In Lawrence’s incisive debut, a queer 30-something magazine writer struggles to navigate her professional and romantic relationships. While reporting on a gala in a borrowed dress, Lily Michaels meets Billie Aston, chief creative officer of a prominent beauty company. Well-known for her power suits and ruthless attitude, Billie gives Lily her number and asks to see the article when it’s published. From there, the two develop a fraught relationship in the “digital ether.” Initially, Lily sees a mentorship opportunity, as Billie is one of the city’s most powerful queer women. When Billie starts sending sexts, however, Lily becomes uneasy. While she knows she’s lucky to have Billie’s attention, she’s also aware that the executive has “zero compunctions about dismantling another, younger threat.” Lily, who has a reached a relationship plateau with her long-term girlfriend, Alison, must decide where her own values lie. Lawrence has an insider’s understanding of the media world, and digs deep into such issues as sexism, racism, and ageism. This marks the arrival of a promising new voice. Agent: Tia Ikemoto, CAA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

Outen shines in her debut about two brothers and their consequential climb on Mount Everest. Charter school psychologist Dixon Bryant sets a goal with his older brother, Nate: to be the first Black American men to summit the mountain. It sounds like a grand adventure, but during their April 2011 stay at base camp, where they wait for clear weather, they both wonder if they’ve underestimated the danger. After a foreboding scene involving an avalanche, Outen skips ahead to the fall of that year, with Dixon back at work. His colleagues’ subdued fanfare about his achievement implies that all did not go well on the mountain. Dixon’s return to the school proves short-lived, and as he retreats into isolation, Outen metes out the story of his and Nate’s ill-fated climb. Dixon has lost all but two of his toes, and he wears a prosthesis molded in “white man’s nude,” prompting him to wryly wonder if Black men aren’t “expected to lose toes... or just not to replace them.” As the reader gets oriented as to what happened to Nate, Outen credibly portrays the uncanny sensations of Dixon’s emotional and physical recovery (“He found himself in an afterlife he could not quite make out”). This one hits hard. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

The moving debut from Eisenberg finds two 30-something best friends reexamining their bond after one of them gets pregnant. Jess, a real estate agent in Hawaii, is the more organized of the two, taking comfort in the transactional nature of her interactions with others. Her roommate, Ren, on the other hand, is as unreliable as a “phone on the nightstand with three percent battery and no alarm set.” The two met as freshmen at the University of Hawai‘i and their lives have been interwoven since. Now, Ren craves a reprieve from her stagnant life as a bartender and fitness instructor in Honolulu. When she unexpectedly gets pregnant after a one-night stand with a tourist named Quincy, she and Jess decide to co-parent with Quincy’s help, now that he’s coincidentally decided to move there. As the friends’ relationship takes on new terms, the story builds to a crisis point involving a betrayal. The once inseparable twosome must decide if it’s one more storm they weather together, or if their lives are headed in different directions. Eisenberg offers a well-honed glimpse at an unconventional family and the obstacles to growing up. Agent: Abby Walters, CAA. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

In Tanner’s mordant debut, two sisters deal with their anxiety and depression while rooming together. Jules, 28, is less than thrilled when her younger sister, Poppy, moves into her Brooklyn apartment—temporarily, Poppy assures her. The sisters were close while growing up in their Jewish household in South Florida, and Poppy looked up to Jules. After Poppy finished college, however, she sank into a depression and moved back home. Recently, Poppy’s mental health seemed to improve substantially, and she announced plans to settle in New York City. Only Jules knows that before arriving in Brooklyn, Poppy attempted suicide. The pair bicker constantly, in a manner that is both comical and savage (Poppy throws a toenail clipping at Jules during a fight). As things go well for Poppy—she gets along with Jules’s boyfriend, finds a job, and plans to adopt a dog—Jules feels threatened. Anxious about being stuck in her dead-end job as a study guide editor, she soothes herself by “hate-stalk[ing]” the “tradfem” mommy bloggers on her Instagram feed (one of whom claims to have a “mom-crush” on her “mini-boyfriend”: her newborn). Though Tanner finds plenty of easy targets for Jules to mock, she never sacrifices the psychological acuity of the character’s sharply portrayed angst and mean-spiritedness. With unflinching honesty, Tanner captures the claustrophobia of 21st-century young adulthood. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

Lennon brings ancient Sicily to life with humor and pathos in his stunning debut. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are being held prisoner in Syracuse after a failed assault during the Peloponnesian War. Two unemployed potters, Lampo and Gelon, decide to recruit some of the prisoners, who have been left to die in quarries near the city, to perform a selection of Euripides’ plays in exchange for food. Gelon, fearing the defeat of Athens could mean the end of its rich history of tragic drama, wants to stage Medea and The Trojan Women, the latter of which depicts the grim aftermath of Troy’s defeat in the Trojan War. Lampo becomes increasingly invested in the project and discomfited by the brutal treatment of Sicily’s vanquished rivals. By giving his leads a sense of purpose during dark and bloody times, Lennon makes the success of their offbeat venture feel important to the reader, and he thoroughly explores the novel’s melancholy central theme—the world is “a wounded thing that can only be healed by story”—all the way up to the gut-punch denouement. It’s not all dreary, though. Lampo’s crackling modern vernacular adds just the right amount of levity, as when he comments on the hot weather: “Even the lizards are hiding, poking their heads out from under rocks and trees as if to say, Apollo, are you fucking joking?” Lennon’s vital tale captivates. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

