Four-year-old Marili learns about life and death and discovers the beauty of the natural world in this deeply perceptive and sensuous 1951 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer (The Wall). The story takes place over the course of a year in an idyllic alpine forest, where Marili is being raised by her maternal grandparents. Her grief-stricken grandmother explains that she’s not Marili’s mother, who died along with her four sons—three in war, and the youngest, Max, at five, from diphtheria. Sadness hangs over the house during the gloomy winter until the first ray of February sunlight lands in a “yellow rectangle... on the kitchen floor.” In summer, Marili explores the surrounding meadows by herself, pushing past her fear of the unknown, and is enchanted by the flowers, especially the fire lilies, which “seemed to come to life under her breath.” The strong-willed and curious girl, who prays with her back turned to the painting of Jesus in her bedroom and beats up a neighbor boy who threatens to drown a litter of kittens, carries glimmers of the adult heroines in Haushofer’s fierce later work, and the story grows unsettling when Marili alarms her grandparents by catching a fever like the one Max had. The main event, though, is Haushofer’s painterly depiction of the landscape, as when she describes how the fog lifts as winter approaches and “a different color... shimmered yellow and red through the milky veils.” It’s a stunner. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

The diverting latest from Léger (God Loves Haiti) traces a Haitian soccer hero’s rise and fall. Gilbert Chevalier’s story unfolds in reverse, while he’s facing a firing squad in the late 1950s for an unspecified offense. The son of a well-off businessman, Gilbert adores soccer and uses his endless charm to woo women, including firebrand Aurélie. As a favor to his father, who hopes for a financial windfall, Gilbert marries Elizabeth, the daughter of a rich Nazi hiding in Haiti after WWII, before leaving alone for New York City to study finance at Columbia. While away, Gil promises to focus on his education, but he quickly joins pickup soccer games in Central Park and gets recruited for the 1950 U.S. World Cup team, despite not being an American (“a small technicality,” he’s told). After he scores a game-winning goal against England, he becomes an overnight sensation. As the years pass, he slouches around Europe and his soccer career declines. Called back to Haiti to visit his ailing father, he learns that Elizabeth has taken up with another man, Aurélie is raising his nine-year-old child, and his life is in danger. Léger sustains the momentum with energetic set pieces, which often involve Gilbert’s Zelig-like encounters with celebrities, as when he rescues Miles Davis from an angry spurned lover. It’s a blast. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Delgado Lopera (Fiebre Tropical) dives into Colombia’s taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression. Growing up in the small town of Ebaguí, Ignacio dominates on the soccer field but also longs to be glamorous like his neighbor Lucrecia, so much so that he wants to “unzip Lucrecia’s face and try it on.” Living under the rule of his alcoholic and physically abusive father, Ignacio takes refuge in secretly swimming naked with Lucrecia’s son, Felipe, and tying his soccer jersey on his head, pretending it’s long hair like Lucrecia’s—something he’s seen men get beat up over. As a young man in Bogotá, Ignacio meets Mamadora Eléctrica, a travesti, at a queer nightclub, and she becomes a mother figure to him. In the present, Ignacio raises a teen daughter, Valentina, and mourns the death of his wife, Alma. To Valentina, he looks like a “mummified bird,” lounging around the house in his flimsy pink robes, dangling earrings, and colorful rosaries, having lost his job at a bank due to frequent absences and drunkenness at work. Meanwhile, Valentina pieces together the story of Alma, who was said to have “popped pills like candy” while Ignacio had affairs with men. The author’s turns of phrase are striking and indelible, and the characters are deeply and lovingly portrayed, including Mamadora, who looks out for the lonely Valentina, helping with her homework and making sure her disapproving aunt doesn’t try to separate her from Ignacio. It’s exquisite. Agent: Kent D. Wolf, Neon Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A volcanic eruption forces a rural veterinarian to cut short her maternity leave in the uneven debut novel from New Zealand poet Wallace. With ashfall covering the streets of the unnamed narrator’s small town, day cares close, office workers report from home, and grocery store shelves stand empty. But the natural disaster is only one battle among many for the narrator, a working mother who struggles with crying children, an inattentive husband, mountains of laundry, and the biases of her male coworkers. When a position opens at her midsize veterinary practice, she alone advocates on behalf of a younger female colleague. One of her children develops a respiratory illness from the thick, gray ash, which makes “everything more urgent.” Despite the intense subject matter, the plot slips into clichés, such as the depiction of a sexist male colleague. Still, the narrator offers impactful reflections on motherhood, which for her feels “like shattering your body into pieces, gluing them back together so the light shines through the seams, then flooding it with greenery, your whole insides a garden fit to burst.” The result is a somewhat pedestrian story punctuated by distinctive bursts of lyricism. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Maksimowska (Giant) serves up a sardonic portrait of a young woman in search of fulfillment. Gosia, pushing 30, teaches high school chemistry in Toronto and finds her life “entirely dull and unsatisfying.” She immigrated to Canada from Poland as a child and is now in a common-law relationship with her French Canadian boyfriend, Peter, who leaves her unsatisfied. (“I was self-conscious of how much sex I wanted to have. I often cried after he fell asleep, frustrated, rejected, deprived.”) Gosia becomes attracted to a female colleague named Harris and kisses her during a night of drunken debauchery. Peter’s father, Phil, meanwhile, is diagnosed with lung cancer and given three months to live. While he’s in the hospital, Gosia travels to Poland with her mother to visit her estranged father and grapples with whether to tell Peter about her indiscretion with Harris. While the narrative is initially confusing, due to its jagged leaps forward and backward through time, Maksimowska’s mordant wit shines (“Pride was best kept personal and private, like masturbation,” Gosia reflects), and she adds depth to the characters, as when Gosia discovers a connection between Peter’s ambivalence toward sex and Phil’s infidelity. There’s much to admire in this cutting narrative. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A married high school teacher confronts his despair and isolation in this insightful outing from Strout (Tell Me Everything). Artie Dam, 57, has a beautiful home on the herMassachusetts coast, a long and stable partnership with his wife, Evie, and a job he loves, but he can’t shake his “accretion of loneliness,” nor can he bring himself to reveal it to anyone. Recalling the suicide of a character in a novel he read, Artie is reminded that “people do die of loneliness” and decides to end his life. After he nearly drowns in a sailing accident, his brush with mortality renews his desire to live, but he’s rocked again when his 27-year-old son, Rob, confides in him that a DNA test showed he’s not Artie’s biological child. As father and son reimagine their bond, Artie must decide whether to jeopardize his marriage by telling Evie what he’s learned. Some of the episodes feel a bit random, but Strout masterfully explores her central themes (after a “lunatic” former president is reelected, a clear reference to Trump, Artie feels like the “country was committing suicide”) and offers timeless observations, suggesting, for example, that her characters feel distant from those they love most because “to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know.” This will stay with readers. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

