A 30-something retail worker gets a chance to shake off her doldrums and come clean about the past in this crisp and unsettling novel from Lippmann (Lech). It takes place in 2008 Philadelphia, where Cass Trout is surprised to receive an invitation to her former best friend Sally Sellers’s wedding in London. Though the formerly inseparable pair have been estranged since high school, right after Sally’s father, Len, died from a heart attack, Cass contemplates attending the nuptials, if only to catch up and possibly clear the air between them. But there’s also a burning secret she wants to spill: when Cass was 18, she embarked on an illicit affair with Len, which she never divulged to Sally, and which caused tension and confusion as Cass snuck around with Len. Admitting that “shame is the weight that I carry,” Cass is eager to exorcise her demons and figure out her ambiguous sexuality. Phone conversations with Sally break the ice, but a missing passport spells trouble. For much of the narrative, Cass reflects on how she was groomed by Len beginning at 12, and she considers the line between abuse and agency (“The writing glared on the wall. Yet I’d choose him again and again despite, if not because of, all signs of warning”). Readers will admire this gritty slice of life. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing) offers a cluttered but affecting story of a Jewish family’s flight from German-occupied Amsterdam to the U.S., and their inherited trauma decades later. The reader meets Ruth and Sophia Jacobsen, 14 and 16, respectively, in 1941, shortly before the latter dies in tragic circumstances that are revealed later. The family then flees from Amsterdam to Lisbon before settling in Connecticut. In 2000, Ruth’s daughter, Stephanie, 39, cannot break through the emotional wall her mother has constructed to deal with Sophia’s death. Things take a turn after Ruth, who lives in isolation near a lake, helps rescue 16-year-old Ian Lima when he attempts suicide by jumping into a hole in the ice. The great number of secondary characters and side stories—a property dispute, a judge getting served with allegations of misconduct by a thwarted lover, addiction in the Lima family—sap momentum, but the icy scene on the lake gains resonance as Ruth reflects on her childhood spent ice-skating with Sophia, and Poliner’s character work is top-notch, particularly in her exploration of Ruth’s melancholy and reticence (“it was chance, the forces that shaped so much of your fate”). This will stay with readers. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A feudal village is tested by the arrival of a strange girl in this galvanizing tale from Collette (The Forests). Madelaine arrives in La Foye as a feral orphan and is found by elder Rose and her adopted boy, Bran. It’s decided that Madelaine should be taken in by childless Ambre and her hard-drinking husband, Léon. The peasant villagers have long abided by the rules set by the Ambroisies, masters of the region, and fear the violent heir Ambroisie-Son, who periodically rides into their village and neighboring environs to rape the women and hunt animals. When Madelaine breaks the rules by killing a deer on their masters’ lands, Eugéne recognizes the dangerous spark of rebellion within the strange girl. As harvests grow scant, the merchants increase the costs of goods, causing the peasants to slide deeper into debt to the Ambroisies. When Ambroisie-Son finally sets his gaze on the beautiful Ambre and her twin sister on a fateful day, Madelaine must decide quickly whether she will continue the tradition of submission to the masters or protect her found family, no matter the cost. Collette’s narrative raises weighty questions about the value of resistance and what it takes to shatter a generations-old tolerance of injustice. It’s a triumph. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mosley (Down the River unto the Sea) stacks a distinctive coming-of-age narrative onto a tender love story. The novel begins in 1999 Los Angeles, where Jamilah Fenestra and Robert Horton meet while shopping at a farmers market and she shares her umbrella with him. A scientist and a cook, respectively, their differences complement each other—she’s analytical and practical, he’s creative but often “lost in places or thought”—and they raise a precocious son, Ghalen, whose world is rocked in fifth grade, when Jamilah is diagnosed with liver cancer and dies soon after. At 16, Ghalen is poised to graduate early from high school, and he works as a pastry chef with Robert at a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills, but his future remains clouded by the loss of Jamilah, whose memories are a constant for Robert. Mosley is particularly effective at rendering the father and son’s bond in her absence, and he adds grit and heartache to his depiction of Ghalen finding his way as a young man, from visiting a childhood friend in the hospital who’s in police custody for assault charges to exploring sex with his first love. Mosley’s relaxed pacing and rhythmic prose are deceptively simple. Readers will fall in love with this bighearted family saga. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bond’s gut-punch of a debut centers on Hope House, a Kentucky group home for a motley crew of boys who, in the 1980s, don’t have much of a future ahead of them—most likely prison, living on the streets, or worse. Narrated by a group home member nicknamed AWOL because he runs away so much, the story covers various residents and their trajectory over a period of four years. Among them are Karvel, a former drug dealer; Smoove, who was shot after he was caught selling fake crack; Bobby Church, who ran his dad over in a car; and Chollie Ocampo, who set his mother’s empty trailer home on fire. The unshakable head of household, Mr. Watts, has the daunting task of teaching his charges to lean on each other, gain self-confidence, and find self-worth. Over the course of the novel, Hope House takes in boys from similar homes that have closed, and might itself have to close before the boys graduate. These pressures add to Bond’s authentic and often heartbreaking picture of the boys’ challenging circumstances and determination to overcome them. When they turn 18, they will graduate from the program and find out whether they can function in society. As AWOL poignantly notes: “We are kids still, on the cusp of something, and that feeling inside us is hope.” It’s a clarion call for the value of compassion and the possibility of rehabilitation. Agent: Sarah Fuentes, UTA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Holly returns to small-town Alabama in the emotional