McCoy (The Baker’s Daughter) spins an entertaining if derivative tale of a faded celebrity. In a framing device set in 1990, college student Lu Tibbott is “floundering” in her history classes, having changed majors multiple times in an effort to find out “who I wanted to be.” Desperate for a senior thesis topic, she latches onto the story of her aunt Lori Lovely, a onetime budding Hollywood starlet who left show business at 23 in 1969 to become a nun. Born Lucille Hickey in Pufftown, N.C., Lori moves to New York City at 18 to live with her sister and her husband and help at their photography studio while the young couple struggles to start a family. Dazzled by the “immortality” of fame, Lori auditions for a role as an extra in a musical. She’s then accepted at a school in London, where she lands the role of a lifetime in a musical film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Lori’s on-screen chemistry with heartthrob Lucas, who plays Romeo, skyrockets her to fame and leads to a tumultuous affair with her costar. McCoy ably evokes the glitter and grit of mid-century moviemaking, but the melodramatic story behind Lori’s retreat, which explains Lu’s own life as well, is not only predictable but notably similar to that of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. This one doesn’t quite stand on its own. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cross (Grievous) delivers an intense psychological drama set in the aftermath of WWI, when an English headmaster searches for the woman he fell for when he was at Oxford. After surviving combat, Jamie becomes headmaster at St. Stephen’s Academy. Despite his professional success, he continues to pine for Amanda, a lower-class Irish woman whom he dated before she suddenly left Oxford without explanation. Jamie has been writing to Amanda’s friend, Diana, who reveals that Amanda is now working as a governess in London. In letters to Amanda, who now calls herself Marion, Jamie professes his desire to see her again. Cross alternates between Jamie’s and Marion’s perspectives, exploring Marion’s history of abuse in Ireland and hinting at her reason for leaving Oxford. Now, with her newfound stability, Marion is committed to caring for her two charges and worries that a reunion with Jamie will unsettle her. Cross vigorously channels Jamie’s trauma as well, injecting the story with his anger upon returning wounded from the war (“He railed against people’s triumphalism, their high-handed theories and self-pitying grief”). It’s a nuanced tale of love and loss. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

A day in the life of a discontented literature professor forms the core of Castro’s caustic latest (after The Novelist). Harold would rather lift weights than attend his department’s monthly staff meeting at Shepherd College, where tuition soars and students are pampered. Though Harold has a chiseled physique and conceited nature (he’d “always known he had a great mind”), Castro portrays him as confused and alienated, confounded by the maze-like campus and loathsome toward most of his conformist colleagues. While waiting for the meeting, Harold scrolls his phone and entertains himself with private jokes, wondering if being a “lifter” makes him one of the “marginalized people” routinely celebrated at campus events. He likes one colleague, Casey, who unlike him has tenure and a successful publishing record, and who introduced Harold to gym culture, but Casey hasn’t been around much. Casey’s absence and Harold’s swelling obsession with his more successful friend injects a bit of tension into the novel, but other potential plot devices don’t quite pan out, as when Harold picks up a student’s neglected backpack, telling himself it was left suspiciously. While the story drags in places, Castro mostly holds the reader’s attention with Harold’s pensive internal monologues. This captures male loneliness in all its funk and fury. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Six high school friends from Chicago are driven apart by war in the emotive debut novel from Chambers (after the poetry collection North American Studies). In 2001, narrator Graham Katz and his hockey buddy Caesar (so nicknamed for his love of Little Caesar’s pizza) enter high school. Their innocence is soon shattered by the 9/11 attacks, but for much of their high school years, they maintain tight, booze-fueled bonds with their friends, including the handsome and troubled Ryan, who becomes infatuated with a girl named Jana who often loses patience with his antics. Another friend, the matter-of-fact Neil, tells Ryan to forget Jana, but he remains stuck on her until the end of high school, when he enlists in the Marines. Graham and overachiever Ben, both of whose parents were hippies, join anti-war protests. As their paths and intentions diverge, some friends fall out, and the narrative skips ahead to college and beyond, when one member of the group is married with children while others grapple with alcoholism, isolation, and heartache. Chambers does an excellent job of juggling the many characters, making them all feel alive in the excitement of their youth and laying bare their struggles to meet the demands of adulthood. It’s a memorable story of friendship. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Haratischwili (The Eighth Life) enchants with this monumental novel that follows four friends in Georgia from the end of the Soviet era to the near present. Mercurial, fearless Dina; flirtatious, free-spirited Nene; quiet, studious Ira; and artistic, observant Keto grow up together in the capital city of Tblisi. In 1987 they are 14 and, with Dina as their ringleader, full of mischief and dreams. Their brothers, however, have no real ambitions or prospects other than small-time extortion and drug trafficking. Nene’s uncle Tapora, the local mob boss, controls much of the city, and Keto’s brother Rati and his crew begin scheming to take over some of Tapora’s territory. Dina, always a shutterbug, becomes a photographer for the Sunday News and covers the war in Abkhazia. In 2019, the three surviving friends reunite in Brussels at a posthumous retrospective of Dina’s photographs. It would be a spoiler to reveal the dramatic and tragic circumstances of her death, which adds poignancy to Haratischwili’s explosive and intimate tale of the women’s struggle to not only survive but thrive. Amid the fast-paced story, the author makes room for the friends’ satisfying reckoning with their history of betrayals and shifting alliances. Readers will find this irresistible. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Qudan’s provocative English-language debut, set in near-future Japan, centers around an architect grappling with ethical and philosophical questions about her latest project. It begins in 2026, when 37-year-old Sara Machina receives a career-making opportunity to design a new Tokyo landmark: a prison in the form of a comfortable apartment tower. The project draws on the theories of a sociologist who argued that criminals should be rebranded as victims rather than perpetrators, due to structural issues such as income inequality that led them to crime. While Sara works on her proposal, she begins a relationship with handsome store clerk Takt, who is much younger than her. After the tower opens in 2030, Takt takes a job there as a “supporter,” a euphemism for guard, and gives a tour to Max Klein, an American journalist. Max also interviews Sara, who is alternately celebrated and vilified online, “described as both a goddess who’d brought beauty and peace to Tokyo and a witch whose tower had plunged society into confusion.” The blend of voices, including passages generated by ChatGPT as Takt tailors his correspondence with Max and Sara uses the platform to work through her conflicted thoughts about the tower, offers an intriguing window into the controversy following the tower’s opening. It’s a disarming novel of ideas. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this perceptive collection, Mountford (The Dismal Service) unearths the inner struggles of characters caught in the middle of political and private battles. In “One More Night Between the Walls,” the child of diplomats in Sri Lanka witnesses the strain on his parent’s marriage over the course of a calamitous New Year’s Eve party, as the threat of civil war mounts. “Mr. McNamara’s Suit” concerns the moral dilemma of a Vietnamese American laundry owner who discovers his best client is Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense and architect of the Vietnam War. The standout “Pay Attention” follows a suburban woman’s experiments with sadomasochism to distract herself from outrage and fear over the election of Donald Trump, only to find hope in an unlikely romance with her affectionate torturer. In the title story, a dissolute man has a stroke while having sex with his mistress on Halloween, after which he faces his wife at the hospital. Mountford is an expert at locating what makes his characters tick and how they handle crises, as with the title story’s married couple, struck “by old wounds... forever confused and looking in the wrong direction.” There’s plenty of heat in this wide-ranging volume. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Pande Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Congolese writer Mabanckou (Broken Glass) fuses political corruption and the afterlife in his textured 13th novel. It follows the winding path toward vengeance of the recently slain Liwa Ekimakingaï, a Pointe-Noire man who doesn’t remember how he died after finding himself buried in a “poor folk’s cemetery.” There, he’s bored by the stories of other dead people such as pretentious bureaucrat Prosper Milandou, who reveals that the city’s rich and powerful frequently consult with sorcerers. Liwa then recalls the night of his death, remembering that he was poisoned by Pointe-Noire’s influential kleptocrat Augustin Biampandou. Augustin is said to have killed his daughter, Samantha, in a ritual sacrifice in exchange for his wealth and power, and it turns out Liwa met Samantha’s ghost shortly before he died. Now, he embarks on a quest for justice. While Mabanckou tests the reader’s patience with the many long-winded stories of the dead, he succeeds at evoking the city’s folkloric magic and satirizing its corruption. It’s not the author’s best, but his fans will find plenty to appreciate. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kukla (City Living), a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, provides an astute reassessment of what empowered sex means in an imperfect world. They acknowledge that because life is inherently messy, people end up having sex under less-than-optimal conditions, whether they’re tipsy or subject to a power imbalance (which are inherent, Kukla notes, in every heterosexual sexual encounter in a patriarchal society). For that reason, public messaging about sex that “relies on a myth of an ideal autonomous self” is misguided; instead, people can rely on social, cultural, or interpersonal “scaffoldings” to support their agency in sexual encounters. Individually, that can mean negotiating safe words at the outset or having a ride home from a party, while social scaffoldings include good sex education, medical institutions that offer contraception, and policies that facilitate effective reporting of sexual violence. Elsewhere, Kukla pays particular attention to the language used to negotiate sexual encounters, suggesting that instead of simply requesting consent, partners can “invite one another to do things, suggest sexy ideas, warn our partner about our triggers, ask about a partner’s preferences.” Such points link to the author’s perceptive critiques of a binary consent culture in which good sex is made to be more about avoiding harm than experiencing pleasure. Well-reasoned and complex, it’s a vital addition to an important cultural conversation. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink

Journalists Jamalpour and Tabrizy debut with a propulsive account of the 2022 Iranian uprising. The book’s alternating first-person narratives are drawn from letters the authors wrote to each other during the protests—Jamalpour, based in Tehran, delivers an on-the-ground report, while Tabrizy offers analysis from abroad. Together they frame the moment as one of exuberant defiance: “We will not bow down” vows the uncle of the slain woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death in the custody of the morality police—after her arrest for “not dressing appropriately”—triggered the mass movement. The protestors, many of them teens, face down tear gas, rubber bullets, arrests, and executions. Particularly poignant is how deeply poetry is interwoven into the movement, from protestors passing each other uplifting notes—“hand in hand we become the sea” reads one passed to Jamalpour—to pop singers releasing anti-government ballads: “For my sister, your sister and our sisters, for the changing of rotted minds,” sang one 25-year-old performer sentenced to a nearly four-year prison term. The authors offer captivating insight into the historical role women have played in Iranian politics and critique Western depictions of the Shah’s reign as more liberating for women, noting that his policy of forced unveiling pushed religious women into the shadows. As the narrative builds, Jamalpour and Tabrizy present the country as caught in a vice-like trap between the regime at home and Western hostility abroad. It’s a gripping view of a nation at a crossroads. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/25/2025 | Details & Permalink