In this thrilling what-if scenario from historian Hawley (The Imjin War), the U.S. sends three—not two—atomic bombs to Japan during WWII, and one falls into enemy hands. In August 1945, the B-29 Wicked Intent sets off from Tinian Island with the U.S.’s first atomic payload, destined for Hiroshima. But the plane is shot down and the crew killed before the bomb can be dropped. The bomb is then discovered intact by Japanese petty officer Ryohei Yagi, but nobody knows what kind of weapon it is. Once it’s ascertained that the bomb contains uranium, Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara of the War Ministry asks Keizo Kan, a civilian scientist, to investigate the device. Kan is shocked to discover that he is staring at a working atomic warhead. Five days after its capture, Hiroshima is destroyed in a second bombing mission, and Sagara orders Kan to get the captured bomb ready to be used against the Americans before they can launch another strike. Kan proceeds, despite knowing Japan’s surrender is inevitable. Meanwhile, Sagara plans to launch one last desperate act to alter the outcome of the war, setting the two men on a collision course that builds to a pulse-pounding climax. The result is the most imaginative take on Hiroshima since Edwin Corley’s The Jesus Factor. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

The tense debut novel from Martins (after the story collection The Sun on My Head) follows a group of friends in Rocinha, the largest of Rio’s favelas, during a government crackdown in the months prior to the 2012 World Cup. At the height of the summer, Washington works tirelessly at a restaurant alongside his brother Wesley, whose dependency on cocaine spirals out of control. An intersecting narrative follows Murilo, a fellow favela resident and soldier for the military police, who has a vivid nightmare in which he slaughters his friend and roommate Douglas during a raid. After Murilo and Douglas lose their apartment due to their other roommate Biel’s erratic drug-fueled behavior, the trio find a place next door to the brothers, who encourage Douglas to follow his dream of becoming a tattoo artist. By November, the military police occupy Rocinha under the guise of the drug war. Biel, wishing he had some weed, is tormented by the roar of helicopters, while Murilo increasingly questions his role in the state-sponsored violence. Martins’s plainspoken prose takes an honest look at how drugs provide relief from boredom and oppression while offering an unsparing view into the dangers of addiction. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down. (July)

Reviewed on 05/23/2025 | Details & Permalink

Huber (Voice First), an associate professor of creative writing at Fairfield University, and essayist Bayne (The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook) assemble an eclectic tribute to Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, who died in 2023. How O’Connor’s feminism influenced the book’s contributors is a major through line. For example, novelist Zoe Zolbrod recalls discovering O’Connor’s music in college, when the musician’s decision to shave her head in response to “her record label’s plan to market her as a pretty girl” inspired Zolbrod and her friends to enact their own forms of “bodily protest” (“One after another, women showed up at the house with shorn heads, rubbing their palms over their stubbly scalps for the sensual pleasure”). NPR journalist Allyson McCabe positions O’Connor as a truth-teller who was open about being abused by her mother, while essayist Myriam Gurba intriguingly reframes O’Connor’s relationship to religion and ethics, noting that despite the musician’s take-no-prisoners image, she was “generous with both apologies and forgiveness. She understood the velocity of grace... how it could move between two people.” While many of the essays focus on the same incidents—including O’Connor’s famous 1992 SNL performance, during which she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II—the book’s varied registers (some lyrical, others analytical) ensure that the perspective is never repetitive, and the composite effectively reveals the intimate ways in which an artist can shape her listeners’ lives. The result is a vivid and multifaceted ode to a trailblazing musician. (July)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Huynh’s zesty sophomore effort (after The Fortunes of Jaded Women), the five Trân siblings compete for their inheritance. Duc, founder of the national Duc’s Sandwiches chain, assigns each of his four daughters one of the company’s floundering outlets, on the provision that if they manage to turn their store around within one year, they’ll get a cut of his estate. However, he also says that if their older brother, Jude, gets married before that time, he’ll get everything. In Houston, Jude starts falling for his fiancée, Phoebe, after making a deal with her to marry for Duc’s money. Meanwhile, the youngest sister, Georgia, encounters their estranged mother Evelyn—who walked out on the family 20 years earlier—in New Orleans, where she runs a Duc’s restaurant. The reasons behind her departure gradually come to light after Bingo, one of the middle sisters, who’s stationed in Philadelphia, uncovers a previously unknown link between Evelyn and family friend Huey Ngô, who helped Duc upon the latter’s arrival in Texas when the KKK was terrorizing immigrants. Adding to the present-day drama, Jude finds out Phoebe is seeing someone else. Some of the final revelations are a bit far-fetched, but Huynh keeps up the momentum with lively dialogue. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Jordan Hill, New Leaf Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Johnston (Campusland) channels Tom Wolfe in this clever satire of diversity initiatives in academia and business. William Sanderson is a junior executive at Bedrock Capital, a premier personal finance firm in New York City, where he’s angling for a promotion. He also hopes his teen daughter, Ginny, will follow in his footsteps to Yale. But both aspirations threaten to be derailed by performative DEI programs. Casper Stein, Bedrock’s founder and CEO, is eager for his firm to land a jackpot deal with California’s public pension system, but the company will only be considered if at least one of its board members identifies as LGBTQ+. Their HR head doesn’t know for sure about each board member’s sexuality, prompting William to embark on a quixotic and farcical quest to produce a gay board member. Meanwhile, Ginny’s prep school, Lenox Hill, embarks on a bizarre and unscrupulous scheme to earn favor from Yale by proving it’s more diverse and inclusive than other schools, leading administrators to bribe a trans student’s parents into transferring their child to Lenox. William’s and the school’s campaigns backfire spectacularly, especially after the latter provides fodder for a tabloid reporter. Johnston holds no cows sacred in this entertaining take on the roles privilege and virtue signaling play in the pursuit of ambition. Admirers of The Bonfire of the Vanities ought to take a look. (July)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Yu (Ghost Music) delivers an arresting story of two sisters grappling with their past as the gradual disappearance of the sun throws their town into chaos. The unnamed narrator, a young woman who has inherited her family’s pharmacy, witnesses a phenomenon that will soon spread through her village of Five Poems Lake: as the sun is set to lose its final sliver, certain people’s heads are inexplicably turned into small suns. The events cause rioting and fears of the apocalypse in the historically isolated area, from which no one who has left has ever been known to return. Twelve years earlier, the narrator’s policeman father disappeared and is presumed dead. Now, after the narrator discovers a possible link between his death and the sun-head people, she and her sister investigate what happened. Coupled with flashbacks from the father’s perspective in the days leading up to his disappearance, the narrative dives into the painful issue of family secrets, exploring questions of whether they should be exposed or remain buried. The pacing flags at times, due to the narrator’s lengthy bouts of introspection, but a keen sense of the sisters’ bond shines through. This confirms Yu’s mastery of the mesmerizing and strange. Agent: Anna Webber, A.M. Heath. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kivel debuts with a rollicking and resonant modern fairy tale of real estate and its discontents. Twenty-something graphic designer Evie Cavallo is evicted, along with every other full-time tenant in New York City, as part of the mayor’s radical scheme to boost tourism by converting housing into short-term rentals. Both of Evie’s parents died several years earlier, just a few months apart, and she has lost touch with her younger sister, who was living at home when their parents died and has been institutionalized following a mental-health crisis, which was exacerbated by losing their rented apartment. Evie’s desire for a fresh start and a semblance of family drive much of the narrative. She travels to Gulluck, Tex., and looks up her late mother’s long-lost cousin, Terry Lang, a real estate agent who puts her up in a carriage house. Evie settles in, getting to know Terry’s strange children and a local keymaker named Bertie, while also taking community-college classes in shoemaking and finding she has a knack for the craft. Things take a surreal turn when Evie discovers a legion of secretive, and possibly immortal, shoemakers that it may just be her destiny to join. While Gulluck feels like a magical place, one of the residents insists to Evie, “it’s not exactly that.” Indeed, even as Kivel brings her weird and wonderful cast of characters to vibrant life, she never drops the incisive real-world commentary on the housing crisis and rising inequality. The result is a sui generis delight. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

A Jewish German teen gets caught up in her family’s drama in Vowinckel’s ambitious if uneven debut. In summer 2023, Margarita, 15, is visiting her maternal grandparents in Chicago, where she spends most of her time repulsed by her grandmother’s terrible cooking and pining for a boy back in Berlin. Her father, Avi, an Israeli who moved to Germany to serve as a cantor before she was born, has sent her to Chicago to practice English and foster her relationship with her grandparents even though Marsha, their daughter and Margarita’s mother, abandoned her and Avi more than a decade earlier. Margarita is blindsided when the adults decide to send her to Jerusalem, where Marsha is on a fellowship. Marsha fails to show up at the airport, leaving Margarita unattended for a night. The novel begins with fast-paced chapters that abruptly alternate between Margarita’s and her father’s points of view, but it gains substance when Avi shows up in Israel. There, tempers flare as nonobservant Marsha mocks Avi’s piety and excoriates his decision to stay in Germany, where antisemitism remains rife, while Margarita takes her mother’s criticism of Germany personally (“It’s not like I want to be German,” she tells her mother. “I just am”). Readers will appreciate this nuanced look into a Jewish family’s divisions. (May)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

Sanz makes her English-language debut with an appealing work of autofiction about a middle-aged Spanish writer dealing with chronic pain. The novel begins with the narrator growing concerned on a transatlantic flight about a bump on her chest, which quickly becomes a source of morbid fixation. Upon returning home to Madrid, she whimpers to her husband, “I’m going to die.” Her subsequent doctors’ appointments are both somber and comical: “I can’t tell if what I’m seeing is my body or a scene from a horror movie,” she notes during a cardiac stress test performed by a grumpy nurse. Alongside refreshingly honest insights into the physical and mental difficulties of menopause, Sanz proffers equally honest reflections on the perils of being a writer. “We’re literary Stakhanovites, trapped in a Soviet worker culture that reveres hard labor as its own reward,” the narrator says in reference to her unpredictable monthly earnings. Such pithy asides are juxtaposed with lengthy and intense descriptions of the narrator’s pain as she attempts to come to terms with it. For a novel about an obsession with mortality, this witty tale brims with vitality. (July)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the gripping and heart-rending latest from Adam (Golden Child), a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier. When Dawn Bishop got pregnant at 16 in 1980, her wealthy parents, owners of a popular juice company in Trinidad and Tobago, sent her away to have the baby. Now 58 and a recently divorced former doctor in London with two grown sons, she decides she’s ready to break the silence about her long-ago “mistake,” as her parents called it. Hints of regret and holes in her memory pervade her narration as Dawn attempts to fit together the “disconnected pieces” of her life. She begins with her father taking action after he found out she was pregnant, arranging a harrowing journey for her with smugglers to Venezuela, where she had the baby in a convent. In the present day, she returns from London to Trinidad and Tobago, where her older brother helps her dig up clues about her daughter, but the heart of the novel is in Dawn’s attempt to make sense of the trajectory of her life: “Maybe my story wasn’t: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe it’s: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost.” Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/16/2025 | Details & Permalink