Rooney (Normal People) continues her exploration of class, sex, and mental health with a cool, captivating story about a successful Irish writer, her friend, and their lovers. Alice Kelleher, 29, has suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of her work’s popularity. After moving from Dublin... Continue reading »

This gut-wrenching novel of psychological suspense with ghostly undertones from Edgar finalist Neville (Ratlines) opens early one morning with social worker Sara Keane scrubbing off the blood stains she often sees on the kitchen floor of the Ashes, the 120-year-old house her father-in-law b... Continue reading »

Philip K. Dick Award winner Stine (Road Out of Winter) sets this searing exploration of the lives of women who are mired in grinding poverty in a climate-ravaged near-future where plastic has become humanity’s only currency. The sordid strip club Trashlands in flood-prone “Scrappalachia” se... Continue reading »

Bateman (the Bow Street Bachelors series) launches a Regency trilogy with this pitch-perfect enemies-to-lovers romance centered on the feuding Montgomery and Davies families. Despite generations of bad blood, the two clans jointly own the land between their estates, and a fragile truce requires that... Continue reading »

Strength in solidarity is the prevailing theme of this galvanizing graphic dramatization by Campbell (Baaaad Muthaz) of a real-life clash between residents of Carnegie, Penn., and the KKK in 1923. Cabbriele, an Italian immigrant haunted by the memory of being tormented by a lynch mob (“We d... Continue reading »

Gander’s resonant 15th collection (after Be With) vibrates with the thrill that comes with being open with another person. There are several poems titled “Sangam Acoustics” (sangam being “a gathering of individuals united in spirit”); aubades; a series titled “The Redwoods,” in whi... Continue reading »

Luesse (Missing Isaac) charms with this excellent post-WWII love story set in the bayous of Atchafalaya Basin. Cajun Raphe Broussard is raising his nephew Remy on his own when Ellie Fields, the town’s new schoolteacher, arrives from Alabama. Unlike previous teachers, who all wanted to beat ... Continue reading »

Former model Diamond (Naked Rome) offers a transfixing chronicle of her coming-of-age bouncing from city to city and country to country to outrun the authorities. Her family—a tight band of five comprising her parents, sister, and brother—lived a life straight out of a thriller that was mar... Continue reading »

Neuropsychologist Stixrud and test prep tutor Johnson team up again (after The Self-Driven Child) for this on-target guide to talking to children. “Focusing on effective communication with our kids is a powerful way to grow our relationship with them,” they write, and across nine chapters m... Continue reading »

Christian writer Yancey (What’s So Amazing About Grace?) excavates his roots in the fundamentalist South in the 1950s and ’60s in this gripping memoir. Yancey was a year old when his preacher father died of polio after asking to be removed from treatment, expecting faith would heal him. Lef... Continue reading »

After discovering a bacteria-eating mold in a local cave, two high school sophomores are offered full scholarships to a prestigious academy in Zentner’s (Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee) tender novel of love and loss. Introspective nature lover Cash Pruitt and science-minded genius Delane... Continue reading »