The nuanced debut from Mezghebe finds an Eritrean American teen seeking answers about her late father’s life as a revolutionary martyr. In 1991, Lydia Negash, 13, lives with her steely mother, Elsa Haddish, in Alexandria, Va. Eritrea has just gained independence from Ethiopia after a long war, and all Lydia knows about her father, Efrem, is that he died fighting in the war in 1978, before she was born. Elsa, once a fierce idealist who fought alongside Efrem, emigrated to the U.S. with Lydia when she was an infant. Now, Elsa sells hot dogs on the National Mall, and tries to protect Lydia from details of her and Efrem’s violent past. With the arrival of Elsa’s free-spirited 19-year-old cousin Berekhet from Addis Ababa, Lydia longs to learn more about her roots. She seeks answers from Berekhet and her surrogate aunt, Zewdi Naizghi, a neighbor and distant cousin who sells home-cooked Eritrean food to fellow immigrants. The knotty truth about Efrem comes out later in flashbacks from Elsa’s perspective. Along the way, Mezghebe crafts a kaleidoscopic portrait of the ways her characters are torn between duty and desire for independence, as Berekhet resists his family’s expectations that be become a doctor and Zewdi considers leaving their tight-knit community for a suitor in California. Readers will find much to admire. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Benedict’s immersive latest (after The Queens of Crime) weaves the stories of an ancient Egyptian ruler and the Englishwoman obsessed with finding her tomb. In 1919, George Herbert, also known as Lord Carnarvon, and Egyptologist Howard Carter resume their excavation of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, which they’d begun in 1907 and put on hold during WWI. Carnarvon’s 18-year-old daughter, Eve, resists her mother’s insistence that she focus on marrying well and instead learns Egyptian history and archaeology from Carter, who supports her desire to discover traces of Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s few female pharaohs. Eve joins the excavation team in 1920, but Carnarvon calls a halt to their work when they’ve failed to turn up anything significant by 1922. Eve persuades him to invest in one more digging season, which, though it yields no sign of Hatshepsut, discovers Tutankhamun’s tomb. A parallel narrative opens in 1486 BC with Hatshepsut as a young princess. In 1479, after Hatshepsut’s husband dies, she fears for the kingdom’s stability and defies tradition by adopting a male pharaoh’s garb and powers. Hatshepsut’s narration feels a bit stiff (“I tell myself to be grateful for the power I have—most women have none”), but Benedict evokes the excitement of archaeology in colonial Egypt with an abundance of lush details. There’s plenty to enjoy in this story of two women defying expectations. Agent: Laura Dail, Laura Dail Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Readers of Huxley’s Brave New World will find glimmers of that book’s dark humor and sterling powers of observation in this stellar 1923 lampoon of English intellectualism after WWI. Protagonist Theodore Gumbril Jr. teaches at an insignificant prep school for boys, work he pursues with little enthusiasm. “You weren’t sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it,” his father says. “That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds.” Gumbril performs scarcely better in a harebrained business venture, having quit his post and laid his hopes on making a fortune by selling “trousers with pneumatic seats,” an idea that came to him while sitting on the school chapel’s uncomfortable pews. What ensues is an uproarious kaleidoscope of character sketches as Gumbril tries to drum up interest in his project from a series of London acquaintances. Among them are Shearwater, a dilettante medical enthusiast; Lypiatt, a failed artist and self-proclaimed “man of genius”; Mercaptan, a bloviating critic; and world-weary socialite Mrs. Myra Viveash. The story isn’t really about the pants, but about the men’s failures. Each of them fumbles at profundity while trying to gain the affections of the beautiful Myra, which adds an entertaining dimension to Huxley’s excoriating depiction of self-seriousness and idleness. It’s a riot. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Zhang (Four Treasures of the Sky) explores the line between fandom and idol worship in her sharp sophomore outing. Minnie, a college freshman, feels isolated until she discovers the boy band HOURglass, who draw inspiration from K-pop. She obsessively follows the group online and connects there with fellow fans, finding a reprieve from her real-world failures. Zhang alternates Minnie’s story with that of band member Eason, the group’s “bad boy,” who’s harboring a dark secret involving his older sister, Faye, which the group’s Svengali-like mastermind, a record label executive known as The Duke, uses as blackmail to keep him in line. The plot verges on melodrama, whether in revelations about Faye via flashback or a present-day attack on another HOURglass member by a rabid fan. Still, Zhang draws intriguing connections between Minnie and Eason by showing how they each become increasingly dependent on HOURglasses’s fame, as Minnie derives satisfaction from her deepening parasocial relationship with the band, while Eason comes to rely on fans’ adoration, to the point that he finds it “increasingly difficult to leave the stage.” It’s a perceptive take on the limits to a relationship between fan and star. Agent: Stephanie Delman, Trellis Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

