Hans Christian Andersen visits Charles Dickens and his family in this revealing novel from Prose (The Vixen). The first section is narrated collectively by the nine Dickens children, who are confused and saddened by their customarily jovial father’s coldness and angry impatience since he moved the household from London to Gad’s Hill, a rural mansion in Kent. With the arrival of Andersen in spring 1857, the children find the perfect target for their pranks and mockery in the gangly and hypersensitive Dane, who speaks very little English but worships Dickens. In the next part, Dickens, 45, details his infatuation with a pretty 17-year-old actress he has cast in his new play. His torment hardly justifies his cruel treatment of his wife, Catherine, whom he taunts and demeans. He’s also intensely jealous of his guest, refusing to show Andersen any approval or encouragement. Just as the reader begins to tire of the Dickens family, Prose turns to Andersen. In this final, vibrant section, the Danish writer reflects on his frustrations as a gay man unable to maintain a satisfying relationship, and he accurately details all that he has observed at Gad’s Hill in a thinly disguised fairy tale about a comet causing fear and wonder. There’s much to admire in this tale. (May)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer. Set to great effect in San Diego, the novel centers on Perdita Jungfrau, a middle-aged therapist mired in postpartum burnout and marital resentment, who meets sad-eyed anarchist-Marxist Nando Acuña, 15 years younger, while he’s working on her neighbor’s roof in 2007. They bond over music—she used to be in a feminist rockabilly band, which she describes as sounding like “Kate Bush falling down a flight of stairs,” and he plays drums. In 2010, after their affair implodes, Nando is gunned down in what may or may not be a random mugging, and Perdita comes to suspect that his wealthy ex-girlfriend—whose canyon-view home she envies—is stalking her. Neyenesch writes with scorching candor about the isolation and boredom that drives Perdita to pursue Nando with increasing desperation, “deranged by obsessive love.” To her chagrin, Perdita discovers that Nando “wasn’t hot in an offbeat way that was special to me—he was totally hot,” and something of a lady-killer. The plot hinges on a very substantial twist, but the book’s real power lies less in the whodunit than in Perdita’s singular interiority and caustic humor. There’s much to admire in this off-kilter story of a woman’s midlife crisis. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In Peterson’s big-hearted debut, a queer woman returns to her indie music roots and the bandmate who broke her heart. Ten years before the start of the novel, when Jamie Cain was a teen in 2002, her band the Maidenheads were beginning to gain notoriety in Washington, D.C. But after she broke up with her bandmate and girlfriend, Mari Dvali, the pain was too much and Jamie left the band. Now, she’s toiling as an editor for an alt-weekly in Baltimore and hooking up with her ex-boyfriend, Peter, while Mari, a singer who sounds like “if Tom Waits were a twentysomething dyke,” has begun to garner attention with her new group, Les Somnambules. Using her press credentials, Jamie attends a Les Soms show and reconnects with Mari. After Jamie visits a practice and ends up singing with the band, Mari makes the unilateral decision to invite Jamie into Les Soms. The move causes discord within the band, specifically with guitar player Amanda, Mari’s ex. As Mari and Jamie begin secretly dating, Jamie must reckon with their volatile history and face old fears of where she belongs in the queer community. The sheer joy of making music comes through on every page, as does Jamie’s determination to be herself. Indie music fans should snatch this up. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Orphan Train author Kline offers a daring and deeply empathetic tale of the sisters who married conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874). Immigrants from Siam, Chang and Eng respectively marry Addie and Sallie Yates, distant relatives of the author, in 1843 Wilkes County, N.C. Sallie, who narrates the novel, is more reserved and tentative than her outgoing younger sister and has a hard time with their new domestic arrangement (the four share a bed), which she describes in clear but not prurient detail (“Even the most extraordinary life feels ordinary when you’re living it”). The novel follows them through the decades on their plantation in North Carolina, as the two women give birth to a total of 21 children. Kline uses their unusual circumstances to cast a light on the pressures of marriage and sisterhood as Sallie begins to assert her own identity and starts to question the institution of slavery, which the other three take for granted. Avoiding sensationalism and hewing closely to the historical record, Kline subtly and often poetically documents the small, daily choices that shape these lives. It’s remarkable. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Lakhani’s perceptive debut follows the fates and fortunes of an Indian American family facing an impending loss. Shortly after their engagement, Ramzan persuaded Sakeena to leave her beloved home city of Rawalpindi, India, and relocate to Florida. Thirty years on, they have established a toehold in America, co-owning a Miami Dunkin’ franchise and raising three children. Sustaining their business has been a struggle, especially with a shiny new McDonald’s nearby, and Sakeena has always been torn about abandoning the Muslim tenet of naseeb, or destiny, and reluctantly consenting to fertility treatments to conceive their firstborn daughter, Fareen. Now, at 60, Sakeena has an autoimmune liver disease that, if left untreated, will kill her. Rather than agree to a transplant, Sakeena sees her illness as a second chance to submit to naseeb. Ramzan beseeches their children to help change her mind, but Fareen is on the verge of nabbing a coveted promotion, while their only son, Adnan, faces charges in Monaco for his counterfeit sneaker operation, and his twin sister, Kawal, still in Miami, feels underappreciated. The bittersweet, character-driven narrative offers piercing insights into the meaning of fulfillment and the cost of success. This satisfies. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Thompson debuts with the scintillating tale of a disillusioned Cambridge University PhD student who goes on a killing spree. Yrsa is at an impasse (“It must have happened gradually, subtly, her life becoming this tedious”). She struggles to contain her boredom with teaching and her disdain for her privileged students, like the one who claims her lecture on intersectional feminism is too woke. Meanwhile, she’s floundering with her dissertation on Afropessimism and women’s liberation. The plot kicks into gear after she learns her best friend’s research has been stolen by her lover, a married professor named Richardson. Not long afterward, she witnesses Richardson being stung by a bee and neglects to offer help as he goes into anaphylactic shock and dies. Yrsa then begins identifying other “bad” men to kill, such as her former lover and classmate, a white man who fetishizes Black women and admits to joining his friends in devising a ranking scale for the women they’ve slept with (“Black girl magic, 20 points!”). The homicides revive Yrsa’s energy for her dissertation, until she receives an anonymous email reading, “I know what you’ve done.” Thompson adds intriguing layers to the sordid thriller plot, such as accessible descriptions of the complex sociological theories of Saidiya Hartman and Stuart Hall, and the story includes a shocking revelation about the origin of Yrsa’s killer instinct. There’s a staggering level of depth to this pitch-perfect satire. Agent: Nicola Chang, David Higham Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the incisive debut from Ghanaian American writer Alonté, a woman’s friendship is strained by a child custody battle. Raised in Oakland, Calif., low-key Dzifa meets her vivacious bestie, Tatiana, when both are college students in Massachusetts. Seven years later, Dzifa is living in Brooklyn with Tatiana, until Tatiana gets pregnant with her daughter, Maddie. A year and a half later, Tatiana, Maddie, and her partner, B, are living in Boston and have just had a new baby, Luca, who was born with a serious heart condition. Dzifa is back home in Oakland when she gets the call that Luca has died. She rushes to Boston, where she is thrust in the middle of a power play between Tatiana and B’s parents, who support B’s decision to sue for full custody of Maddie. Dzifa also has her own family drama, including her unstable and vindictive mother and her holier-than-thou sister. Alonté does an excellent job illustrating the characters’ grief in the wake of tragedy, along with Dzifa’s heartfelt desire to support her friend. This will move readers. Agent: Alex Kane, WME. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this innovative polyphonic novel, Yamashita (Sansei and Sensibility) blends archival documents with fictional flourishes to chronicle the detention, forced removal, and conscription of Japanese Americans during WWII. The title is a reference to two sections of the U.S. government’s Loyalty Questionnaire for internees, which asked whether they would fight for the U.S. and denounce the Japanese emperor. If they answered in the negative, they were segregated from other internees and cast into a no-man’s-land of statelessness, while those deemed loyal were conscripted to fight in the European theater, where many of them died. Many second-generation Japanese Americans found themselves caught in a fraught middle ground, which Yamashita dramatizes by detailing the murky role of the Japanese American Citizens League, which deepened divisions and confusion by placating the U.S. government rather than defending its community. Yamashita employs a bold blend of perspectives, from scans of questionnaires to oral histories and even a trombone, who travels with its owner, an 18-year-old who passes as Chinese, to join a “wannabe Glen Miller band.” The result is a powerful and lively novel that documents the turmoil endured by internees while raising enduring questions about identity, loyalty, and citizenship. Agent: Chris Fischbach, Fischbach Creative. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stories of addiction and underemployment feature in the bare-knuckled fiction debut from journalist Strickland (You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave). The unnamed narrator of the title entry, a high school senior, dreams about heading to California from his hometown in north Texas, leaving behind his alcoholic mother and memories of his older brother who died at age 16 from a heroin overdose. In “Mockingbirds,” a former teacher, now mopping floors at an abortion clinic, is hounded by an anti-abortion protester intent on making him into a villain online. In “Rent Money,” a woman in her early 20s comes to terms with the shortcomings of her 41-year-old husband, a heavy-drinking slumlord for “meth monsters” who tries to goad her into collecting rent, a far cry from the “clean, simple life” he promised her when they got married five years earlier. Strickland laces his hardscrabble scenes with lyricism, as in “Screaming East on I-10,” when a young drifter living alongside crack addicts describes taking a hit of the drug, then notices how “night bruises the sky purple.” In each piece, grief underscores the characters’ recklessness, imbuing the collection with an unsentimental but tender emotional register. Strickland’s humane depictions of people living on the margins acknowledge the forces that shape them. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

A restless stay-at-home dad searches for purpose in this arresting if scattershot novel from Politanoff (You’ll Like It Here). Ned Lafferty is unhappy about losing his job, as well as the fact that his six-year-old son, Frederick, still isn’t “self-sufficient” and more closely resembles his increasingly detached wife, Loraine. When Ned pulls his old tennis racquet from the garage, he’s flooded with memories from his glory days, which ended 14 years ago, during his freshman year of college. Hoping to “live a little,” he joins the local tennis club and plays matches while Frederick is in childcare. The occasional casual game turns into heated competition after Ned is told by an old playing partner, “You can’t just play for fun once you’ve tasted glory, the kind that you’ve had.” Ned’s need to reinvent himself, his effort to make friends, and his simmering competitive streak lead to him becoming the captain of the men’s recreational summer league, and Politanoff creates tension as Ned keeps the whole thing secret from Loraine. Most of the characters are broadly sketched, but Politanoff parlays his own experience as a former D1 tennis player into brisk and technical descriptions of the sport. Despite its faults, there’s plenty here to enjoy. Agent: Chris Fischbach, Fischbach Creative. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink