A young Black woman tries to figure herself out by pushing the boundaries of her open relationship and attempting to write an autobiographical novel in the wry debut from Blassingame. Cat, 24, an MFA student in Washington, D.C., is in an open relationship with her college boyfriend, Jay, a schoolteacher in Los Angeles. Confessing to the reader that she’s “always been restless,” she connects with Jay’s best friend, Tristan, and the two begin an ill-advised sexual relationship, which they keep secret from Jay as well as from Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, an art student who happens to be painting a portrait of Cat. Meanwhile, Cat plugs away at her novel about a young Black woman who opens her relationship and tries to “locate herself in this bigger feminist story.” To make ends meet, she works in a restaurant, while Jay considers a career in politics, galvanized by the 2024 election, which sows divisions on Cat’s campus. Although at times the narrative packs too much in—telling the story of Cat’s parents’ marriage alongside her own romantic entanglements and struggle to stay focused on school amid political upheaval—the result is a painfully realistic and enjoyable portrait of a messy young adulthood. It’s a promising first effort. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary Management. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Charged with purpose, this hard-hitting autofiction from Louis, which is being published simultaneously with Collapse, details the period in the author’s late 20s when his mother, Monique, left her physically abusive third husband and began a new life as an independent woman. After managing her initial escape with the help of Louis and his siblings, Monique learns to operate a computer, purchases a small house in Paris, and confronts the distance between herself and her adult children, with whom she’s experienced varying degrees of estrangement. In Louis’s case, their break came with his first novel, The End of Eddy, in which he unsparingly depicted his home life with his father, a controlling drunk, which scandalized his mother. But as the second half of this novel makes clear, Louis is not out to hurt his mother, but rather to offer a clear-eyed view of their lives, even if it means examining why Monique might have been prone to reenact the trauma of each previous marriage with another violent husband. Louis also grapples with the limits of literature, wondering if it can make up for the world’s pain. Uncommonly honest and deeply moving, this is an unvarnished record of a mother’s disastrous relationships and redemption. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Louis (History of Violence) opens this revelatory autofiction, which is being published simultaneously with Monique Escapes, by confessing that he felt nothing upon learning of his heavy-drinking older brother’s death at 38. The two brothers hadn’t seen each other in nearly 10 years, and the unnamed man’s fatal heart attack came as little surprise given his history of substance abuse. Nevertheless, Louis resolves to write the history of his late sibling, a would-be master butcher who was “sick because of his dreams” that went unrealized. The brother’s story takes shape after their parents’ divorce, when he turns to petty crime. Later, he is accused of rape. Alternately cruel and exploitative toward Louis, whom he once threatened to kill for “speaking badly” about their family, the brother doesn’t seem redeemable. But Louis reveals the depths of his compassion and his ability to shape a complex story when he adds the perspective of a woman named Stéphanie who knew his brother. She believed he was overlooked by society, and attempted to help him reform. In the end, Louis determines to make the novel “a rampart against forgetting.” It’s an earnest and richly inquisitive portrait. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Montrone’s beautiful debut chronicles a contemporary American girl’s coming-of-age over the course of two consequential summers at her maternal grandmother’s agriturismo in Italy. Ten-year-old Leonora, who goes by Leo, spends long days in the pool, but is happiest when her father, a gregarious and volatile Brooklyn-born humanities professor, regales her with his versions of Homer’s epics. After her grandmother puts her to work cleaning guests’ rooms, she develops a habit of pocketing jewelry and other items, and she likens herself to Odysseus “dripping in the spoils of her clever intrusions.” Trouble lies beneath the surface of the lush setting and Leo’s childhood wonder, as Montrone hints when Leo’s father drunkenly smashes a glass, cutting himself. The novel’s flawless first part ends with a tragic turn. The second and final part finds Leo, now 18, back cleaning rooms and falling in love with new coworker Dolores, an American woman about her age. There’s little tension beyond Leo and Dolores’s will-they-or-won’t-they, but Montrone vividly harnesses the ache of first love and the youthful yearning for self-understanding, which, for the poetic-minded Leo, is as much tied to death and fate as it is to sexual desire. This will stay with readers. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Taylor (Beyond the Moon) delivers an immersive tale of enduring love between a British woman and a German Catholic seminarian on the eve of WWII. In 1936, 16-year-old Kitty Garland-Fry moves to the island of Guernsey with her artist father, mother, and siblings. Not long after, she meets Lukas von Harnitz, who’s visiting his British-born maternal grandparents. Lukas is drawn to Kitty and her free-spirited family but remains conflicted about his feelings for her and his call to the priesthood. Lukas’s cousin Caspar, a German military officer, also visits Guernsey and is equally smitten with Kitty, though her heart belongs to Lukas despite his efforts to distance himself from her and remain true to his priestly aspirations. Brokenhearted after both men leave, Kitty accepts Caspar’s invitation to visit him in Bavaria, eager to leave behind memories of Lukas, who has since returned to the seminary. When she arrives, Germany is on the brink of war and Caspar’s family mocks her country’s policy of appeasement. Taylor heightens the drama of Kitty’s love triangle when the trio converge in Berlin amid Germany’s escalating tensions, and Kitty, stuck in the country, faces the brutality of Hitler’s regime. WWII fiction fans will be riveted. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