McCarthy (Everyone Knows How Much I Love You) offers a tender yet tense story of estranged sisters who grew up studying ballet. Frances Garbinski, now in college in New York City, was unmoored when her older sister, Charley, drifted away from a successful dance career after a neck injury. For the past six years, Charley has secluded herself in a French convent. When Frances hears that Charley’s ex-husband, Johnny Fitcher, is in town, she tracks him down, believing he had mistreated Charley somehow and bears responsibility for her withdrawal. (“Sometimes we blame dance, but mostly we blame Johnny,” she narrates.) To her surprise, she bonds with Johnny over Charley’s absence, but hesitates to forge a friendship, especially after another one of Johnny’s exes accuses him on social media of bullying and gaslighting her. However, when he invites her to visit his family’s vacation home on Cup Island in the Long Island Sound, Frances cannot resist, determined to unravel the mystery of Charley’s withdrawal. There, she gradually tests the waters of a potential romance with Johnny, which leads her closer to answers about her sister. McCarthy writes astutely about dance as a double-edged sword that impassions the sisters but also damages them, and she mirrors this duality in her portrayal of Frances’s push-pull dynamic with Johnny. The result is magnetic. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Residents of an Asian American community in Western Massachusetts respond in consequential ways to a false alert of a “ballistic missile threat” in Yu’s resonant debut. The alert says to “seek immediate shelter,” but David Li, a family man who inherited his father’s public relations firm, gets in his car and takes off, leaving his wife and infant son behind. Nina Chang, thinking she’s about to die, writes a farewell text to her lesbian daughter, who lives in California, then spitefully adds, “I guess being selfish was worth it.” After Clare Hillden’s husband, Jacob, dies of a heart attack brought on by the stress, she is contacted by a woman claiming Jacob had raised a secret family with her. While these characters deal with the fallout of their actions, others act heroically, such as Nick Chen, a downcast musician mourning the breakup of his band, who rescues a waitress, hoping they can outrun the blast in his car. Behind it all is the problem-plagued state official who accidentally caused the alert, which is called off 18 minutes after it goes out. Yu handily juggles and resolves the many story lines, exploring the ripple effects of snap decisions and fully developing his characters as they face various consequences. Reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter,” this layered novel pays dividends. Agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This lively set of vignettes sees recurring Gifford protagonist Roy, last seen in the collection Roy’s World, getting an unorthodox education from his uncle Buck. In 1958, when Roy is 12, his father dies, and he begins spending summers and holidays with Buck, a fast-living, hard-gambling world traveler. Whether he’s working with the criminals and outsiders Buck employs in his construction business, learning how to skin a gator, sailing off the coast of Miami, or meeting the likes of Howard Hughes, Roy becomes acclimated to a hidden adult world of desperados, gamblers, and hoods, where “living is a very dangerous business.” Among the volume’s many colorful episodes is the one depicted in “The Golden Ball,” in which Buck is robbed of a hunk of gold jewelry he melted down after he showed it to a porn actress he was seeing. Buck teaches Roy never to bet the odds when everything is unpredictable, and his stories of gangsters and nightclubs become entries in the boy’s private mythology. Gifford is one of the last practitioners of the two-fisted storytelling of Ernest Hemingway—with whom, naturally, Buck is on a first-name basis. This sketchbook offers an urgent view into the larger-then-life denizens of a vanished America. (May)

Reviewed on 03/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Patchett follows 2023’s Tom Lake with another perfectly executed and quietly profound family drama. Daphne, a 53-year-old happily married English teacher, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with her husband, Jonathan, a retired hospital administrator, when she runs into Eddie Triplett, who was once her stepfather. Though he was only married to her mother, Abigail, for two years, Daphne and her sister built a life-changing amount of trust with him. Abigail and Eddie abruptly divorced following a car accident in which he and Daphne drove off the road in a snowstorm in Winchester, Mass., which resulted in nine-year-old Daphne climbing out of the wrecked car to find help. The story takes place in the weeks after her reunion with Eddie, as Daphne learns the truth of why he and her mother divorced and revisits the accident and its reverberations. Somewhere along the way, the novel becomes a meditation on mortality, long marriages, and what it means to love well. “It’s an awful business.... Loving another person,” Abigail tells Daphne, reflecting on her three marriages, each with their share of successes and failures. Daphne also reflects on how Eddie, when they were trapped in the car, told her an intense story that still haunts her, about a rancher named Mary who hovers on the brink of death after an accident. Like many of Patchett’s works, this beautiful and generous novel feels effortless, never straining for effect. It’s one of her best. (June)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink