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

Basara (The Cylicst Conspiracy) spins an invigorating if digressive tale of a Russian prophet and crank. Born in the late 19th century, Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson claims to have discovered a disease he calls Parkinson’s, which has nothing to do with the real-life neurological disorder previously discovered in England by another Parkinson. This Parkinson’s is symptomless, claims Demyan, who also heralds its “redemptive” qualities, arguing that it can purify nations and liberate people from worshipping at the “abhorrent shrines of godless health.” A Zelig-like figure who plays a central role in key moments of Russian and Soviet history, Demyan denies that a healthy mind can exist in a healthy body, seeing an obsession with fitness and medical treatments as indicative of moral, spiritual, and intellectual decline. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Nabokov contribute their own reflections on Demyan’s writings (the former bemoans the “boring, strained style” of Demyan’s novel). Basra stuffs a great deal of material into the fragmented narrative, including state archival documents, philosophical treatises, and ruminations on the history of walled cities. Though the novel tests the reader’s patience, Basara’s playful erudition impresses. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Colombian writer Ospina (Variations on the Body, a story collection) dismantles the illusion of man-made borders in her beautiful debut novel, which tracks the migrations of five animals. It begins with a dog named Kati, who’s left on the streets of Bogotá when her unhoused owner is arrested. She’s taken to a shelter, where she meets another dog, Mona, abandoned by her owner. Elsewhere, a scarlet tanager bird survives a near-fatal impact with a Manhattan skyscraper and flies south to Colombia, over migrant children corralled in a detention center in Florida, only to find his home in the mountains clear-cut and poisoned by pesticides. In other narrative threads, a newborn beetle is whisked from the countryside into a Bogotá apartment where she becomes lost amid the foreign steel and cement, and a woman gives up her pet porcupine. Later, Ospina circles back to Kati, who’s uprooted once again, this time to the countryside, where she eventually claims a new independence. Animated by a sense of wonder about animals’ inner lives in a landscape increasingly altered by humans, Ospina’s narrative hints at the radical possibilities of a future shaped by purposeful communion with nature. This is revelatory. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Garvin (Crow Talk) delivers a heart-wrenching yet uplifting story of an Oregon beekeeper who joins forces with a PhD student to save the local ecosystem and protect the area’s undocumented migrants and refugees. Jake Stevenson, paralyzed below his waist, tends to his honeybees on Mount Hood, where he provides shelter to Mexican teen Flaco Lopez, sent north by his mother to escape the violent cartels ravaging their hometown. Meanwhile, neurodiverse graduate student Abigail Plue has spent her entire life feeling inadequate, until a professor appoints her to research bumblebees in a lab. She’s then assigned to organize a field study in the Oregon woods to research endangered species. There, she meets Jake and Flaco, along with Christian firebrand E.W. Dewitt, who’s running for Hood River County sheriff as “the godly choice” and vowing to round up “illegals.” Dewitt also plans to build a hunting camp that would destroy the bees’ habitat. Abigail, Flaco, and Jake each rise to the occasion in satisfying ways, and Garvin gleefully spotlights the characters’ resilience (“We neurodiverse folk can teach you neurotypicals a thing or two,” Abigail’s professor declares). Readers will cheer on the heroes of this winning story. (Apr.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misattributed the quote about neurodiverse folk.

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Goldberg (Nothing Can Hurt You) pairs her 2016 novella with three short works in this impactful volume. Other Women follows an unnamed college dropout in New York City, who addresses her narration to an ex-lover. She runs through memories she shared with the unnamed man, such as hooking up after an art show and watching The X Files together. After she learns he’s engaged to another woman, the narrator takes a job as a nanny for two children and accompanies the family to Berlin. Even in a new city, however, she’s tormented by the feeling of being jilted. The fragmented narrative is carried along by things the narrator wished she’d said to her lover: “I wanted to say: Don’t fuck me like you love me if you don’t.” The other stories are “Paris 1979,” about two CIA agents surveilling an actress believed to be a Soviet spy; “All Girls,” which begins with the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl named Jenny and tracks rumors circulating at her school about what happened to her; and “The Virgin,” concerning college student Lydia, who has a bad sexual experience with a boy from her class. Each entry is told from an intimate point of view and showcases Goldberg’s pared-down prose. It’s a memorable gallery of women on the brink. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lowkis (Spitting Gold) serves up an enticing sapphic love story that takes place on a supposedly cursed English manor. In 1926, Vee Morgan hopes to make a new start after a mysterious event landed her parents in jail. She takes a job as a gardener at Harfold Manor, working for the reclusive Lady Arabella Lascy and her dastardly illegitimate brother, Morry Reacher. Lady Lascy has buried four brothers and believes her family is cursed, and that she is next. Vee doubts it, but when her cottage on the grounds is destroyed by rain, she moves into the main house and the pair begin an affair. Lowkis makes frequent allusions to Vee’s and Arabella’s past troubles, but doesn’t reveal the specifics until the final act, which will have readers reassessing their view of the characters. Lowkis effortlessly toggles between past and present, and the novel swerves artfully from gothic tropes (“The lane sucks at my boots, as if the manor grounds don’t want me to leave”) to knotty and surprising psychological suspense. There’s much to admire in this twisty tale. Agent: Ginger Clark, Ginger Clark Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Shree, whose novel Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize, unfolds a dreamlike narrative of the mysterious friendship between two women in an unnamed city in India. Following the death of his aunt Chachcho, Bitva is staying in the apartment where she raised him with her husband, Om Babu, who’s also dead. To Bitva’s chagrin, Chachcho’s closest friend, Lalna, moves into the apartment and sets about rearranging the rooms and sorting through Chachcho’s belongings. In the days that follow, Bitva recollects the deep and unusual connection between Chachcho, a dutiful and obedient wife, and Lalna, who Chachcho took in after her marriage failed. He also remembers speculation among the neighbors that Lalna was his biological mother. Her long-ago affair with Om Babu further clouds the truth of Bitva’s origin. Later sections of the evocative novel are told from Lalna’s perspective and that of an omniscient narrator, further exploring a friendship that defies social expectations and the boundaries of familial kinship, and whose most vivid moments are shared on the rooftop of the apartment complex, where the private lives of the women unfold freely. Readers are in for a treat. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this inspired outing from Han (The Apology), a Korean American woman views her troubled love life through the lens of a classic Korean story of star-crossed lovers. Channing and her cousin Dahee heard the “The Tale of Chunhyang” when they were nine from their grandfather, Harabeoji. Both were captivated by the story, especially Channing, who fantasized about finding a love like Chunhyang, the daughter of a courtesan, did with nobleman Mongryong. At 30, Dahee is a New York City second-grade teacher, while Channing, who quit school in 11th grade, has recently found work as a nanny to two young children in her hometown of East End, Mass. Kent Cho, who works for the mayor of East End, has become obsessed with Channing, but she’s in love with a young man named Minjae. Dahee and Harabeoji come to visit, and the cousins binge-watch a TV adaptation of the folktale. The novel gets a bit far-fetched when Kent accuses Channing of stealing his expensive watch and has her jailed, but Han keeps readers in suspense, wondering whether Dahee will be able to help Channing or Minjae will stand up and rescue her like Mongryong saves Chunhyang. It’s an engrossing story of the power of family and true love. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

A cynical PhD dropout tries to make do in her new digs at a girl’s boarding school, in Sharp’s distinctive debut. It’s winter and the unnamed narrator has traveled to a seaside tourist town somewhere in the Northeast, where she’s been hired to teach English literature. On double doses of her prescription stimulants, she lectures on subjects she’s obsessed with, such as the life of Stalin and Dickens’s Bleak House, noting how the students “stared back at me with the vacant curiosity of idiot fish whose aquarium had just been tapped by a finger.” As the narrator settles in at the school, where “every year the cottages sank another inch into the earth,” she befriends quirky students like Cordelia and begins dating fellow teacher Thomas, who’s recently returned from leave, which he claims was due to a family illness. The lightly plotted narrative casts a spell on the reader, thanks to Sharp’s powers of observation and the narrator’s eccentric disposition, as when her seatmate on a train pretends he’s sleeping and plays footsie with her, and she welcomes the touch. This pensive and offbeat work is an acquired taste. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/13/2026 | Details & Permalink