Ward revisits the dysfunctional Perkins family of her 2020 novel, The Jetsetters, with a charming romp through a new set of crises. Regan, now divorced, has moved with her two teen daughters from the U.S. to Athens, Greece, and she disappears after going to meet her online boyfriend for the first time in person. The girls contact their grandmother, Charlotte, in Georgia, and she dispatches Regan’s older sister, Lee, a former reality television star dealing with bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, to help out. Meanwhile, Regan and Lee’s middle sibling, Cord, fights alcoholism and phone addiction while reeling from a likely breakup with his sweet-natured fiancé, Giovanni. Ward gives each family member a turn in the spotlight, darting among their points of view from one crisp cliffhanger to the next, pausing occasionally to reveal long-held family secrets or dispense pop psychology insights into the Perkins’ bad behavior. The novel takes a breezy approach to the characters’ mental health problems, which sometimes rubs the wrong way but for the most part humorously reflects their cattiness toward one another (when the medicated Lee tells Charlotte it’s time for her pills, Charlotte haughtily says, “mine aren’t for my brain”). It’s a bouncy ride through a well-meaning family’s calamities. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

This gripping and grounded tale of friendship and self-delusion takes place in rough-and-tumble Stone Mountain, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondacks that’s less like its upscale, tourist-destination neighbors and more like the Rust Belt communities Russo portrayed in his early novels such as Mohawk. Tyler Sinclair, frontman of famous rock band Stone Mountain and the only native who made something of himself, is returning for the first time in 20 years to kick off the group’s latest tour with a fundraiser for a local man, Tim “Doc” Dockery, who was paralyzed below the waist in a swimming accident that Tyler and his best friend, Curt, now the town’s police chief, witnessed when they were teens. In Tyler’s mind, the reason he left at 18 was because Curt’s girlfriend and now wife, Freddi, was in love with him, and he didn’t want Freddi to leave Curt. Curt, meanwhile, told himself the same thing. As the narrative unfolds, it emerges that at least one of the main characters is responsible for running opioids into town, and Curt and Tyler face their respective naivety and narcissism to reckon with the real reason behind Tyler’s flight. In between action sequences, including a deadly high-speed chase and a shoot-out in an abandoned church, Russo probes the flawed and soul-searching characters of the two men and finds the meaning of their lifelong bond. It’s a memorable literary thriller. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

An Irish writer named Bartholomew “Mew” Port walks magically from a London park into his native Dublin, where he finds the city abuzz with a mysterious leftist revolt, in Ridgway’s scintillating and dreamlike latest (after A Shock), which teems with big ideas about the complex legacy of the Troubles in a country transformed by immigration and wealth. Mew deeply misses his lover, Mahmoud “Mootie” Habib, but for the time being he’ll have to settle for the company of two hotel porters whom he befriends after expressing sympathy for their planned strike in the futuristic city, which has banned cars and replaced them with trams and pedestrian conveyer belts but is riven with income inequality. It turns out the porters are part of the Dublin Initiative for Socialist Housing, described in the xenophobic press as “verging on the terroristic.” Soon, Mew learns about an alphabet soup of opposing groups including the reactionary paramilitary IPRO and the pro-landlord RDC. These, along with glimpses of DISH members speaking to each other in huddled whispers after a meeting, evoke the Troubles’ partisanship and secrecy, while the government’s violent crackdown and extrajudicial detentions recall Britain’s anti-republican repression. As the body count rises, Mew wonders if he’s dead or dreaming, but Ridgway never abandons his marvelous fantastical conceit, leaving Mew to grapple with the limits of his devotion to Mootie and to the cause he’s become swept up in. It’s a bracing and singular state-of-the-nation novel. (June)

Reviewed on 04/24/2026 | Details & Permalink

When film director Agnès Septembre learns her aunt Colette has just died, the news comes as a surprise, as Agnès was previously told Colette had died three years ago. Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers) intertwines multiple story lines surrounding the ensuing mystery in this entrancing drama. Agnès finds a suitcase of audio cassette tapes recorded by Colette among her belongings, which, as the reader eventually discovers, hold the answers to Agnès’s questions about why Colette faked her death and who was buried in her place. Listening to them, Agnès learns about a former circus performer named Blanche, who finds refuge from her abusive father, Soudoro, in Colette’s home, unbeknownst to anyone in Colette’s family. She also gets the story of Colette’s difficult upbringing by an ignorant, cruel mother, her career as a shoe mender, and her devotion to her piano prodigy brother, Jean. The plot ramps up when Soudoro, released from prison for beating Blanche’s mother, becomes fixated on Agnès. The epic saga satisfies despite an over-the-top final twist, and Perrin juggles the myriad plotlines with élan while maintaining suspense. It’s a gripping story about the power of friendship as a safe harbor from abusive families. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Eggers (The Every) unfurls a decades-spanning story of love and art. At 15, Cricket Dibb begins commuting from his home in 1980s Indiana to a drawing class in Chicago, believing it’s time to take his work seriously if he ever wants to become a real artist. His talent attracts the attention of classmate Olympia Argyros, a fearless girl one year older, who encourages him to exhibit his nude life drawings at his school library. Cricket falls in love with Olympia, but she’s restless and fickle. Meanwhile, he finds solace in his friendship with Jed, his coworker at a convenience store, after his drawings are banned from the library. Later, ROTC graduate Jed gets deployed to Kuwait during the Gulf War and dies in a freak accident, inspiring Olympia to curate an installation in his honor. Olympia flits in and out of Cricket’s life, stoking his erotic and emotional devotion (“She’d always felt free to touch any part of him at any time, and he did not mind”). As Cricket reaches middle age, he has melancholy but sanguine epiphanies about a life dedicated to art and his enduring passion for Olympia (“Every year Cricket felt more—of everything—and every year his eyes had only gotten better, younger, his aperture opening, opening, opening”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink