The stimulating sophomore effort from National Book Award finalist Flournoy (The Turner House) follows five Black women over two decades of soul-searching and turmoil. The nonlinear narrative begins in 2008 with Desiree, a young waitress in Los Angeles, feeling unmoored after the death of her grandfather, who raised her along with her sister, Danielle, from whom she’s estranged. Seeking a fresh start, Desiree moves to Manhattan a few years later. There, she stays with her wealthy childhood friend Nakia, a restaurant manager, and considers reconciling with Danielle. The pair’s other friend, influencer and graphic designer January, who is pregnant, contemplates asking the father, her first and only partner, to relinquish his rights to their child so she can explore what else life has to offer. In 2019, university librarian Monique, another member of the friend group, blogs about her school’s unwillingness to acknowledge its historical role in the slave trade. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Nakia generously supports her staff but doesn’t make a show of virtue signaling (“She didn’t aspire to be known as good—she loved Monique but had no desire to become an Internet Person”), all the while wondering how she might find fulfillment. Flournoy’s pages radiate with intelligence as her characters attempt to shape their lives on their own terms. It’s a knockout. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Purvis attempts to channel the Brontës and Shirley Jackson in this inspired if undercooked debut about dangerous paranoia in an 18th-century English village. The “season of strangeness” in Little Nettlebed begins with the catching of an enormous “unnatural” sturgeon in the nearby Thames, which some see as a sign of the devil. The five Mansfield sisters—Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, and Mary, who live on a farm with their blind and recently widowed grandfather Joseph—elicit enmity from the villagers with their exclusive bond and seeming condescension. Thomas Mildmay, who works on the farm, becomes entranced by the eldest sister, the dark and powerful Anne, while ferryman Pete Darling nurses his resentment toward them after a handful of perceived slights. When Pete thinks he sees the Mansfield girls transforming into dogs, it’s possible his grudge has clouded his reason. Either way, he spreads the claim widely, after which every awful event, including the killing of a coop full of chickens, is attributed to the sisters. Fear of the Mansfields spreads, and the novel culminates in a murder. The story alludes to modern-day paranoia and scapegoating without offering significant surprises or memorable insights, but it sustains an eerie vibe, and Purvis depicts the disturbing sisters and bucolic setting in sensual prose. Neo-gothic diehards will find enough to enjoy. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Oyeyemi (Parasol Against the Axe) unspools a confounding tale of a woman split seven ways. Kinga Sikora, 40, lives in Prague, where, each day of the week, a different version of her, named Kinga-A through Kinga-G, takes over her body and leads a completely different life. Each version records the day’s events in a diary for the others to read, as they have no memories of each other’s actions. Several of them scheme to wrest control from self-appointed leader Kinga-A, who works in a bank on Mondays and condescendingly chastises the others for such habits as ordering expensive takeout. Kinga-A also briefs the others about a strange outfit called the Luxury Enamel Posse, which breaks into homes and stuffs the occupants into suitcases along with a bunch of loose teeth and blank checks. What this all means remains elusive, but it provides context when Kinga-A discovers a handsome man named Jarda tied up in her pantry, who claims the posse is after him. On Friday, Kinga-E, a perfumer’s muse, meets a fellow foreign woman named Milica, who turns out to be connected to Jarda, and the disparate threads spin wildly on their way to a surprising conclusion. The novel is hard to follow, but it’s held together by hypnotic prose and a healthy dose of absurdism. Adventurous readers will enjoy following its twisty path. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gelfuso’s engrossing debut follows the adventures of a Jewish girl who hides in a fantastical realm during WWII and devotes herself to protecting collective memories. It begins in 1938 Germany during Kristallnacht, when 11-year-old Lisavet Levy’s watchmaker father sends her into the time space, where people’s memories are bound in books, to save her from the Nazis. Though he promises to retrieve her, she winds up trapped in the time space with a specter, who teaches her how to access the memories stored in the books. As the war progresses, she discovers that German, American, and Russian timekeepers have gained access to the time space and are each trying to destroy memories of atrocities to shape a version of history that favors their own country. In 1949, Lisavet strikes up a romance with an American timekeeper named Ernest Duquesne and becomes pregnant with his child. A parallel narrative set in 1965 Boston follows Ernest’s 15-year-old niece, Amelia, who’s drawn by a strange woman into the time space to find a book in which Lisavet hid all the memories she saved from burning. Gelfuso seamlessly blends elements of romance and fantasy into the twisty quest narrative, and packs excitement into every page. It’s a delight. Agent: Jennifer Weltz, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (Aug.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the year in which the character Lisavet Levy strikes up a romance.