In Jewell’s memorable debut, a clairvoyant and restless American woman grieves for her son who died in WWI and gains a new sense of life from an affair with a preacher. Isabel Fuller and her husband Edward are among the more prosperous farmers in their Southern community. Isabel wishes she had prevented their oldest son, Carl, from enlisting, as she sensed he would never come back. Amid caring for their three younger sons and household chores, the relationship between Isabel and Edward fractures. After the Fullers agree to let Pentecostal reverend Micah Kane hold his revival meetings on their land, Isabel feels a powerful and unexpected attraction to Micah, who not only reciprocates but also expresses sympathy for her grief and loneliness. The two embark on an affair. Much of the narrative involves Isabel processing her feelings about her attraction to Micah and concern about losing Edward forever. There’s also a tragic episode involving Caroline, a young orphan in the Fullers’ care, whose disappearance unexpectedly leads the Fullers to renew their bond. Jewell entices with her multidimensional characters, especially Isabel, a strong, complex woman seeking to overcome despair. The author is off to a promising start with this confident and dramatic family saga. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 12/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

This 1939 treasure from Polish modernist Gombrowicz (1904–1969; Pornografia), available in its entirety for the first time in English, involves a young tennis coach entangled in intrigue and supernatural phenomena. Leszczuk is visiting an estate in the Polish countryside to tutor tennis prodigy Maja Ochołowska, who’s engaged to middle-class schemer Cholawicki. Knowing that his fiancée finds him repulsive and is only out for money, Cholawicki pins his hopes to clinch the marriage on inheriting or outright stealing a treasure trove of art from his employer, Prince Holszań ski. The nobleman, meanwhile, is haunted by the ghost of his dead son, Franio, whose apparition stalks Holszański Castle. Gombrowicz fills the plot with genre tropes, including a self-important professor who convinces himself that he would steal the prince’s art for the sake of “the common good,” a cowed servant who, terrorized by Franio’s ghost, lets leak to Cholawicki that all is not normal in the castle, and more. What emerges is a crafty and sharp exploration of the greed, lust, and vanity that spin people out of control. Gombrowicz’s gleeful misanthropy and sense of the absurd shine through the genre trappings to create a potboiler that’s enjoyable on multiple levels. This works perfectly both as a straightforward gothic akin to Du Marier’s Rebecca and as a knowing parody. Agent: Bonnie McKiernan, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

As in his classic novel Erasure, Everett portrays in this ingenious retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people. Many of the same things happen as they do in Twain’s original: Jim escapes from enslavement on a Missouri farm and joins up with Huck, a white boy who’s faked his own death. Huck is fleeing from his abusive father, while Jim is hoping to find a way to free his wife and daughter. The main difference is in the telling. Jim narrates, not Huck, and in so doing he reveals how he employs “slave” talk (“correct incorrect grammar”) when white people can hear, to make them feel safe and superior. Everett also pares down the prose and adds humor in place of sentimentality. When Huck and Jim come upon a band of slave hunters, Huck claims Jim, who’s covered by a tarp, is a white man infected with smallpox (“We keep thinkin’ he gone die, then he just don’t”). Clever additions to the narrative include a tense episode in which Jim is fraudulently sold by a slaver to “Dixie” composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, who has Jim perform in blackface with his singing troupe. Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 12/15/2023 | Details & Permalink

Modern love is not for the faint of heart in Tepper’s devastating latest (after Between the Records). From the first page, readers are plunged into the intense and extramarital relationship between 30-something Brooklynites Paul and Celia, a writer and artist, respectively. Celia is in an open marriage with woodworker Graham and refuses Paul’s entreaties to leave her husband. After she learns she’s pregnant with Paul’s child, she changes her mind. Nine months later, Paul and Celia are living together with their infant son, Waylon. They are in love, but tiny cracks in their relationship eventually grow into fissures as Celia becomes friendly with a seductive critic, while Paul finds it increasingly difficult to fend off the advances of a more successful writer. Then, while in Poland, Celia is tempted by a famous artist’s attractive young assistant. It doesn’t help their relationship that Celia’s career as a portrait painter is on the rise and Paul’s newsletter-writing gig has taken a downturn. Offering a pitiless dissection of a modern relationship, Tepper shows himself an expert at orchestrating scenes of domestic carnage. This plays out like a hipster Brooklyn version of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink

A Colorado town grapples with wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic in the uneven latest from Pritchett (Hell’s Bottom, Colorado). The roughly sketched narrative begins with related vignettes, each containing a series of shifting points of view. In the opening scene, ecoactivist Gretel tries to shoo a deer away from poisonous flowers with a BB gun. Then Mariana, a neighbor, accidentally hits the deer with her truck, an event witnessed by Sherm, an unemployed bartender, who takes it home for meat. Other sections portray the spreading wildfire from the perspective of a moose, a mountain, and the town itself. Pritchett’s writing takes off in moments when the affinity between human and nature catches the characters by surprise, as when Norman is overcome by watching a hawk try to catch a sparrow, and Sherm, laid up alone with Covid, watches a mallard duck struggling to take flight and identifies with the bird. Too often, though, the project can feel indulgent and tedious, as in a 13-page section in which Gretel attempts astrological readings of the town’s residents. The various parts don’t quite cohere, leaving readers lost in the haze. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 12/08/2023 | Details & Permalink