McGuire follows up The Abstainer with a staggering portrait of the schemers and villains who populate Prince of Wales’s Fort, a barren outpost of the Hudson Bay Company in what is now northern Manitoba. In 1766, an unreliable fur trader offers a rock with a sliver of gold running through it to company manager Magnus Norton, suggesting that more can be found in the barren Esquimaux lands farther north. Norton enlists his vicious, self-serving deputy, John Shaw, to lead a small party on a secret mission to find the gold deposits and bring enough home to make them all rich. The introspective and melancholy seaman Tom Hearn joins the party, along with Norton’s naive nephew Abel Walker; their Dene guide, Datsanthi; his troubled son, Nabayah; and their wives Pawpitch and Keasik. Much of the expedition, which goes violently and tragically awry—Keasik is impregnated by Shaw, who loses an arm in a wolf attack—is shown from Hearn’s perspective. The frigid winter conditions and the gut-wrenching sexual and racial violence perpetrated by Shaw—as savage as any villain in recent literary memory—are brought to vivid life by the author’s keen talent for storytelling and willingness to depict the depths of human cruelty. Though some expedition members make it back alive to tell the tale, the story’s ending is a shock, as McGuire explores in the final twist how hope and honor can be liabilities in a world of temptation, treachery, and retribution. It’s a stunner. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 11/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Gospodinov, whose novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize, offers a beautiful meditation on identity and mortality. The unnamed narrator, a prize-winning Bulgarian author, wonders about his fate, now that his father has died and his mother is in poor health: “Do we still exist if the last person who remembers us as children has passed away?” He recounts the stages of his father’s illness, from a diagnosis of terminal cancer 17 years earlier, which seemed to be miraculously cured, to the cancer’s recent and fatal return. He draws lyrical insights from his father’s devotion to his garden (“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden”) and describes the helplessness and sorrow of watching his father’s decline. The descriptions are wrenching, but they’re leavened with moments of humor, such as when the narrator remembers the “first aid kit of tales” that his father, an excellent raconteur, drew on to provide much-needed laughter. This will stay with readers. Agent: Kristi Murray, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

An ordinary man suffers an existential crisis in Nobel laureate Pirandello’s fascinating 1926 novel, freshly translated by Wilsey. Vitangelo Moscarda spirals after his wife, Dida, points out that his nose leans slightly to the right, which he’d never noticed before. He becomes obsessed with the gulf between how he sees himself and how others see him and ponders the fundamental instability and unknowability of the self. Having retreated into solitude, he develops a theory, based on the fact that his last name means maggot, that there are “a hundred thousand men all with that single name, Moscarda... living inside this poor body of mine.” To prove his point about the chaos of existence, he performs a series of outlandish stunts, bequeathing his home to an ex-con, attempting to close the bank his late father owned, and falling in love with an unhinged woman who subsequently shoots him. Pirandello marshals the dizzying material with a masterful hand, providing clarity no matter how far his narrator stumbles in the dark, as when Moscarda appeals to the reader, “have faith that I’m constantly struggling to provide you with the same reality that you provide for yourself; that I long for the you in me to be the you that you see when you’re thinking of yourself.” Those with a taste for philosophical fiction ought to snatch this up. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Guterson (The Final Case) offers a moving account of the entwined lives of an American woman and a Tibetan monk. Evelyn Bednarz grows up in the 1960s feeling restless in her small Indiana town. At 18, she leaves home and hitchhikes across the country. Interested in Buddhism, she stops at a Buddhist retreat center in New Mexico, where she carries heavy limestone to help build their temple in exchange for a place to stay. Back on the road, she meets a man named Scott in a bus station. They travel together and become lovers, until he makes the abrupt decision to leave her. She then discovers she’s pregnant and heads back home to Indiana to raise her son, Cliff. A parallel narrative follows Tsering Lepka, who’s raised by monks in the Tibetan mountains and declared to be the sixth incarnation of their monastery’s late leader. Unsure if he can spend the rest of his life on a throne, he leaves for the U.S., where he translates Tibetan manuscripts for a Seattle professor. A few years later, Evelyn receives unexpected and miraculous news that might link Cliff, now five, with Tsering. The narrative feels a bit aimless, but the ending, in which Evelyn finally finds a sense of purpose, is deeply satisfying. The author’s fans will appreciate this subtle tale of spiritual seeking. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Moskovich (Virtuoso) offers a raw novel-in-verse of a Ukrainian American’s passionate affair with a Russian woman in Berlin. The unnamed narrator was born in Soviet Ukraine and left with her family in 1991, when she was seven, for the U.S. As a young woman dealing with depression, she fled to Paris and then settled in Berlin, where she met her partner, a Russian expat named Nadezhda. The narrator doesn’t feel like she belongs in the places she’s lived (“I’ve always wanted / a city to love as my own”) and she has faced lifelong persecution for her Jewishness. Her relationship with Nadezhda is intense and obsessive (“she’s my Russian Bonnie, I’m her Ukrainian Clyde,” the narrator muses at one point). Though the two bond over their Soviet heritage and queerness, Nadezhda’s lack of interest in having children drives a wedge between them, as does her misinformed Russian family, especially after her mother parrots Putin’s claims that the 2022 Russian invasion was meant to rescue Ukrainians from fascism (“Nadya, your face is getting red, I like Ukrainians, her mama said”). Throughout, Moskovich effectively evokes her narrator’s dizzying rootlessness and all-consuming love for Nadezhda. It’s a memorable portrait of the ways in which desire defies reason. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

A struggling writer is linked to a series of mysterious deaths in Fishkind’s beguiling debut. While drinking and wandering alone on the night of his 26th birthday, Jacob Garlicker witnesses a brutal stabbing on the beach at Coney Island. After consoling the victim, he panics and flees. Soon after, his downstairs neighbor, Lauren Smith, is murdered. At the crime scene, he tells detectives Powell and Winston that he didn’t know Lauren or anything about her demise. Seven years later, Jacob, now married to the wealthy Emma and having failed to publish his novel, has come to accept that his writing about “male ennui” is simply not marketable. That summer, he travels with Emma to the Hamptons for her father’s birthday celebration. There, Jacob is routinely belittled, as when Emma’s family friend Dr. Masterson makes fun of his surname. Then Jacob finds Masterson dead on the beach, and Powell and Winston show up to question him about Lauren, Masterson, and two other deaths, causing him to claim, “There’s been a whole weird conspiracy or something.” Though the novel is somewhat baggy, it coheres into a satisfying portrait of a ne’er-do-well coming to terms with his choices. Once this gets its hooks into the reader, it doesn’t let go. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 11/21/2025 | Details & Permalink