The descendants of Arctic homesteaders cope with climate change and discover a strange new livelihood in Shaw’s inventive debut. In an alternate present, the Spahr family lives in a “salmon-colored fisherman’s shack built on deep stilts” in the middle of a fjord, accessible only by boat or floatplane. The mother, Viola, supports the family as a charter pilot, raising three children with her farmer husband, Fry. Viola dies just as visitors begin arriving to hunt for pianos brought to the fjord by early settlers, which are now underwater, and are worth a great deal of money. Her daughter, Milda, who has long dreamed of moving south for school, becomes wrapped up in the piano hunting, and teams up with her brother Finley, a committed piano hunter who dives with the aid of a submersible that resembles a jet ski, to locate a piano brought there by their ancestor Moose Bloomer. The search is complicated by rising sea levels, and by the siblings’ uneasy relationship with the Huntmoon family, pastors of a local church. Shaw weaves memorable folkloric elements such as pet sea lions and a piano that is 18 feet tall with a resonant story of a people contending with a vanishing way of life. It’s a singular tale of human perseverance. Agent: Janet Silver, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Frost (Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier) delivers an immersive if underwhelming novel of President Franklin Roosevelt as seen through the eyes of one of the lesser-known members of his staff. In 1934, journalist Bill Hassett, a friend of the president, is invited to the Oval Office, and they begin a long-running working relationship, with Hassett serving as speechwriter and confidant. From the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through early 1945, Hassett watches as Roosevelt makes war plans with his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, going back and forth between these two imposing men to organize a military alliance against Germany and Japan. The author also brings into focus lesser-known figures like Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna, who helps Hassett deal with her father’s secret health problems; and Lucy Mercer, whose on-again, off-again romance with FDR continues until his death. Based on Hassett’s diaries, the novel takes readers inside FDR’s inner circle, but there is nothing revelatory or especially dramatic in the depiction of these well-known events. It’s a curious project, one that evokes FDR’s sphinxlike quality without going much deeper. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This marvelous collection from Argentinian surrealist Aira (Fulgentius) begins with a departure, in the form of a grounded and revelatory personal history. “Margarita (A Memory)” recounts the author’s childhood in rural Pringles, where most of his work is set, and his encounter with the bewitching Margarita, a distant relative whose “mythical and obscure” family history unlocked his ability to turn his dreams and fantasies into art (“I was discovering that it was possible to enter the picture and explore it from within, bathing in the rain of particles that fertilized the world”). The other four entries return to the bizarre terrain of Aira’s fiction. “The Dream” comprises two capers: a bank robbery committed by a teller and a search for a missing woman, the latter of which leads to a convent that houses a secretive cult of robotic nuns. “The Hormone Pill” begins comically, when a middle-aged husband takes one of his wife’s menopause pills as a prank. From there, the story zooms out to become a meditation on existence and the “joke-point at the center of the general system of life.” “Musical Brushstrokes” centers on a painter who flees Pringles only to find himself in a wilderness surrounded by feral hobos, a murderous dwarf, and the kind of revolutionary violence from which he’d hope to find sanctuary. The delightful picaresque “Princess Springtime” takes place on an island paradise where a princess in a tower translates hack novels until her idyll is shattered by the arrival of a fiendish pirate. Aira’s profound ability to capture the vividness and twisted logic of dreams remains undiminished. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Besson (Lie with Me) offers a haunting and wistful work of autofiction about a fateful summer. “I have never managed to rid myself of that story. It has never left me,” Philippe narrates on the first page, before jumping back to 1985 when he was 18 years old and spending the summer with family friends on an island off the northern coast of France. He shares a room with his hosts’ son, François, whom he’s grown up with, and looks forward to lazy, carefree days. He quickly befriends Nicolas, who recently moved to the area, as well as Alice and Marc, Parisians visiting for the summer. A messy tangle of friendship and romance ensues, with Philippe intrigued platonically by Nicolas while Alice desires Philippe, much to the despair of François, who wants Alice. Meanwhile, Marc and Philippe dance around their unspoken mutual attraction before going on a date. After a night of drinking at nightclubs, Nicolas goes missing, and Philippe is flooded with guilt over not making sure Nicolas found his way home after they were separated. Reflecting back on the incident and gradually shading in the details, he reflects on how the event marked his “loss of innocence.” Besson eloquently portrays the characters’ youthful fickleness and yearning. This one leaves a mark. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Haig offers a touching companion piece to his 2020 novel The Midnight Library, this time following an 81-year-old bookstore chain owner who finds a second chance in the afterlife. Wilbur Budd has devoted himself to his business for decades, which caused him to neglect his wife, Maggie, and lose her many years earlier. She surprises him with a phone call, in which she expresses a desire to become friends again. Shortly after, he collapses and dies. In the afterlife, he finds himself at a train station and realizes he’s the same age as when he and Maggie honeymooned in Venice. The train that arrives is the full-size version of a toy train he had as a child. Aboard it is Agnes Bagdale, who owned the bookstore Wilbur frequented as a young boy. Agnes then leads him on a tour of his past, stressing that he must not try to speak to his younger self. However, he breaks the rule when the train brings him to his honeymoon. Haig occasionally slips into platitudes (“It only takes a moment to die, but a whole lifetime to learn how to live”), but he authentically evokes Wilbur’s fears and regrets over the course of a life marked by sacrifice. This will please the author’s fans. Agent: Clare Conville, C&W Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

