Benedict (Wolf Season) unspools a harrowing story of an Iraqi refugee family’s attempts to fit into American society. During the Iraq War, Khalil served as an interpreter for the U.S. military, until he was killed in a car bombing, presumably by insurgents. His wife, Naema, who narrates, was left scarred, and their three-year-old son, Tariq, lost his leg. Staff Sgt. Jimmy Donnell, who worked with Khalil, arranges for the pair and Khalil’s mother, Hibah, to escape, and eventually puts them up in his home near Albany, N.Y., with his wife, Kate. Immediately, things start going awry for the family, as Naema is unable to find a job even though she was a pediatrician in Iraq, and Kate leaves the country for reasons that are explained later. Meanwhile, Jimmy suffers from PTSD triggered by his memories of combat, and pines for Kate, which alarms Naema, who feels she can’t quite trust him and wants to find an apartment for her family despite having little money. Benedict effectively chronicles the struggles of a family displaced by war and a refugee’s desire to provide for her family (“It does not seem so very much to ask from the country that destroyed my own,” Naema reflects). This chilling tale will stay with readers. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Korn (The Shutouts) channels the angst of the early 2000s indie music scene in this effective appeal to millennial nostalgia. Susan is 17, cool but not popular at her Long Island high school in 2005, and unsure if she likes boys. She breaks up with her boyfriend, Kyle, and is soon drawn to his new girlfriend, Eliza, whom she meets in a packed car on the way to a rock show. Their night is cut short when Susan reveals that she recognizes Eliza from a nude photo the boys in their school have been sharing with each other online (“You saw my tits and now you think you know me,” Eliza says, causing Susan to feel a mix of shame and desire). Five years later, after graduating from college, she’s living at home and working for an indie record label in Brooklyn. She’s also come out of the closet, but her attachment to Eliza keeps her from pursuing a meaningful relationship. By 2015, having moved to the city, she’s become “addicted to dating apps” and matches with Eliza. When they reunite, their spark is electric, but Eliza shies away, and the rejection makes Susan feel like a teenager again. The story is tender without being sentimental, and mordant without trivializing Eliza’s teen trauma. It’s a clear-eyed gaze into the messiness of youth. Agent: Mia Vitale and Sarah Passick at Park, Fine & Brower. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Black stranger arrives in a mostly white Upper Midwest suburb during a contentious election in this beguiling and immersive debut novel from Verrone. Calling herself Baby, the stranger claims she’s the niece of Eugene Fox, an aging white man and former city council member in Original Hill, a small city overlooking the Mississippi River in the shadow of an unnamed metropolis that resembles the Twin Cities. Eugene lost his seat to a 30-something Black outsider named Lucky Foote in the previous election, and he’s desperate to reclaim it. As the mysterious and increasingly magical story unfolds, Verrone teases out the connection between Baby’s arrival and Eugene’s ambition. Meanwhile, Lucky becomes enamored with Baby, forgoing his womanizing ways to spend as much time with her as he can. As Eugene’s and Lucky’s campaigns wear on, Lucky grows increasingly obsessed with Baby, neglecting civic duties and ignoring the petitions of outsiders advocating for the restoration of Sankofa, a former Black neighborhood that once bordered Original Hill before it was bulldozed to construct a highway. Verrone grounds the story with references to the very real history of Black Americans’ displacement in Minnesota and develops Baby’s character with fascinating bits of folklore and magical realism. There’s a lot to enjoy in this ambitious tale. Agent: Alyssa Jennette, Stonesong. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Szpila’s wild ecofeminist debut centers on bipolar antiheroine Anna Frenza, CEO of Poland’s national oil company. Brash and abusive, Frenza rails against what she views as empty rhetoric from environmental activists who “claim to be the saviors of the planet but would, in reality, do pretty much anything for a Hass avocado and an almond milk latte.” Ironically, Frenza is revealed to be a tree hugger of a different kind when she’s caught on camera having sex with a tree while sleepwalking and loses her job. The incident gives way to a whopping tale of time travel through medieval Poland where, in the 17th century, the Earthen Ones, a tribe of nature-worshipping women, are led by Mathilde Spalt. The Earthen Ones have renounced conventional life to live in the forest and have carnal knowledge of plants—their lovers are trees, moss, twigs, and branches. Most fascinating is the latter part of the novel, in which Frenza, back in the present, is in a mental institution populated with modern-day Earthen Ones. Driving the bizarre material are intriguing ideas on gender, climate change, and religion. There’s an arresting quality to this strange tale. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Faison’s assured debut explores the ripple effect of a couple’s decision to open their marriage. Frances and Ben, together since college, never considered such a thing. But after the sudden death of 30-year-old Frances’s mother, Frances is left longing for a way to break through her emotional numbness. A flirtatious exchange with Lily, the couple’s server at a restaurant, leads to an intensely pleasurable night for all three—but it’s February 2020, and a global pandemic puts any further plans with Lily on hold. A couple of years later, as the world opens back up, Frances and Ben resume exploring the boundaries of their relationship, adapting to each other’s changing desires. Meanwhile, their friends and family are alternately perplexed, intrigued, and titillated by their experimenting. The novel’s structure—which shifts back and forth from the happy early years of Ben and Frances’s marriage to the couple’s expanded life with people they’ve dated, including Lily—is largely successful, though some of the flashbacks feel disconnected, particularly those centered on Frances’s mother and grandmother. Still, Faison cleverly mirrors the phases of the couple’s open relationship with shifts in tone, moving from sexy and exciting to increased emotional intensity and vulnerability. Readers will find it an intimate and insightful story of modern romance. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A middle-aged woman adjusts to being a grandmother and caretaker for her own mother in the wake of her father’s death, in the poignant English-language debut from Michelsen. Reflecting on the “subconscious sense of completion” she feels as a grandmother, the narrator also notices a “fleeting thought of nascent dismantling. Like with scaffolding when a building is finished.” She dotes on her grandson and spends considerable time supporting her elderly mother, whose mind and body are progressively deteriorating. The novel unfolds primarily as a series of vivid images that contain the narrator’s wistful memories and recognition of the passage of time, as when she observes the beauty of a worn staircase (“Life has cascaded down the steps and moulded its current form”). The narrator tries to cherish her remaining moments with her mother, but she senses that “the past is ready to pounce” with less sunny memories, and attempts to steel herself (“Just pretend! Just do what all women have done through the ages! Pretend!”). As her mother’s dementia progresses, she realizes that she has become the “mother to my mother.” There is a lovely economy to Michelsen’s writing, which allows the lyrical impressions to resonate. It’s a spare yet powerful meditation on mortality. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

