In Costello’s dark and intense debut, a family grapples with disturbing secrets during and after WWII. Louise, beautiful and intelligent, abandons her ambition to be the next Marie Curie when she marries Roland, her brother’s West Point roommate, and has four children in quick succession. During the war, Louise finds work at a Lockheed plant in Los Angeles, moving up from the assembly line to design airplane wings. Her father, brother, and husband all die serving in the Pacific. By 1948, the widowed Louise is embittered and drinking heavily, leaving her live-in mother to babysit while she works as a biochemist in Bethesda, Md. Kit Blunt, a volatile amputee and fellow POW whom Roland confided in, arranges to meet her in a bar, and they begin a stormy affair. A parallel narrative set in 1964 New York City follows Louise’s daughter, Charlotte, a book editor whose paralyzing night terrors interfere with her prestigious career. Lyrical passages depict Louise and Charlotte grappling with Roland’s death and revelations about Louise’s childhood that explain Charlotte’s painful memories of her own early years. Moody and atmospheric, this gritty tale is worth a look. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Campanioni (A and B and Also Nothing) offers an entertaining if messy collage of piquant observations about the nature of memory and storytelling. Presented as a series of fragments titled after classic films, the book begins with a prologue in which the narrator describes his attempt to write stories about his mother’s and father’s lives before they emigrated to the United States from Poland and Cuba, respectively. Instead of presenting his parents’ origin stories factually, he spins freely into fabrication and projection. In “What Dreams May Come,” Campanioni interrupts his mother’s memories of growing up in Poland shortly after WWII and playing dress-up with her opera singer mother’s costumes to muse on which details he’s invented and which were reported to him. In “Man Without a Face,” his cinephile father recalls a movie he’d seen starring Marlon Brando dubbed into Cuban (“which isn’t the same as Spanish”); Campanioni claims he’s thought about his father’s memories so many times that they have become his own. Unfortunately, the author frequently departs from the premise and opts not to develop any sort of narrative arc. It’s a mixed bag. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dermansky’s hilarious latest (after Hurricane Girl) kicks off with a hot air balloon crash in a backyard pool. Joannie, the divorced mom of an eight-year-old daughter, and her architect neighbor, Johnny, have just had their first tentative kiss when the balloon crash-lands in Johnny’s pool. The pair rescues its passengers, who turn out to be a wealthy couple trying to rekindle their romance. Julia Foster, a philanthropist, feels trapped in her stagnant marriage to tech billionaire Jonathan, who still desires her despite his frequent extramarital affairs. In classic Dermansky style, hijinks ensue as everyone agrees to a sleepover at Johnny’s house, where Joannie’s daughter Lucy ends up watching movies in the basement with Johnny’s young son, Tyson. Set during the Covid-19 pandemic and exuberantly told from alternating perspectives, the narrative explores each character’s secrets, betrayals, and desires. The highlight is Dermansky’s slapstick action and dialogue, such as her description of Jonathan and Julia’s crash (“They were screaming, not out of fear, but in anger. They seemed to hate each other. They were all dressed up,” Dermansky writes before one Foster says to the other, “I will kill you, if we don’t die!”). It’s a hoot. Agent: Alex Glass, Glass Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

A woman joins a cloister of nuns in rural Australia in this artful outing from Wood (The Weekend), which was a finalist for this year's Booker Prize. The unnamed narrator’s decision surprises her husband, from whom she is separated, as well as her friends and even herself, as she’s an atheist. In spare, unadorned prose, Wood weaves the narrator’s observations of the religious community’s day-to-day life in New South Wales with memories of the past, particularly of the narrator’s late mother. The plot is driven by a plague of mice at the abbey and the arrival of the remains of Sister Jenny, a former member who died while operating a women’s shelter in Thailand. Accompanying Sister Jenny’s bones is Sister Helen Parry, a famous environmentalist. Unbeknownst to the others, the narrator and Sister Helen Parry knew each other in high school, and their reunion brings up uneasy memories for both women. Woods’s exercise in restraint elides obvious questions of faith and the existence of God, instead offering subtle insights on the nature of forgiveness and grief. It’s an intriguingly secular tale of religious devotion. Agent: Pamela Malpas, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

The narrator of Gordon’s acerbic if exhausting debut reflects on people in his life who died young and his tenuous connections with former high school friends. Jacob, a 30-something magazine writer in New York City, hopes to get a raise and a promotion by starting a podcast. He heads to Los Angeles, where he meets with Kelsey, a classmate from his Chicago prep school. From Kelsey, Jacob learns that Seth, a gay Black man he was friends with, died from a heroin overdose a year after graduation, not from an ulcer as Jacob was originally told. Thinking the subject will appeal to his editors, Jacob successfully pitches a podcast about the mysterious circumstances behind the death, and the project morphs into more than he’d bargained for when he interviews classmate Lee, an indie rocker who might have sold Seth the heroin. Gordon’s scathing and often funny prose (the “fucked” state of America “added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up”) mostly makes up for his protagonist’s stifling self-absorption. Fans of Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland ought to take a look. Agent: Eloy Bleifuss, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Rho’s immersive debut novel (after the memoir American Seoul), a Pittsburgh woman explores her Korean roots. In 2006, recent divorcee Angelina Lee travels to South Korea, which she left at age six, to attend a summer university program in Seoul. Hoping to reunite with family she doesn’t remember and grieving her mother’s recent death by suicide, Angelina goes to Gwangju to meet a cousin and their grandmother. She discovers that her mother had an older sister, Sunyuh-unni, who was abducted by the Japanese in the 1940s and forced to work in a brothel. Though her grandmother has dementia, and her cousin is convinced that Sunyuh is dead, Angelina sets out to find her with the help of a fellow student and journalist named Keisuke Ono. The two search records, talk to a survivor of the brothels, and begin an affair, which Angelina ends, believing the younger man isn’t ready to become a step-parent to her two children. Rho expertly explores her characters’ complex emotions, especially Angelina’s, as she struggles to find contentment following a contentious divorce and wrestles with guilt over her inability to prevent her mother’s death. Readers will savor this weighty family drama. Agent: Amy Bishop-Wycisk, Trellis Literary Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

This shimmering, career-spanning collection captures Tillman (No Lease on Life) at her most beguiling, playful, and inventive. In “Come and Go,” three characters collide according to the whims of the narrator (“I have my reasons”). The ingenue at the center of “Coming of Age in Xania” blurs her description of the surreal film she’s cast in with an account of drifting between two lovers, while the narrator of “Aka Mergatroyde,” a fictional stand-in for the author, claims the name Lynne Tillman is a pseudonym and that she’s now going to tell the true story of her Mergatroyde family, beginning with an ancestor’s violent death in Scotland. In “Dead Talk,” actor Norma Jean Baker tells her story from the perspective of her Marilyn Monroe persona, while in “The Undiagnosed,” the narrator meets filmmaker Clint Eastwood at a party and they talk about their fathers. The title entry returns to the conceit of “Come and Go,” following several strangers as they wander a carnival. Tillman is infinitely clever and a master at concision, able to unspool both ordinary and epic tragedies in just a few pages. This is Tillman’s best book yet. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

South Korean writer Sohn’s intriguing sophomore novel (after Almond) revolves around a 30-something woman’s civil disobedience. Jinye interns at an adult education company, where she befriends coworker Gyuok at free ukulele classes offered by their employer, and they bond over their dissatisfaction with the ruling elite. Gyuok initiates a series of pranks by leaving a threatening letter on the desk of a manager who has poor personal hygiene, and soon Jinye joins him in other stunts, such as throwing eggs at a duplicitous congressman and ambushing a photo op with Korean movie stars. Along the way, Jinye grows more and more assertive (“I’m sick and tired of being crushed by people who have it easier than me,” she says). Halbert’s translation feels stilted in places (ambient noise pulsates during an outdoor concert “like a giant fetus”), and the plot strains credulity when the pair elude punishment for their transgressions. Still, once the action starts, this tale of self-empowerment through revenge holds the reader’s attention It's worth a look for fans of Parasite and Squid Game. Agent: Barbara Zitwer, Barbara Zitwer Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Martin picks up the thread from his 2005 novel, The Bright Forever, about the killing of a nine-year-old named Katie Mackey, in his subtle latest. In 1972, mathematics teacher Henry Dees disappears from small-town Tower Hill, Ind., after townspeople come to believe he helped a convicted murderer kill Katie, who was his student. He shows up in Mt. Gilead, Ill., where he rents a room from Edith Green, a lonely woman who impulsively promised a large gift from her recently deceased father’s estate to the town library. These two awkward outsiders begin a romance, which annoys Edith’s would-be suitor, Bertie Squiggs, and leads to questions about where Henry came from. When Bertie, a tow truck driver, happens to be in Tower Hill delivering a Mustang, he learns the police are looking for Henry. As revelations in Tower Hill raise the stakes, Henry and Edith get engaged and Bertie wrestles with whether to informthe police of Henry’s whereabouts. Martin’s slow-burn mystery runs on reflective character work and lucid prose, and he keeps the reader guessing right up to the end. This is one to savor. Agent: Gail Hochman: Brandt & Hochman Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Desire, extreme weather, and uncanny events figure into this stellar collection’s five stories. In Nobuko Takagi’s “The Hole in the Sky,” an unhappy 45-year-old university administrator whose dishonest husband is away on business drives through the rain preceding a typhoon's landfall in Fukuoka and meets a strange, storm-chasing boy. “Husband in a Box” by Tomoko Yoshida centers on a housewife whose shut-in husband—who happens to be extremely small—ventures outside for the first time to attend an opera with her. Taruho Inagaki’s “The False Mustache” is a dreamlike story of queer desire in which a middle school boy privately acts out his favorite scene in a movie, the death of a naked soldier, and is caught by the young man who is boarding with the boy’s family. “Hot Day” by Takako Takahashi begins with a man and a woman meeting in a run-down fishing port for a tryst; when there are no hotel rooms available, they take an endless walk in the blazing heat that turns surreal and hallucinatory. Taeko Kono’s “Cage of Sand” follows an unnamed middle-aged woman whose composure begins to crack when her husband leaves her alone for months at a time. All five entries are wonderful and provocative. For fans of contemporary Japanese fiction, it’s a must-read. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/03/2025 | Details & Permalink