This gimlet-eyed saga from Whitaker (The Animators) traces the rise of a family-owned chain of discount stores in Kentucky. Fran and Fred Taylor grew up in an impoverished rural part of the state in “standard issue deprivation.” By 1979, they’re in their early 40s and are raising four kids in Lexington while running Baker-Taylor’s, a discount department store that’s positioned to expand. Though they’re viewed as gauche by their old-money neighbors, they’re proud of their “do-it-on-my-own money.” As their stylish cousin Jack once said, “What Fred lacked in worldview, he made up for with hunger.” But as the family settles into upper-middle-class life, Fred and Fran’s bond begins to fray. To Fran’s surprise, she can’t stop daydreaming about Wendy, one of the store’s new general managers. Fred, plagued by anxiety about how others view him, achieves his dream of being invited to join an exclusive fraternal organization but hides it from Fran. Their four children, ranging from middle school– to college-age, become increasingly disillusioned by their family’s growing fortune. Whitaker expertly juggles the expansive cast of characters and elicits sympathy for all of them even when they exhibit the worst parts of themselves. It’s an openhearted epic of the American dream and the bargains struck to achieve it. Agent: Bonnie Nadell, Hill Nadell Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Two gallerists battle over the right to represent an aging painter in this uneven novel from Cahill (Tiepolo Blue). Lorna Bedford, a New York City art dealer, was once close friends with famous painter Thomas Haller. She represented Haller during his early career and helped lead him to success. Now, however, Haller is working with Claude Berlins, a new dealer in Europe. Meanwhile, billionaire real estate developer and arts patron Leo Goffman wants to buy Haller’s new work but despises Berlins and would prefer to work with Lorna. Over the course of several twists and turns, Lorna seeks one last payout from Thomas, via Leo. It’s an affecting tale of the friends’ tangled bonds in a fickle industry, but the novel falters under the weight of its myriad subplots: a young man falls to his death, Goffman hits a woman with his car, a love child is given up for adoption. Still, Cahill writes beautifully of Haller’s work and creative process, as in the description of two abstract paintings that appear side by side as “an expanse of luminous pink, the brushstrokes destabilised in places by the action of a spray can and splashed solvents,” which turn out to be fragments from film stills. This is worth a look. Agent: Isobel Dixon, Blake Freidman. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

A strange widow arrives from the U.S. to Bäck, a remote coastal village in 1930 Sweden, in this magnificent 1964 novel from Trotzig (1929–2011), her English-language debut. The locals know little about Lydia, but the reader gathers she had married into the Lindgren family. Their ancestral farm is now run by 50-something Judit, known as the Queen for her imperious demeanor, and her younger brother Albert, a taciturn virgin. Their youngest sibling, Viktor, whom Judit cared for while their mother dealt with postpartum depression, left for America in 1920. Viktor met Lydia in New York City during the Depression, when they were both underemployed, and the pair became lovers, moving into a room together and sharing food. In the novel’s final sections, the reader learns the details of the couple’s brief marriage and Viktor’s death, and the story takes surprising and poetic turns over the course of Lydia’s time in Bäck, where she grows acquainted with Albert and Judit. Vogel’s translation masterfully renders Trotzig’s lush and lyrical descriptions of the rural Swedish landscape and Depression-era New York, the latter of which looks to Viktor like “the uncertain ocean of hunger and death.” Readers will be grateful for this introduction to a distinguished writer. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the dark and often funny debut novel from Stinson, a young woman comes to believe her stalker ex-boyfriend has followed her across the country. At a bar in Los Angeles, where she moved from Brooklyn two years earlier, Clarice sees a guy who might be her ex, P.T. As she watches this man confidently flirt with the bartender, Clarice grows infuriated, given that their breakup and his subsequent stalking, which caused her to get a restraining order that’s recently expired, left her with “the sexual prowess of unleavened bread.” In between twice-a-week therapy sessions, Clarice fixates on the possibility that P.T. has followed her across the country. She also recalls better times, such as when P.T. presented her with a four-leaf clover he’d found in Prospect Park; mulls over the nature of love (“Was I rewriting history to deny I ever loved him because of how it turned out?”); and reflects on the irony of how their roles reversed, remembering that when they were together, she was “desperate for him to want me.” Stinson raises the stakes as Clarice exhibits stalker tendencies of her own, even following the bartender for clues as to P.T.’s whereabouts. Shot through with acerbic wit, this is both unsettling and un-put-downable. Agent: Eloy Bleifuss Prados, Neon Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lin (The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu) spins a beguiling tale of a secret U.S. military program and its strange effects on a family of Chinese immigrants. The time period isn’t specified, but the story appears to take place sometime during the Cold War. Saul Keng Hsiu, 37, and his 33-year-old wife, Mei Lee, have fled a famine in China with only some gold, chrysanthemum seeds, a suitcase, and an old leather knapsack of belongings. They settle on a prairie in South Dakota, where government officials visit the couple’s farm and offer to buy an acre of land from them. Saul and Mei agree, and the Air Force builds a nuclear missile silo on the property as part of a mysterious plan that Saul later learns is called Project Methuselah. The project causes strange things to happen: volcanic ash falls from the sky, Mei discovers that she can practice augury, their young daughter Mara learns she can communicate with farm animals, and the chrysanthemums they grow turn out to be hardy aphrodisiacs. Gradually, the novel takes on more speculative dimensions, as Saul learns Project Methuselah is actually an experimental nuclear weapon deterrent developed with intelligence stolen from the Chinese. The story can be tough to follow, but it’s packed with intriguing fabulist turns. This offbeat tale will stay with readers. Agent: Lisa Queen, Queen Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 02/27/2026 | Details & Permalink