When film director Agnès Septembre learns her aunt Colette has just died, the news comes as a surprise, as Agnès was previously told Colette had died three years ago. Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers) intertwines multiple story lines surrounding the ensuing mystery in this entrancing drama. Agnès finds a suitcase of audio cassette tapes recorded by Colette among her belongings, which, as the reader eventually discovers, hold the answers to Agnès’s questions about why Colette faked her death and who was buried in her place. Listening to them, Agnès learns about a former circus performer named Blanche, who finds refuge from her abusive father, Soudoro, in Colette’s home, unbeknownst to anyone in Colette’s family. She also gets the story of Colette’s difficult upbringing by an ignorant, cruel mother, her career as a shoe mender, and her devotion to her piano prodigy brother, Jean. The plot ramps up when Soudoro, released from prison for beating Blanche’s mother, becomes fixated on Agnès. The epic saga satisfies despite an over-the-top final twist, and Perrin juggles the myriad plotlines with élan while maintaining suspense. It’s a gripping story about the power of friendship as a safe harbor from abusive families. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Eggers (The Every) unfurls a decades-spanning story of love and art. At 15, Cricket Dibb begins commuting from his home in 1980s Indiana to a drawing class in Chicago, believing it’s time to take his work seriously if he ever wants to become a real artist. His talent attracts the attention of classmate Olympia Argyros, a fearless girl one year older, who encourages him to exhibit his nude life drawings at his school library. Cricket falls in love with Olympia, but she’s restless and fickle. Meanwhile, he finds solace in his friendship with Jed, his coworker at a convenience store, after his drawings are banned from the library. Later, ROTC graduate Jed gets deployed to Kuwait during the Gulf War and dies in a freak accident, inspiring Olympia to curate an installation in his honor. Olympia flits in and out of Cricket’s life, stoking his erotic and emotional devotion (“She’d always felt free to touch any part of him at any time, and he did not mind”). As Cricket reaches middle age, he has melancholy but sanguine epiphanies about a life dedicated to art and his enduring passion for Olympia (“Every year Cricket felt more—of everything—and every year his eyes had only gotten better, younger, his aperture opening, opening, opening”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Joella (A Little Hope) spins an overly sentimental tale of a young man dying of leukemia and his sister’s attempt to process his death. After high school graduate Chip Bishop’s diagnosis in 1974, he disappears for much of the summer to a Poconos mountain resort called the Red Maple Inn, leaving his sister Maggie and parents without a clue as to where’s he’s gone, and not telling them much upon his return, shortly after which he dies. In the Poconos, he finds purpose and comfort, charming the resort owner and her young staff, comforting a staffer tormented by flashbacks of combat in Vietnam, and pitching in on odd jobs. A year later, Maggie visits the Red Maple Inn and gets to know the people who were with Chip during the last months of his life, among them activities director Nancy, who sings his praises (“He showed up at this place like a, I don’t know, a firecracker”). As the picture of Chip’s life there slowly develops, Joella throws in incidents involving a baby, a bear, and an alpine romance, but there’s not much depth, and the eventual revelation of a love triangle feels underdeveloped. Even Chip’s death doesn’t make much of an impact on the page. This has the cloying ring of a schmaltzy ’70s soft rock tune. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A trans telehealth worker’s safety comes under threat just as they’ve found happiness with their partner in the brilliant debut novel from Thomas (Manywhere: Stories). Ro and their partner, Liam, live in a remote cabin in rural Florida, where Liam toils as a translator and Ro serves as a patient navigator for the Southern Trans Care Access Taskforce. The pair also offer shelter to a trans teen named Quentin before he starts college in Missouri. Recently diagnosed with autism, Ro occasionally loses the ability to speak and communicates instead through ASL. They become fascinated with an anonymously published fantasy story titled “Mad Eden,” which is sourced from words used in a scholarly article on autism. Ro and Liam struggle financially, but they’re happy together (“Wring our bodies, and the joy would drip from us like dirty water,” Ro narrates). Things take a turn when video from Ro’s appointment with a woman who claimed to be seeking gender-affirming care for her trans child turns up in an anti-trans newsletter. Further complicating matters, Ro learns that Quentin, now enrolled in Missouri, needs their help. Lacing traditional narrative elements with snippets of social media posts, emails, and chapters from “Mad Eden,” Thomas’s gorgeously constructed story explores difficulties of love, as Ro, a refreshingly complex protagonist, weighs their idyllic bliss with Liam against their desire to help those in need. This luminous novel is impossible to forget. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historical novelist Morris (The Tattooist of Auschwitz) turns to contemporary fiction with an affecting if hackneyed story of a dying teen’s last wish. Jesse, 15, is in and out of the hospital with terminal leukemia. Alex, about to turn 30, is a brilliant but socially awkward coder working at a CGI studio, who lives alone except for his dog. When Jesse makes a wish through a foundation for an immersive 3-D film of her life to leave for her family after she’s gone, Alex’s company takes on the project. Working together, Alex and Jesse incorporate drawings by her younger brother, her mother’s poetry, photos of the family at their favorite picnic spot on the beach, and staged scenes featuring Jesse to surprise her family. Meanwhile, the strain of Jesse’s illness has torn her parents’ marriage apart, and her father treats Alex with contempt and hostility. What’s more, Alex’s boss wants to turn Jesse’s wish into a publicity stunt, which nearly drives Alex to quit. Though Morris avoids the maudlin by sustaining an upbeat tone, the plot veers into cliché, as when Alex finds himself falling in love with a blue-eyed social worker at the hospital. It’s a mixed bag. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

For Barbara Foerster , the 58-year-old Brooklynite who narrates Lavery’s wry and empathetic latest (after Christmas at the Women’s Hotel), having a best friend is one of the most important things in the world. Another important thing for Barbara, who works at a gourmet food market, is cooking. So it’s a double blow when she prepares a special dinner for her best friend, Susan Montgomery, only for Susan to confront her with a long list of her faults. (Barbara doesn’t share them with the reader, but she explains that “after a certain point, I told her that I got the idea.”) Barbara then sets out to find a replacement friend, someone who is “a champion of her own happiness, and peacefully minded, but who can still have fun being a little bitchy.” It turns out, however, that Barbara has issues in her other relationships—things are rocky with her son, for example, after she said she didn’t want her young granddaughter around her antique furniture. As Barbara contends with her antisocial habits, she realizes she might have to widen her circle, and she attends an Episcopalian church. Barbara is an endlessly companionable narrator, especially in her moments of self-awareness (“divorced women, as a rule, have totally lost whatever interest in behaving reasonably they ever had in the first place”). Thanks to Lavery’s sharp-tongued heroine, this one leaves a mark. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mexican author and scholar Eudave makes her English-language debut with a mysterious and fantastical novella set in 1977 Guadalajara, an “unusual year” when the “world fell apart, or would soon fall apart,” amid punishing weather, nuclear anxiety, Pinochet’s military coup, the death of Elvis, the Son of Sam, and other portents. It begins with a young girl named Maricarmen, who visits a parish fair with her father and sister and becomes obsessed with a freak show exhibit of a “serpent girl” kept in a glass box by a fortune teller. Before Maricarmen leaves the fair, she witnesses the serpent girl being raped by her keeper. In the chapters that follow, Maricarmen and her neighbors are gripped by a series of disturbing encounters, sometimes involving animals or ghosts. There’s the boy who watches a man routinely hang his dog from a tree in a precise and scientific manner, the girl whose pet boa constrictor patiently endures its doting owner while considering whether to make a break for the jungle, and the ghost who visits the children’s bedsides to tell them stories. Eventually, the various threads converge into a satisfying and thought-provoking finale. Readers will be grateful for the introduction to this distinctive writer. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

The writer protagonists of these stimulating metafictional stories from Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being) long for connection and creative fulfillment. The title entry, framed as an author’s note, concerns a short story called “The Typing Lady,” written by a woman who caught the attention of the narrator at a library. The protagonist of this story within the story, also a writer, collects old typewriters in a quest to reconnect with her late mother, a poet who clacked out her work on a Remington. “Ships in the Night” traces aspiring romance author Cayenne’s vagabond life with her teen daughter, Baby, and Cayenne’s benevolent drug-dealing boyfriend, Guy. Much of the story takes place in Vancouver, where Guy protects Baby from a predatory man, while Baby longs for stability. In the hilarious “Dead Beat Poet,” a young woman named Caitlin puts her dream of becoming a poet on the back burner while working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. During an editorial meeting, Caitlin is suddenly possessed by the ghost of a poet who claims he was friends with Allen Ginsberg and tells her the publisher should focus on poetry, causing Caitlin to blurt out “more poems!” In Ozeki’s sure hands, the story channels the ghost’s dated braggadocio into a timely rant against corporate workplace woes, as when he calls Caitlin’s boss a “one-eyed shrew who does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.” Ozeki’s atmospheric tales radiate with intelligence and wit. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

New mothers possess superhuman abilities and sustainable electricity wards off the climate crisis in this clever blend of fantasy and speculative fiction from Tsao (The Majesties), set in an alternate version of Sydney. Despite these seeming advances, protagonist Vivi has been left behind. Plagued by postpartum fatigue, she lacks the powers gained by other mothers in the final stage of labor, called “rebirth,” during which they give birth to their “fetal mother.” The fetal mother then quickly grows to the mother’s size and cannibalizes her, and this new version of the mother holds preternatural strength, energy, and maternal instincts. Vivi was cannibalized but ineffectively, and she’s been diagnosed with “malabsorption.” After her husband gives her a cruel ultimatum—divorce or induced labor, to repeat the rebirth—she leaves him. Vivi, who is ethnically Chinese and immigrated to Australia from her native Indonesia with her family, seeks refuge with her uncle, who helps her train as an electrician, and she becomes a “hobbler,” providing power to those who can’t afford to convert their homes for service by the new grid. There’s a lot going on here, and while the narrative feels cluttered, Tsao cannily uses the fantastical elements to explore a new mother’s anxieties about measuring up to other mothers. It’s worth a look. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A literature scholar turned private investigator takes on a strange case related to the late Alice B. Toklas in this clever debut novel from poet Bussey-Chamberlain (Grief Is the Thing in Pleather). The unnamed narrator has recently left academia and London behind and set up shop in present-day Brighton. She receives a call from a mysterious man who claims that Toklas, partner of modernist writer Gertrude Stein, had a horn growing from her forehead, which she hid behind hats. For reasons that come out later, he desperately wants the narrator to track down the horn. She agrees because she needs the money, but she’s not convinced by the rumor, which she takes for “cruel lesbian gossip.” She also feels some kinship with Toklas, who survived Stein by 21 years, given that her partner, May, has recently died. Still, she investigates in earnest, traveling to the British Library to view Toklas’s archives and stopping into Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where a bookseller insists Toklas was merely hiding a cyst. Throughout, the narrator offers thoughtful meditations on grief (“No one will ask me if my grief can be contained to paid leave”), which are leavened with droll humor about the futile and misguided work of academia. There’s much to admire in this well-paced queer detective novel. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink