The well-rounded debut from Leung delves into the conflicting attitudes of student activists during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, which were triggered by a proposed bill that would have eroded the Chinese territory’s sovereignty. At the story’s outset, college student Ah Lei accepts an invitation from her roommate, Panda, to join her at a peaceful demonstration. Ah Lei isn’t “the most political person,” but she’s galvanized by the proposed bill and transformed by witnessing police brutality during the event. Afterward, she can’t understand how Panda sustains her carefree nature. Subsequent chapters portray other protestors, including Panda’s friend Ah Mak and his girlfriend, Chan Yuek, along with Chan Yuek’s sometimes lover Ho Sam. Each chapter shows how a character’s usual routine is disrupted by the protests, and how their bonds are tested by arguments over whether to use violence. Some of the dialogue is too expositional and flat, such as Panda’s claim that “without a democracy or votes that count, we can still speak with our wallets.” Leung is stronger when chronicling the inner lives of these young adults who find themselves at the center of history even as they contend with lovers’ quarrels, sibling rivalries, and other quotidian rites of passage. It’s an intimate portrait of bravery in the face of repression. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bhattacharya (The Sly Company of People Who Care) serves up an illuminating tale about a woman fighting for her agency in India. The daughter of a railway worker in the township of Bhombalpur, Charu Chitol is five in the 1960s when her mother dies from a fever. As the only sister to two boys, Charu is burdened by domestic chores during the ensuing years of famine, drought, and workers’ strikes against inflation. At 16, she runs away from home, boarding a train to Bombay with aspirations of making something of her life by enrolling in college. She moves in with her maternal uncle and takes a job as a saleswoman, which she keeps secret because her family looks down on working women. When her uncle finds out, he and the rest of her family pressures her to get married, but Charu stands firm and moves into a women’s hostel. Eventually, she becomes a welfare inspector and learns how those belonging to lower castes are exploited and mistreated. Through Charu’s experiences, Bhattacharya provides a wide-angle view of India’s inequality and patriarchal gender roles, all while depicting in intimate detail how his protagonist struggles to live on her own terms. This satisfies. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The animated if jumbled adult debut by Hamm (author of the YA novel The Black Kids) traces the shifting fortunes of a 1960s singing group. Talented brothers Roman, Rocco, and River perform as The Johnson Three. After a promising but unsuccessful audition in Detroit, they come home with a stowaway they found on the side of the road, the ghost of a lynched vaudeville performer whom Reed describes as “pickaninny prodigy Christmas Jones the Third.” Christmas uses his hanging rope as a neck brace, and his body is burned and wrecked, but he becomes part of the group thanks to his vocal chops. Their father uproots the family to California to pursue their recording career, but a violent act by the ghost dooms the group’s chance at fame. Heartthrob River goes solo and becomes a megastar, making fans swoon with a dance move he picked up from Christmas, but the others founder. Roman enlists in the Army and fights in Vietnam, while Rocco, who is neurodivergent, is institutionalized against his will. The story becomes increasingly hard to follow as it stretches into the 1990s, with myriad continuity problems, but Reed pulls at the reader’s heartstrings with her depictions of the characters’ early promise and misfortune. It’s a mixed bag. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Honek’s distinctive English-language debut tells the story of a rural Polish village through 13 interconnected tales. The narrator of “Permission to Land” looks back on his childhood friendship with Andrzej and Pilot, the latter of whom is regularly beaten by his parents and tormented by their peers for being a “runt,” and the story ends with Pilot’s bizarre and tragic death. “The Little Bell,” one of the strongest entries, follows a girl named Dorotka who is staying with her grandmother and the grandmother’s 17-year-old dog, waiting for her mom to arrive. The story takes on an increasingly dark tone as the visit progresses. “First the Hair Caught Fire” chronicles the moments before a fire in 12-year-old Eleonora’s home. “On Cemetery Hill” similarly centers on a fire, this one set by Andrezj, who burns many of his belongings before making another fateful decision. Honek is skilled at atmospheric descriptions, as when a house grows so quiet that one can hear the thumping of a cat’s paws as it plays with a dead mouse. This vivid collection dances along the thin line between the living and the dead. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

At the outset of Shah’s engrossing debut, 12-year-old Deepa befriends new girl Ruchi at their Bombay Catholic school. Deepa is thought of as ordinary, while the nuns admire Ruchi for her academic promise and determination to become a doctor. As teenagers, she and Deepa experiment with kissing and imagine living together. At 21, Deepa marries Sanjay Jain, a doctor who applies for a work visa in Connecticut. A few years later, Ruchi is arranged to marry Naren Mehta, an engineering grad. The couple follows Deepa to Vernon, Ct., where Deepa has a daughter, Anu, and Ruchi becomes pregnant with her son, Moksh. As their kids grow up, Deepa bonds with the neurodivergent Moksh, whom she recognizes as reserved like herself. Meanwhile, she criticizes Anu’s looks and remains willfully ignorant of the girl’s queer sexuality. Deepa’s family is wealthy thanks to Sanjay’s salary, while Naren’s poor spending habits relegate Ruchi to a life of debt in a dilapidated neighborhood. Deepa helps Ruchi get a job handling the billing for another doctor at Sanjay’s practice, where she discovers that he is engaged in insurance fraud. Bitter and resentful after Deepa begins snubbing her in favor of wealthier friends, Ruchi calls in an anonymous tip that upends their lives. Shah has a talent for teasing out the mysterious nature of desire and the complex bonds of community, family, and friends. This is one to savor. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

An artist’s bohemian existence in Berlin implodes in this exquisite novel from Joseph (At Certain Points We Touch). Shortly after meeting handsome Berlin-based stranger Alexander at a London bar, Charli, an art-school graduate from a working-class family in Liverpool, impulsively follows him to Berlin. She joins an eclectic, hard-partying community of foreigners, including Polly, an Anglo-Irish artist Charli met in art school, and Finley, an American painter, DJ, and sex worker. As Charli falls deeper into a demimonde of drugs, parties, and sex, she devotes herself to supporting Alexander’s burgeoning career as a pop star. His rising fame brings out tensions in their relationship, leading to a series of betrayals that set the characters on a path to tragedy. Joseph’s pitch-perfect voice propels Charli’s story toward its bitter end, and her keen eye captures both the hardscrabble glamour of her characters’ lives and the dark underside of a dream come true. This fierce and original narrative has the feel of a classic. Agent: Zoe Ross, United Agents. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Dark, strange, and gripping, Shannon’s debut revolves around the unnamed narrator’s obsession with cleaning. For the 20-something woman, an aspiring painter and art school graduate saddled with “an ungodly amount of student debt,” cleaning had long been a “nuisance.” But now, back living in a small English town with her parents, she becomes compulsive about tidying, starting in her parents’ house, where she grows attuned to “the art of each movement” and feels “light-limbed and coiled with energy” from simple tasks such as emptying a cupboard. After getting a job as a cleaner at an art gallery, she stumbles upon fellow aspiring artist Isabella doing coke in the bathroom and the two hook up. They get caught having sex by the owner, and the narrator loses her job. She urges the flighty Isabella to tell her live-in boyfriend, Paul, that she has been hired to clean their home, and after Isabella inexplicably disappears one day, the narrator assumes her place as Paul’s companion. Shannon’s writing is delightfully weird and witty as she tracks her narrator’s metamorphosis “from a daytime creature into a night-time hag” who spends her days sleeping, her evenings with Paul, and her nights in Isabella’s studio. It’s a memorably off-kilter portrait of a woman’s search for meaning. Agent: Helen Edwards, Helen Edwards Rights Agency. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jones (An American Marriage) delivers a triumphant novel of two motherless girls from rural Honeysuckle, La., who follow very different paths into adulthood. Vernice “Niecy” Davis is orphaned as an infant and raised reluctantly by her free-spirited aunt Irene, who dispenses such advice as “If you ever get a chance in life, grab you a preacher, but just temporarily. Don’t fool around and end up being somebody’s first lady.” Before Niecy learns to talk, she befriends Annie Johnson, who’s being raised by her grandmother after her “trifling” mother, Hattie Lee, left her at one month old. In Annie and Niecy’s alternating narration, the women reflect on their abandonment—Niecy’s in a permanent sense, as her father killed her mother and himself, while Annie always hopes that someday Hattie Lee will return and grow to love her. After high school, Niecy leaves for Spelman College in Atlanta, where her wealthy roommate, Joette, nicknames her “country mouse” and chastises her for spending so much time thinking about her “other girlfriend,” Annie, who’s been writing to Niecy about her torrid misadventures on the way to Memphis in search of Hattie Lee with her ex-boyfriend’s cousin Bobo. Annie’s and Niecy’s paths continue to diverge, first when Niecy entertains a suitor at Spelman and later when Annie gets unexpectedly pregnant. Still, they remain the most important person to the other even as it feels like they’re on “different sides of a waterfall,” as Annie puts it in a letter. Throughout, Jones tells her protagonists’ stories with grace, humor, and pathos. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Argentine artist and poet Denis makes her English-language debut with a vivid yet scattered chronicle of a 20-something woman trying to make sense of her disordered existence. The lyrical novel unfolds in the second person, as the unnamed narrator addresses her ex-boyfriend, whom she first met when they were teens and she saw him breathing fire in a field, where “parts of you shone like a Vermeer.” Unemployed and living off an inheritance, the narrator moves into her ex’s apartment to look after his cats while he’s hospitalized for a mental breakdown. She yearns for the routine and stability of a full-time job, reflects on her miscarriage years earlier, and has one-night stands with other men. The fragmented chapters are sometimes awkwardly cut together, to the point that they lose cohesion or momentum, but Denis reels the reader in with indelible images and provocative hints at the connections between the narrative’s various strands (“That the cat I gave you attacked me is probably one big metaphor for something I don’t understand”). Along the way, the narrator considers how she might make a new life for herself and stop feeling like a ghost. Admirers of cross-genre works by writers like Kate Zambreno will find much to appreciate. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

A 30-something poet navigates the vagaries of freelance copywriting work in Poppick’s reflective and often funny debut novel (after the poetry collection Fear of Description), which unfolds as a series of journal entries. The narrator, D__, has devoted his life to poetry. His partner, Lucy, with whom he lives in New York City, is also a poet, as are his friends Ruth and Will. Though he’s invested in these relationships, something ineffable is missing from D__’s life. A “permalancer” for a failing consumer product company, he keeps a fire wall between his “stupid” copywriting and his poetry. Sometimes he tosses gigs to Will, who, hilariously, doesn’t make the same distinction and turns in product descriptions that read like absurd prose poems (“The era of normal umbrellas is over. That’s why this umbrella isn’t normal: it’s kind of cool. This is a cool umbrella”). After D__ is laid off, he and Lucy break up, and he finds he can’t write poetry anymore. He drives Ruth across the country to where she’s entering a PhD program, makes notes about the poems he longs to write, and reads Proust to try and understand the nature of time. D__ is a frank and companionable narrator, who endears himself to the reader with his devotion to the “parallel dimension” contained in poetry. This portrait of a modern-day Bartleby is a blast. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/12/2025 | Details & Permalink