companion piece to The Stories We Keep. Cat, 17, bonds with new student Glen Lewis in 1981 over the loss of their fathers—hers recently died in a work accident, while his abandoned the family. The pair start dating, but trouble brews during the summer months when their classmate Ally spreads rumors that Glen had sex with her. Glen then informs Cat that Ally is telling the truth, but that it happened before he started dating Cat. Later, Cat spies Glen talking with another girl at a Fourth of July party and then sees him hanging out with Ally outside of a bar. Cat chooses to ignore further rumors of Glen’s infidelity and marries him immediately after graduating from high school. She gives birth to a daughter, Jenna, a couple of years later, but Jenna is colicky, and Glen becomes distant and neglectful, often spending time at a bar after work, and Cat wonders if she should have heeded earlier warnings. The narrative can feel repetitive, especially as Cat and Glen constantly pick at each other, but it builds to a satisfying and hopeful conclusion. Readers will be stirred by this bittersweet bildungsroman. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stockett’s vibrant follow-up to her bestselling 2009 novel, The Help, traces the intersecting lives of an exasperated older sister, a precocious orphan, and an enterprising woman in 1933 Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur endures a miserable existence at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls in Oxford. Singled out by the cruel director, Meg is forced to toil in the institution’s offices rather than attend school. Too old to be adopted, she counts down the days until her 12th birthday, when she’ll be sent to work in a Biloxi cannery—though she still clings to hope that the mother who abandoned her might return. Meanwhile, Birdie Calhoun, 24, is forced into action when back taxes threaten the rural home she shares with her mother and grandmother in the Delta. She travels to Oxford to ask her younger sister, Frances, for help, only to discover that Frances’s supposedly charmed life is far less so than it seems. There, Birdie crosses paths with Meg and Charlie, a down-on-her-luck woman with a wild idea for making a fortune and reclaiming control of her life. The pace slackens at times, but Stockett holds the reader’s attention with her colorful characters. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this offers a memorable view into the impossible choices faced by women in the Great Depression. Agent: Kim Schefler, Levine Plotkin. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Ojeda (Jawbone) delivers an intense and remarkable polyphonic hymn to the consoling and destructive power of music. Two friends, teen girls Nicole and Noa, leave their violent home city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to attend Solar Noise, a weeklong “post-Andean” experimental music festival of “ancestral thrash retrofuturism” at the base of a remote and active volcano. There they meet other festivalgoers, including a pregnant former conservatory musician who expounds on art’s dark side (“To make music, you have to learn to love death”), a rhapsodizing figure known as the Poet, and a group called the Songstresses, “speleologists bringing to light the hidden, epiphanic shape of the world.” Also roaming about the festival grounds are Diablumas, “anarcho-primitivist” worshippers of experimental music who wear two-faced masks and recruit adherents to their cult. Amid the riotous dancing, sex, psychedelic drugs, and “mosh-pit inferno,” Noa taps into the rumbling landscape’s subterranean energies and discovers a new otherworldly voice (“the lightning’s voice, the mare’s voice”). After the festival ends, Noa visits her father, who abandoned his family following a nervous breakdown, and the two warily circle each other as Diablumas prowl about with their eyes, and ears, on Noa. As she and others make oracular pronouncements about music, life, and death (the Songstresses: “Fire is instinct, it is a song without time and fire is delirium”), the novel accrues a strange beauty and an entrancing Dionysian beat. It’s impossible to resist. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Literary agent Mills debuts with an intriguing if tonally uneven novel of a London woman whose life changes as she sinks deeper into her habit of pretending to be other people. Beth, aimless at 38, has few friends, and her only family is her sister, Elspeth. After seeking to get out of her rut by role-playing different types of women, including a fitness instructor named Nikki Love, she is approached by Leila, who invites her to join a secret group of women who engage in a game called Life-Play. Leila and the three other members are slow to fully accept Beth, waiting to see whether she will commit to their rules. Though the group’s handbook prohibits dishing on Life-Play to outsiders, Beth regales Elspeth with tales of their exploits, such as becoming a professional Elvis impersonator and a Cirque du Soleil aerialist. The whimsical role-playing group is a neat concept, but it winds up taking a backseat to the much heavier story of Beth’s reasons for committing to certain roles, especially after Elspeth is diagnosed with cancer. The result is a striking but flawed tale of a woman’s identity crisis. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Malasarn debuts with an affecting novel of an immigrant family’s internal conflicts. Manda, a teacher, leaves her native Thailand to visit her younger sister, Siripon, in Los Angeles, and decides to stay, becoming like a second mother to her baby nephew, Ben. Lacking her sister’s professional degree and command of English, Manda does menial work in a department store, while her brother-in-law, Kamron, a metal worker, suffers frequent injuries on the job and drinks heavily. When Ben is six, Manda sees the boy wrap a blanket around his waist like a skirt and imitate a female dancer. Alarmed at the boy’s effeminacy, she and Kamron hire a Buddhist priest to exorcise the restless girl ghost they believe resides within Ben. The frightening and traumatic ritual, which ends with Manda taking Ben to the bathroom and instructing him to vomit, results in years of nervous vomiting. Malasarn delicately explores the theme of leading a double life, as Manda adjusts to living in a foreign land and Ben, as a fifth grader, keeps quiet about the reason for his vomiting to avoid attracting even further attention as “puke boy,” and later explores his sexuality as a young gay man. It’s an accomplished family drama. Agent: Ian Bonaparte, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink