Two gallerists battle over the right to represent an aging painter in this uneven novel from Cahill (Tiepolo Blue). Lorna Bedford, a New York City art dealer, was once close friends with famous painter Thomas Haller. She represented Haller during his early career and helped lead him to success. Now, however, Haller is working with Claude Berlins, a new dealer in Europe. Meanwhile, billionaire real estate developer and arts patron Leo Goffman wants to buy Haller’s new work but despises Berlins and would prefer to work with Lorna. Over the course of several twists and turns, Lorna seeks one last payout from Thomas, via Leo. It’s an affecting tale of the friends’ tangled bonds in a fickle industry, but the novel falters under the weight of its myriad subplots: a young man falls to his death, Goffman hits a woman with his car, a love child is given up for adoption. Still, Cahill writes beautifully of Haller’s work and creative process, as in the description of two abstract paintings that appear side by side as “an expanse of luminous pink, the brushstrokes destabilised in places by the action of a spray can and splashed solvents,” which turn out to be fragments from film stills. This is worth a look. Agent: Isobel Dixon, Blake Freidman. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A strange widow arrives from the U.S. to Bäck, a remote coastal village in 1930 Sweden, in this magnificent 1964 novel from Trotzig (1929–2011), her English-language debut. The locals know little about Lydia, but the reader gathers she had married into the Lindgren family. Their ancestral farm is now run by 50-something Judit, known as the Queen for her imperious demeanor, and her younger brother Albert, a taciturn virgin. Their youngest sibling, Viktor, whom Judit cared for while their mother dealt with postpartum depression, left for America in 1920. Viktor met Lydia in New York City during the Depression, when they were both underemployed, and the pair became lovers, moving into a room together and sharing food. In the novel’s final sections, the reader learns the details of the couple’s brief marriage and Viktor’s death, and the story takes surprising and poetic turns over the course of Lydia’s time in Bäck, where she grows acquainted with Albert and Judit. Vogel’s translation masterfully renders Trotzig’s lush and lyrical descriptions of the rural Swedish landscape and Depression-era New York, the latter of which looks to Viktor like “the uncertain ocean of hunger and death.” Readers will be grateful for this introduction to a distinguished writer. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the dark and often funny debut novel from Stinson, a young woman comes to believe her stalker ex-boyfriend has followed her across the country. At a bar in Los Angeles, where she moved from Brooklyn two years earlier, Clarice sees a guy who might be her ex, P.T. As she watches this man confidently flirt with the bartender, Clarice grows infuriated, given that their breakup and his subsequent stalking, which caused her to get a restraining order that’s recently expired, left her with “the sexual prowess of unleavened bread.” In between twice-a-week therapy sessions, Clarice fixates on the possibility that P.T. has followed her across the country. She also recalls better times, such as when P.T. presented her with a four-leaf clover he’d found in Prospect Park; mulls over the nature of love (“Was I rewriting history to deny I ever loved him because of how it turned out?”); and reflects on the irony of how their roles reversed, remembering that when they were together, she was “desperate for him to want me.” Stinson raises the stakes as Clarice exhibits stalker tendencies of her own, even following the bartender for clues as to P.T.’s whereabouts. Shot through with acerbic wit, this is both unsettling and un-put-downable. Agent: Eloy Bleifuss Prados, Neon Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lin (The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu) spins a beguiling tale of a secret U.S. military program and its strange effects on a family of Chinese immigrants. The time period isn’t specified, but the story appears to take place sometime during the Cold War. Saul Keng Hsiu, 37, and his 33-year-old wife, Mei Lee, have fled a famine in China with only some gold, chrysanthemum seeds, a suitcase, and an old leather knapsack of belongings. They settle on a prairie in South Dakota, where government officials visit the couple’s farm and offer to buy an acre of land from them. Saul and Mei agree, and the Air Force builds a nuclear missile silo on the property as part of a mysterious plan that Saul later learns is called Project Methuselah. The project causes strange things to happen: volcanic ash falls from the sky, Mei discovers that she can practice augury, their young daughter Mara learns she can communicate with farm animals, and the chrysanthemums they grow turn out to be hardy aphrodisiacs. Gradually, the novel takes on more speculative dimensions, as Saul learns Project Methuselah is actually an experimental nuclear weapon deterrent developed with intelligence stolen from the Chinese. The story can be tough to follow, but it’s packed with intriguing fabulist turns. This offbeat tale will stay with readers. Agent: Lisa Queen, Queen Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Spanish writer Torres’s lyrical if unfocused English-language debut follows a 28-year-old writer navigating romantic turmoil and the loss of a parent. In 2019, Sara has recently relocated from London to Barcelona for a university lecturer position. Her girlfriend, D., plans to join her soon, but in the meantime, Sara takes up with a new lover, an actress referred to only as Girl. Between rendezvousing with Girl and teaching, Sara travels to Asturias to visit her mother, María Teresa, who has been battling cancer for a decade. After María Teresa dies, Sara declines to speak at the funeral, feeling unprepared and believing that “a mother’s funeral deserves silence. A thick and heavy silence that starts in the forehead and moves down, pressing against the eyelids and blocking the throat, like being drowned in oil.” D. then joins her in Barcelona, and Sara opts to cuts things off with Girl, yet she can’t shake her lingering feelings for her now ex-lover, even as time passes and the Covid-19 pandemic keeps Sara and D. cooped up in their apartment. The depictions of Sara’s unsettled love life can be wearying, though the passages on her grief are emotionally resonant. The plot never quite takes off, but portions of this emotive novel pack a punch. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Spufford (Cahokia Jazz) spins a lavish historical fantasy of a secretary and her lover battling time-traveling fascists on the eve of WWII. The story opens with daring Iris Hawkins enjoying a night out after a day of drudgery at her London financial firm. By chance, she meets brilliant engineer Geoff Hale, who’s besotted with gorgeous Nazi sympathizer Lady Lalage “Lall” Cunningham, and impulsively seduces him. After spending the night with Geoff, Iris sees a nightmarish inhuman figure keeping watch outside his house. She continues seeing Geoff, and the pair are visited by a friendly angel who warns them of a threat greater than Hitler: a cabal of British fascists including Lall are planning to use imprisoned angels, like the one Iris saw outside Geoff’s house, to go back in time and alter history for the worse. Spufford approaches the magical elements with lighthearted humor (“Oh, come on,” Geoff says to the angel. “No one has believed in the luminiferous aether since about, what, 1870! It doesn’t exist!” To which the angel replies, “I see that I have used terms you find anachronistic. Would you prefer it if I said that quantum tunneling was involved?”). As Iris enters a parallel world called Nonesuch to save London, Spufford sustains the tension all the way to the miraculous finale. Readers will be enthralled. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Booker Prize winner Burns (Milkman) uses the tropes of superheroes and supervillains to explore the complications of real human relationships in this playful novella. A 26-year-old woman known as the femme fatale is dating a man called the superhero; the two are in love, but a magic spell drives the femme fatale to try to kill the superhero, who’s afraid of getting close to people, partly because he suspects his family harbors dark secrets. It turns out the femme fatale’s “out-of-time, eccentric great aunt,” who lives by herself in a skyscraper with secret passages, is an accomplished villain, and the superhero has a dossier on her. She might also be the superhero’s grandmother. The great-aunt is gearing up for one last attempt to take over the world, putting her on a collision course with the superhero—but as near deaths, real deaths, and betrayals pile up, the femme fatale and the superhero must also contend with the state of their romance, having “escalated what should have been a simple, harmonious love relationship into some critical, extreme, ‘heroes and villains’, disaster-upon-disaster.” Burns zooms through the comic action scenes and slyly reveals what’s truly at stake: two people learning to see themselves and their problems as merely ordinary. It adds up to a charming metaphorical love story. Agent: David Grossman, David Grossman Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

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