A real estate feud drives this riveting novel from Hua (Forbidden City). Jin Chang moves his family into an exclusive Bay Area enclave with plans to flip their new house. He immediately butts heads with his busybody neighbor, Blair Belle, a tech worker whose company makes a camera called an Orb, which she uses to monitor her home and surveil the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Blair’s husband has begun to build a nearby complex called Bellavista, to include affordable housing, which would help single mother Minerva Washington keep her teen daughter, Tasha, in the neighborhood’s coveted school district. When Jin’s spirited 15-year-old daughter, Jane, rescues Tasha from a coyote attack, the two become close friends. Unbeknownst to the Belles, Jin is behind an anti-Bellavista campaign, which causes further tensions between Blair and a rival she assumes is orchestrating it. Jane winds up in her own conflict with the Belles’ Princeton-bound daughter, Quinn, after Quinn catches Jane reading her diary, and the plot’s many strands come to a head during a party Quinn throws at the Changs’ house while they’re away. Hua’s spectacular character work offers complex and surprising views into the many players’ motivations. Readers will find much to love in this multilayered page-turner. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

This introspective and wide-ranging story collection from Caldwell (These Days) is peopled with unsettled characters. In “All Grown Up,” a divorced father returns to Northern Ireland to clear out his mother’s house after her death, has an unexpected tryst, and tries to understand what happened to his marriage. In “The Lady of the House,” a young aspiring actor, feeling unmoored, visits her sister’s new home in Scotland, where she’s haunted by a malevolent presence. Caldwell, also a playwright, shines in stories about performance, such as “Little Lands,” a close reading of the Ländler scene in The Sound of Music; “Harmony Hill,” about a musician traveling from North Carolina to Dublin with her 17th-century Peter Guarnerius violin; and the collection’s standout, “Hamlet, a Love Story.” That one centers on the players in an “edgy, choose-your-own-adventure-style production of Hamlet,” in which the prince controls the action after Act I. The narrator is the widow of the production’s original Hamlet, and the story masterfully explores the play itself, grief, and the protagonist’s feeling of “drifting—carried along in other people’s slipstreams.” There’s much to admire in these nuanced stories. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy (after Crook Manifesto) with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. In 1981, furniture dealer and semiretired fence Ray Carney, now an empty nester, helps move a hot sapphire necklace, telling himself he’s taking the risk for his wife, a travel agent trying to put out her own shingle. Soon, though, he gets in deeper than he’d bargained for, joining a crew for an ambitious heist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He compares his evolution as a criminal to the “churn” of the ever-changing metropolis, where transplants to the city outnumber those who left for the suburbs. Two years later, Carney’s old friend and associate Pepper faces a reckoning of his own. Getting on in years and stumbling after a botched job, Pepper commits to recovering a precious African mask from an unscrupulous downtown art dealer despite feeling left behind by the city, where “maybe the game had changed, too.” The saga concludes in 1986, when Carney weighs how much to help a nephew in danger. The heists, stakeouts, and showdowns are rendered with grit and precision, but the real wallops come in breathtaking riffs on the city’s magnetic force, for instance when Carney, remembering the 1981 film Escape from New York, recognizes that leaving town would be like “going on the lam from yourself.” It’s the greatest New York novel in years. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (July)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this delightfully droll debut from Fabriczki, a quirky mother and daughter find their footing in Los Angeles as the latter gradually learns the truth of their origins. When Sonia drops her daughter Mila off for her first day of elementary school in 1996, she instructs her in what to say: “We live about a five minutes’ drive away, your mother works at an office, and you’re not Russian.” Sonia, who buys American goods for resale in Eastern Europe, rarely discusses her early life. Despite their closeness, Mila knows nothing of her mother’s upbringing or her father’s identity. Five years later, Mila finds out her mother regularly emails a man named Anthony, and she hatches a scheme to meet him during a fifth grade band trip to San Francisco. She has no idea that her mom’s history with Anthony started when 18-year-old Sonia, then Szonja, flew from her native Hungary to California to spend the summer with her married sister, Rina. Szonja and her sister have little in common, and, feeling like a scolded child in her home, Szonja pulls away. The charm here is in Fabriczki’s character work, which takes on increasing depth as she alternates between 2001 and chapters focused on Szonja in 1989, slowly revealing what led to Sonia’s life as a single mother. This sharp-witted immigrant story is full of surprises. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger, UTA. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Benedict (Wolf Season) unspools a harrowing story of an Iraqi refugee family’s attempts to fit into American society. During the Iraq War, Khalil served as an interpreter for the U.S. military, until he was killed in a car bombing, presumably by insurgents. His wife, Naema, who narrates, was left scarred, and their three-year-old son, Tariq, lost his leg. Staff Sgt. Jimmy Donnell, who worked with Khalil, arranges for the pair and Khalil’s mother, Hibah, to escape, and eventually puts them up in his home near Albany, N.Y., with his wife, Kate. Immediately, things start going awry for the family, as Naema is unable to find a job even though she was a pediatrician in Iraq, and Kate leaves the country for reasons that are explained later. Meanwhile, Jimmy suffers from PTSD triggered by his memories of combat, and pines for Kate, which alarms Naema, who feels she can’t quite trust him and wants to find an apartment for her family despite having little money. Benedict effectively chronicles the struggles of a family displaced by war and a refugee’s desire to provide for her family (“It does not seem so very much to ask from the country that destroyed my own,” Naema reflects). This chilling tale will stay with readers. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Korn (The Shutouts) channels the angst of the early 2000s indie music scene in this effective appeal to millennial nostalgia. Susan is 17, cool but not popular at her Long Island high school in 2005, and unsure if she likes boys. She breaks up with her boyfriend, Kyle, and is soon drawn to his new girlfriend, Eliza, whom she meets in a packed car on the way to a rock show. Their night is cut short when Susan reveals that she recognizes Eliza from a nude photo the boys in their school have been sharing with each other online (“You saw my tits and now you think you know me,” Eliza says, causing Susan to feel a mix of shame and desire). Five years later, after graduating from college, she’s living at home and working for an indie record label in Brooklyn. She’s also come out of the closet, but her attachment to Eliza keeps her from pursuing a meaningful relationship. By 2015, having moved to the city, she’s become “addicted to dating apps” and matches with Eliza. When they reunite, their spark is electric, but Eliza shies away, and the rejection makes Susan feel like a teenager again. The story is tender without being sentimental, and mordant without trivializing Eliza’s teen trauma. It’s a clear-eyed gaze into the messiness of youth. Agent: Nicki Richesin, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Black stranger arrives in a mostly white Upper Midwest suburb during a contentious election in this beguiling and immersive debut novel from Verrone. Calling herself Baby, the stranger claims she’s the niece of Eugene Fox, an aging white man and former city council member in Original Hill, a small city overlooking the Mississippi River in the shadow of an unnamed metropolis that resembles the Twin Cities. Eugene lost his seat to a 30-something Black outsider named Lucky Foote in the previous election, and he’s desperate to reclaim it. As the mysterious and increasingly magical story unfolds, Verrone teases out the connection between Baby’s arrival and Eugene’s ambition. Meanwhile, Lucky becomes enamored with Baby, forgoing his womanizing ways to spend as much time with her as he can. As Eugene’s and Lucky’s campaigns wear on, Lucky grows increasingly obsessed with Baby, neglecting civic duties and ignoring the petitions of outsiders advocating for the restoration of Sankofa, a former Black neighborhood that once bordered Original Hill before it was bulldozed to construct a highway. Verrone grounds the story with references to the very real history of Black Americans’ displacement in Minnesota and develops Baby’s character with fascinating bits of folklore and magical realism. There’s a lot to enjoy in this ambitious tale. Agent: Alyssa Jennette, Stonesong. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Szpila’s wild ecofeminist debut centers on bipolar antiheroine Anna Frenza, CEO of Poland’s national oil company. Brash and abusive, Frenza rails against what she views as empty rhetoric from environmental activists who “claim to be the saviors of the planet but would, in reality, do pretty much anything for a Hass avocado and an almond milk latte.” Ironically, Frenza is revealed to be a tree hugger of a different kind when she’s caught on camera having sex with a tree while sleepwalking and loses her job. The incident gives way to a whopping tale of time travel through medieval Poland where, in the 17th century, the Earthen Ones, a tribe of nature-worshipping women, are led by Mathilde Spalt. The Earthen Ones have renounced conventional life to live in the forest and have carnal knowledge of plants—their lovers are trees, moss, twigs, and branches. Most fascinating is the latter part of the novel, in which Frenza, back in the present, is in a mental institution populated with modern-day Earthen Ones. Driving the bizarre material are intriguing ideas on gender, climate change, and religion. There’s an arresting quality to this strange tale. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Faison’s assured debut explores the ripple effect of a couple’s decision to open their marriage. Frances and Ben, together since college, never considered such a thing. But after the sudden death of 30-year-old Frances’s mother, Frances is left longing for a way to break through her emotional numbness. A flirtatious exchange with Lily, the couple’s server at a restaurant, leads to an intensely pleasurable night for all three—but it’s February 2020, and a global pandemic puts any further plans with Lily on hold. A couple of years later, as the world opens back up, Frances and Ben resume exploring the boundaries of their relationship, adapting to each other’s changing desires. Meanwhile, their friends and family are alternately perplexed, intrigued, and titillated by their experimenting. The novel’s structure—which shifts back and forth from the happy early years of Ben and Frances’s marriage to the couple’s expanded life with people they’ve dated, including Lily—is largely successful, though some of the flashbacks feel disconnected, particularly those centered on Frances’s mother and grandmother. Still, Faison cleverly mirrors the phases of the couple’s open relationship with shifts in tone, moving from sexy and exciting to increased emotional intensity and vulnerability. Readers will find it an intimate and insightful story of modern romance. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A middle-aged woman adjusts to being a grandmother and caretaker for her own mother in the wake of her father’s death, in the poignant English-language debut from Michelsen. Reflecting on the “subconscious sense of completion” she feels as a grandmother, the narrator also notices a “fleeting thought of nascent dismantling. Like with scaffolding when a building is finished.” She dotes on her grandson and spends considerable time supporting her elderly mother, whose mind and body are progressively deteriorating. The novel unfolds primarily as a series of vivid images that contain the narrator’s wistful memories and recognition of the passage of time, as when she observes the beauty of a worn staircase (“Life has cascaded down the steps and moulded its current form”). The narrator tries to cherish her remaining moments with her mother, but she senses that “the past is ready to pounce” with less sunny memories, and attempts to steel herself (“Just pretend! Just do what all women have done through the ages! Pretend!”). As her mother’s dementia progresses, she realizes that she has become the “mother to my mother.” There is a lovely economy to Michelsen’s writing, which allows the lyrical impressions to resonate. It’s a spare yet powerful meditation on mortality. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink