Rowbottom (Aesthetica) offers an intimate and kinetic tale of friendship and betrayal in the 1980s Los Angeles porn world. As teens, Jude and Winnie dream of escaping their backwater burb north of L.A., especially Winnie, who’s sexually abused by her stepfather. She runs away at 16 in 1980 and Jude follows two years later. In L.A., Jude shacks up with a slightly older guy named Laird in a seedy motel, doing heroin and pulling stick-up jobs. After Laird winds up in jail, Jude finds Winnie at a strip club. Her feelings for Winnie have never been strictly platonic, and she’s excited when they move in together. Winne doesn’t do porn (“those girls are tragic,” she tells Jude), but Jude tries it anyway, initially through Winnie’s boss, and believes she’s found “her destiny.” Soon Jude gets in deep, and after she makes a ruthless move, putting her career before the friendship, Winnie cuts ties. The novel’s second half, set 30 years later, revisits the events from Winnie’s perspective. Now a writer, she takes stock of what led to the friends’ break and the trouble she found in trying to make a life for herself. Rowbottom’s portrayal of the porn demimonde is exciting and gritty without feeling lurid, and the novel doubles as a moving ode to the value of a female friendship. It’s a knockout. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sutanto (Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers) delights with this tale of second chances. Mebel Tanadi, a “Chinese-Indonesian princess” whose “second and arguably most universal language is cash,” has spent the past 40 years as a happy trophy wife to Henk in Indonesia. When he suddenly runs off with the family’s 24-year-old private chef, she decides to attend culinary school at the Saint Honoré School of Culinary Arts in France in order to win him back, and heads to Paris loaded down with Birkins and designer shoes. After she arrives, she learns that she mistakenly enrolled at another branch of the school near Oxford, England. When she gets to Oxford and immediately has her handbags stolen, she considers turning around and going home, but decides to strap on her Louboutins, put on her Hermes suit, and see what comes next. Along the way, Mebel discovers a deeper sense of self, meets an apparently perfect man, and becomes a mentor for younger students, all the while wondering what she’ll do if Henk really does come back. Sutanto keeps the pages turning with tight plotting and thoroughly enjoyable characters. Readers are in for a treat. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this well-built if overwrought literary crime novel from Martinson (The Reign of the Kingfisher), Kentucky sheriff’s deputy Alicia Moore faces suspicion after she discovers the body of her ex-fiancé, Jake Paisley, “crucified like Jesus” and disemboweled. It’s the same m.o. of a murder two decades ago when Alicia was in her senior year of high school and engaged to Jake. The convicted killer, a “fucked-up kid” named Greg Walpole, was friends with Jake before the crime, and locals suspected Alicia and Jake were somehow involved. The stress caused them to break up, and to this day, she’s called “blood river witch” around town. But thanks to her father, the sheriff at the time, from whom she’s now estranged, she was never charged with a crime. Now, as Moore becomes a person of interest in Jake’s murder, she’s pulled from the case and investigates on her own, placing her faith in an occult scholar who offers to help her solve the crime and clear her name. As she gets closer to the truth and uncovers a scheme to convict her of Jake’s murder, she turns to her father for help. The story is full of satisfying twists and turns, but the purple prose can be distracting, as when a pastor’s voice “lifted toward the ceiling like helium in an airship.” It’s a mixed bag. Agent: Danielle Matta, Robin Straus Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Balasingamchow debuts with a thrilling narrative full of hairpin turns and complex questions about the narrator’s reasons for being on the run. The protagonist, a 37-year-old Singaporean voice actor who goes by Ophir, unspools her story in the form of a podcast recorded somewhere in America. Her trouble started back home, 10 years earlier, when her best friend Nirmala convinced her to hold onto stolen cash from a guy they call Charlie. As Ophir tells it, Nirmala is caught by the police, and Ophir, afraid of the same fate, takes Charlie’s $60,000 and flees the country. She works as a hostess at a bar in Tokyo, loses the stolen cash in Switzerland, and, years later, winds up in London working at the Golden Pearl Noodle House. She stays under the radar until Florissa, a former school friend, unexpectedly visits the Golden Pearl. After Ophir finds herself in the middle of Florissa and her husband’s dangerous marital spat, she pulls up stakes once again. Ophir is an endlessly companiable narrator despite her patently unreliable version of events, which careens like a roller coaster from one scrape, mistake, or escape to the next. It’s a blast. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Elan’s magnificent debut traces the reverberations of a computer game on the work of late-21st-century ecologists and seafaring migrants in the distant future. In 1983, college student Becks grieves the loss of Ben, her computer programmer uncle who died of AIDS. As she digs through Ben’s possessions in her grandmother’s house, she uncovers an unfinished video game, Homebound, that he left for her, and she sets out to complete it, reveling in the material language of computer programming (“Words between people... is like a glaze over the realness of action and being.... But code is the doing, is the thing: words and syntax and rules creating their own world”). In 2086, UC Berkeley professor Tamar Portman, who inherited a copy of Homebound from her late mentor, makes the startling discovery that Chaya, a robot she built to study ecosystems damaged by climate change, has become sentient. Later, Tamar and Chaya play the game together, in which an astronaut is lost in space. In a third thread, Chaya sails north in 2586 with a group to a site where they believe a time-traveling spaceman will return to Earth. Elan intersperses the sprawling epic with fascinating ontological discussions on the nature of life (“You are a part of our collective intelligence, part of the great spiral of being,” Tamar tells Chaya). It’s a marvel. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (May)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Royal palace intrigue animates this intelligent novel from Benjamin (The Swans of Fifth Avenue). When King Edward VIII abdicates the throne of England in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, his decision elicits intense resentment from his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who subsequently rises to Queen Consort while her husband, Bertie, becomes King George VI. Elizabeth also harbors ill will toward Wallis, whom she dubs That Woman, and determines to prevent Wallis from receiving the designation of her royal highness. As WWII nears, Elizabeth rues David (as the former King Edward is now known) and Wallis’s carefree travels across Europe and his apparent affinity for Hitler. During the London Blitz, Elizabeth and Bertie face the danger of German bombs and support those who lose their homes to the blasts. Wallis dislikes Elizabeth as well, believing that Elizabeth has been instrumental in having the couple exiled to the Bahamas, where David serves as governor, and that she’s behind Bertie’s decision to withhold funds David requested. Benjamin capably combines fact with fiction to detail private conversations between the characters and their innermost thoughts, as Elizabeth and Wallis seek to preserve their own interests while supporting their respective husbands. Those who can’t get enough of the British royal family will be riveted. Agent: Stacey Testa, Writers House. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