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

A bookseller embarks on a surreal ontological quest in poet Mimosa Montes’s brilliant debut novella (after the collection Thresholes). Upon waking in the two-bedroom apartment she’s just started renting for the summer, the unnamed narrator is momentarily confused as to where she is and when, and sees bloodstains on the sheet. She’s also plagued by visions of rabbits with horns. These destabilizing visions, coupled with thoughts of suicide, compel her to “become a narrator, so that I might appreciate the world.” Determined to “pass through time like a tongue without a body,” she stops paying her phone bill, quits her job at a bookstore, and puts an indefinite hold on her mail, all in pursuit of the silence her “experiment” requires. The narrator considers the boundary between life and art on a visit to an artist’s open studio in her building, where she observes a painting in progress bisected by a green line (“Something was getting worked out.... Though nobody, not even the painter, knows where this green really comes from, nor where the essence of this green is going”). For such an abstract story, the ideas conveyed are succinct and artful, and the narrative moves toward an unexpectedly poignant conclusion. This is luminous. (June)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bloomsbury editor Oliver cues up The Devil Wears Prada for the music industry in her incisive debut. South Bronx native Billie Grand, 24, dreams of a job in A&R, spotting talent and using her position to lift up the voices of other Black people. When she finally lands a coveted assistant position at Lit Music Productions in Manhattan, it’s far from what she’d imagined. Not only is she underappreciated and overworked, but her suggestions are ignored, and she’s pressed instead to give Black validation to mediocre white talent. After catching an opening set by singer Samirah, she knows right away that she’s found the kind of artist she wants to represent. She keeps in touch with Samirah and her manager, holding out hope that she’ll soon be able to sign her own clients. As Samirah and other artists of color are insulted with lowball offers from Lit, Billie tries to determine whether it’s possible to change the industry from the inside, or if she’s becoming part of the problem. Oliver adroitly tackles ethical issues about capitalism and race, and conveys an infectious passion for music. Pop fans ought to snatch this up. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (June)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the touching latest from Grodstein (We Must Not Think of Ourselves), a dejected 40-something woman travels halfway around the world to restore her sense of purpose. Amy Webb met her husband, Judd, 20 years earlier, while working as a line cook in his Manhattan restaurant. They married two years later, and she gave up her job not long after to help raise her stepson, Ferry. Several years ago, she turned to writing and became a college writing instructor, but she’s between assignments and classes, and Ferry is at Cornell for his sophomore year. After she sees sexually explicit messages from another woman on Judd’s phone, she suspects he is having yet another affair. She then embarks on a journey to Tbilisi, Georgia, to help find a lost dog named Angel. (She’s been following the search for Angel on social media and has sent donations to the cause.) Irine Benia, head of Angel’s search group in Tbilisi, offers to put her up. There, Amy encounters Irine’s elderly mother and aunts and her teenage daughter, Maia. She also meets Andrei, a mysterious, attractive boarder in their home who she considers sleeping with. As Amy gets her bearings in Tbilisi, the liberating effect of her desire for Andrei and surprising discoveries about Irine and Angel restore her long-buried instinct to put her needs first. The pleasure of the novel is in watching Amy’s transformation, which, despite being a well-worn trope, feels genuine. Readers will be transported. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wachman’s wrenching debut chronicles the Ukraine-Russia war from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy. Artem lives in Chernihiv, Ukraine, with his mother and younger brother, Yuri. The boys’ father, Tato, left eight years earlier for the U.S., where he works in construction. Artem barely remembers Tato in the flesh, but they speak on the phone and he thinks of his father regularly (“his absence sits on our couch”). Artem likes to draw and watch horror movies with his best friend, Viktor, for whom he recognizes a growing attraction (“I feel like bursting out of myself, the way that overripe tomatoes split when their insides become too much”). A far greater disruption occurs on February 24, 2022, when the Russians invade. The family are visiting Artem’s grandfather in the countryside, and the brothers hide in a trunk while the mother and grandfather are killed by soldiers. After the soldiers leave, Artem leads Yuri on a long, traumatizing walk home. He grapples with feeling “inadequate about protecting his brother,” especially when Yuri comes down with a fever. After they enter a shelter, they arrange to reunite with Tato, but escaping Ukraine for Romania, from where they plan to fly to the U.S., proves fraught. Wachman enriches the narrative with vivid images, such as the boys fleeing a barrage of rockets and bullets for a bus stop, where they encounter a corpse, and moving sentiments, as when Artem’s mother tells him, “This isn’t the future I wanted for you.” Though this striking novel can be painful, its rewards are extraordinary. Agent: Naomi Eisenbeiss, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Yahm’s bawdy and irreverent debut, a Jewish family copes with a congenital illness. Louise, an admittedly mediocre cellist, jokes bitterly that her late Orthodox mother, a Freudian psychoanalyst, messed up her psyche through religion and psychology. She marries Leon, a gentle and somewhat hapless therapist-in-training, in 1974. Five years later, they move from the Upper West Side to a farmhouse in Upstate New York with their baby daughter, Lydia. By the fourth grade, Lydia exhibits symptoms of OCD, such as excessive hand-washing, and they do their best to get her help. Then Louise starts experiencing neurological symptoms like her mother had. Louise believed her mother had died from brain cancer but then learns that she might have had a genetic disorder found among Ashkenazi Jews. In what she intends as a radical act of love, Louise deserts Leon and Lydia for a kibbutz in Israel, hoping to spare them the hell of seeing her waste away as her mother did. In Israel, she undergoes an experimental treatment. The story is heartbreaking, but it teems with life thanks to the family’s irrepressible witty banter. This cathartic novel will move readers. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Galef (My Date with Neanderthal Woman) delivers an uneven comic novel about a disgraced hospital orderly trying to understand his downfall. It’s the year 2000 and narrator Tony Mazza, 41, is joyriding in a stolen ambulance. After accidentally smashing into a Porsche, he’s arrested by a cop who calls an ambulance (“Um, another ambulance,” the cop clarifies), which transports Tony back to his own ER. Tony then takes readers on a reverse tour through his life, searching for answers to a question that has long plagued him: “Where did I go wrong?” He begins with his last job as a bartender and goes all the way back to his teenage and preteen years. At no point can Tony manage to make good, with misfortune or poor judgment repeatedly wrecking his chances for happiness and stability while his ne’er-do-well friend Sandy Quade always gets off scot-free. It’s Sandy who surfaces as a voice in Tony’s head telling him to do reckless things like steal the ambulance. Tony’s soul-searching persistently touches on a subplot involving the disappearance of his younger sister, Angela, when they were kids, and hints that the Quade family might have been responsible. Galef’s prose is tight and his sense of humor is sharper than that of Tony, who has a penchant for stupid jokes, but a late-breaking revelation feels emotionally manipulative. It’s a mixed bag. (May)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink