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

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