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

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