millie for help freeing her sister from the institution, and Millie, moved by Cecilia’s story, agrees to try. Though the ending is a bit too neatly redemptive, Matchar offers a clear-eyed view into the period’s poverty, misogyny, and injustice, along with a stirring depiction of resilience on the part of those “the world considers crazy or bad or broken.” There’s much to admire in this feisty tale. Agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary Management. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lemann takes readers back to the world of her 1985 cult classic Lives of the Saints with an easygoing and lovely, if inconsistent novel of late middle-age. Delery Anhalt, a native New Orleanian, lives now in Washington, D.C., with her family, but is regularly drawn back home. In New Orleans, she tends to her father, now marred to Delery’s close friend Amelia, and reflects on his aging as well as her own. Heartbroken after she’s blindsided by a betrayal, Delery comes to view herself as an innocent Don Quixote type, one who “embroider[s] everything into vast ideals.” While beautiful and deeply felt in their individual ways, the separate sections of Lemann’s novel don’t quite add up to a whole—the final section, set on an African safari with Delery’s children and husband, feels tacked on to a more cohesive work centered on New Orleans, including Delery’s present-day volunteer work there as a court-watcher in the backlogged criminal justice system. Despite the scattered structure, the novel offers an indelible ode to the struggling but vital city (“Things were different since Katrina. The scrappy quality. The gentility’s still there, but its veneer chipped. Its shabbiness increased”). It’s well worth taking the plunge. Agent: Kristi Murray, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Han blends folklore and magical realism with Korean history in her remarkable debut, a family saga spanning the 20th century. It begins with Myoung-Ok, married to “mountain giant” Dahn, giving birth to twins Geum-Ja and Geum-Jin in 1902. At 13, Geum-Ja disappears into the forest, returning occasionally in the form of a tiger to unsuccessfully urge her brother to join her in the safety of the mountains, away from the occupying Japanese army. After Dahn is shot in the arm by a soldier, he begins having violent outbursts. Desperate to save their son from Dahn’s rage, Myoung-Ok kills him. In 1920, Geum-Jin marries Jung-Soon, the daughter of a rich merchant, who possesses a magical power to extract the truth from others, which she uses on Japanese soldiers to help the resistance. Eventually, they’re discovered, and everyone in the family is killed except for Geum-Jin and Jung-Soon’s daughter, Young-Ja, despite Geum-Ja’s best effort to defend them as a tiger. As a young woman in 1941, Young-Ja is forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese. Later sections follow Young-Ja’s son and granddaughter, the latter of whom encourages Young-Ja to share her story before the novel reaches its poignant conclusion. Han brilliantly immerses readers in her birth country’s history and offers a testament to women’s strength in the face of brutality. It’s a knockout. Agent: Heather Carr, Friedrich Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

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