This charming tale of an innocent abroad from Pulitzer winner Greer (Less) doubles as a love letter to Italy. The narrator, Geoffrey, a 21-year-old American college student, lands a job as an archivist for an eccentric Baronessa in Tuscany. Arriving in the fall after his graduation, he’s immediately swept into the magical if unsettling world of his 92-year-old employer. To Geoffrey, the villa “look[s] both like the British Museum and like a child’s bedroom, filled with beloved trash and treasures.” Soon, the Baronessa has him doing everything but cataloging the villa’s contents. Ten hours a day he trims the rose bushes; searches for books and magazines; makes appointments with doctors, masseurs, and veterinarians; and listens to the Baronessa’s endless fantastical tales. Everyone in her life has a story, the young man learns: “They lived in a sealed world of comic-strip logic, and within that world, all schemes ended as happily as a monkey’s life in Zanzibar.” As the months pass, Geoffrey absorbs Italian culture, breaks his vow to avoid romantic entanglements, and faces some tough choices for his future. Throughout, Greer breathes life into the Baronessa and her world and captures its appeal to Geoffrey, fashioning the novel into a box of treasures. This light and airy bildungsroman is great fun. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. As a coordinator of sea rescues in the English Channel, the unnamed narrator is regularly forced to decide whether to send or withhold assistance for sinking boats. Most often the doomed crafts are carrying refugees making the perilous crossing to the U.K., and her decisions frequently come down to whether the craft is in her country’s waters, among other calculations. One evening, she communicates with a man on a raft of refugees drifting somewhere along the line between French and English waters. He calls her 14 times over the course of a couple of hours as the boat slowly sinks. All but two of the 29 aboard end up drowning. The news causes intense hand wringing on both sides of the Channel, and most of the novel consists of the narrator replaying that night as well as her subsequent exchange with a police investigator. The narrative takes on intriguing layers as the investigator grills her about her decisions and the recordings of her radio calls with the man, in which she attempts to absolve herself of guilt (“I didn’t ask you to leave”). It’s a satisfying exploration of a moral gray area. (Apr.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misdescribed a plot point.

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Rufous, the Canadian cartographer and former wildlife technician at the center of this immersive story from Butler (The Wild Heavens), is losing his memory due to an unspecified terminal illness. Over the course of the novel, Rufous journeys to the British Columbia Interior, where he grew up, and recovers memories of his childhood there. Abandoned by his mother, he was raised by his grandmother along with his twin sister, Calliope, and their three older half siblings. Their grandmother died in 1979, when the twins were five . Determined not to be split up by social services, the children fled to a campground in the wilderness, where they lived in a tree house and survived by taking odd jobs as apple and blueberry pickers. Eventually, Rufous contracted pneumonia, and his siblings left him with a lesbian couple who took him in. Butler’s depiction of the children’s off-grid life sometimes strains credulity, but there is a surprising plot twist, and Rufous’s mental decline and physical pain are artfully conveyed, as when he’s gripped by a migraine and remembers how his grandmother described them as “grief trapped in your brain, twisting into strange shapes as it tries to break free.” It’s a stimulating tale of a fading man’s journey into the past. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink

Grant (Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home) spins a gritty tale of a girl’s coming of age in rural New Hampshire in the 1990s. Twelve-year-old Maggie Thompson, who lives with her dad in a trailer home, is reeling from her mother’s sudden departure when she witnesses Rachel Mann, 16, drowning in a nearby lake. One year later, Rachel’s mother disappears (her car is found abandoned near a bridge), and Maggie and her friend Sarah team up with Rachel’s younger sister, Erin, to find out what happened to Mrs. Mann. They suspect she ran off with a local judge and probate attorney who disappeared around the same time after he was caught embezzling money from his clients. While out looking for clues, the girls run into three high school boys, who invite them to a party. There, Maggie, now 13, is pressured by the boys into sexual activity and finds her friendships tested in the aftermath. Grant delivers an unflinching depiction of the sexual exploitation faced by the girls, and she offers a sensitive account of Maggie’s burgeoning desires. (Remembering the lifeguard who tried to save Rachel, Maggie reflects, “I’d hoped the lifeguard noticed me—not as someone to save, but as someone he might want to touch.”) There’s plenty to savor in this intense novel. (June)

Reviewed on 04/03/2026 | Details & Permalink