A scientist grapples with the discovery of a mysterious sea creature and its impact on a small island in Yang’s assured debut. Marine biologist Jo Ness receives a call from Nadia, her best friend and unrequited crush in college, after 11 years of silence. Nadia implores Jo to come to the tiny island off Maine where she lives, to examine an unusually large jellyfish. When Jo arrives, she’s greeted with hostility from the locals, who warn her about the dangerous jellyfish, a giant glowing creature they nicknamed Clementine. Meanwhile, Nadia’s husband, Roger, reports that she’s gone missing. Determined to find Clementine, who appears every full moon, Jo panics when she spots both the animal and what seems to be the dive-suited ghost of her former diving partner Aldo. Jo attempts to leave the island, only to discover the real reason why Clementine is such a threat. Racing against the next full moon, Jo struggles to save the islanders from danger while navigating her jealousy toward Roger, recurrent sightings of Aldo, mixed signals from the host at her bed-and-breakfast, and other complications. Yang’s crystalline prose captures the characters’ fear and yearning. It’s a well-crafted literary monster tale. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Waidner (Corey Fah Does Social Mobility) pays homage to the Beckett Trilogy with a spectacular and surreal story of doppelgängers trading places in modern-day London. Aubrey Lewis, an actor, is out of work at 46 and grieving his wife, Laurie, who died three years ago from cancer. One day, an unemployed man named Lindsey Korine mysteriously enters his flat “like he owned the place,” having followed Lewis after noting they bear a striking resemblance to each other. Korine learns that Lewis had a role in the long-running TV series People Live, People Die, People Live as If They Were Already Dead, which followed sleuths A. Smythe and B. Smith, each hired to spy on the other, an “existential feedback loop which the series exploited for tragicomic effect.” Lewis played Smythe’s partner, C. Schmidt. Lewis and Korine argue when Lewis announces he’ll refuse to audition for the starring role in a new show centered on a character based on Schmidt. Ultimately, Korine goes in his place and gets the part. Weeks pass as Korine settles into Lewis’s life, while elsewhere, a happier Lewis finds purpose as a stay-at-home husband to Korine’s wife, also named Laurie, and raises the couple’s young son. As they struggle to keep control of their new roles, each man becomes desperate and more violent, fearing the other will come back and reclaim his identity for good. Waidner’s delightfully absurd story offers deep insights into the lengths people go to escape their lives. This tale of ambition, loss, and desire for purpose is one of a kind. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

Originally published in 2003, this deeply human story from Jeyamohan (Stories of the True) tells of slavery, religious hypocrisy, official corruption, and arranged marriage in 1991 Tamil Nadu. Perennially cash-strapped patriarch Pothivelu Pandaram puts on a pious face by working as a custodian at a Hindu temple. In fact, he makes his living from the horrific practice of breeding and trading a group of deformed people he and his associates call “items,” whose proceeds from begging on the temple steps he transfers to his own pocket. One has just given birth to her 18th baby, and he stuffs the pair and his other “items” in a van bound for a Hindu festival in the temple town of Pazhani. What unfolds there and back home is painful to read: Pandaram’s overseers regularly beat the beggars, the police abduct and rape one of them and leave her in the hospital with a broken spine, and Pandaram, who’s contracted a venereal disease, makes an ill-fated deal with another enslaver. When his plans to marry off his oldest daughter backfire disastrously, he unleashes his savagery on his own household. Yet the novel is eminently readable, thanks to the unsparing view not just of Pandaram’s cruelty but his folly, as well as the wit and wisdom of the beggars. Observing the festivalgoers, one says to another, “They’re going a-begging. Begging to the lord on the hill.... We beg these folks for money. And they beg the beggar God.” This is a masterpiece. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink

See’s stirring novel (after Lady Tan’s Circle of Women) interweaves the stories of three Chinese immigrants in 19th-century Los Angeles. In 1870, the small, dirty city is home to just 180 Chinese residents, including 30-odd women. That year, Dove’s scholarly Cantonese father earns a large “bride price” by arranging her marriage to an elderly Los Angeles merchant who covets the status conferred by a young, beautiful wife. After Petal’s starving peasant family sells her into servitude, she’s forced to perform sex work at a brothel controlled by one of the city’s Chinese tongs. By chance, Dove and Petal meet Moon, a happily married woman trying to get pregnant, and they bond over their mutual powerlessness. (“Not one of the thirty-four Chinese women in Los Angeles came here by choice,” Moon observes dryly.) All three are endangered when white rioters loot the Chinese community and massacre nearly 20 men in October 1871. See builds a taut story from precise details, such as the fact that Petal will have to service an average of seven men a day, six days a week, to earn out her four-year contract. Without minimizing the period’s racism and misogyny, See offers an inspiring vision of female resilience. Agent: Sandy Dijkstra, Sandy Dijkstra Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/10/2026 | Details & Permalink