Axios editor Kole (The Big 100) unpacks in this impassioned treatise how the links between “guns, religion, and politics” have tightened in evangelical communities over the past 50 years. The author finds an inflection point in the late 1960s and early ’70s, as increasing support for the Vietnam War and skepticism of the civil rights movement pushed evangelicals away from the relative pacifism of mainline Protestantism and toward a militaristic Christianity epitomized by a “tough-guy ethos” and an “increasingly masculine, almost warrior-like view of Jesus.” That philosophy, Kole argues, set the stage for evangelicals’ increased affinity for firearms, which was fueled by notions of America as a Christian nation (and thus the Second Amendment as divinely inspired) and a perceived need to defend their beliefs and their embattled “standing in American life.” Noting that an embrace of violence repudiates Christian ethics of love and forgiveness, the author calls on readers to demand commonsense gun control reforms and on pastors to frame gun control as an extension of Jesus’s pacifist teachings. While Kole’s definition of evangelicalism can feel overly broad, he makes trenchant points about how fear, change, and social instability have altered the role of faith and identity in America. It’s a revealing window into the evolution of one of today’s most divisive social issues. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

What causes hallucinations? How do conspiracy theories take root? Why are some people convinced a lucky hat can help them catch more fish? Neuroscientist Yon tackles these questions and more in his riveting debut exploration of how the brain shapes perception. The account draws from philosopher Karl Popper’s theory that people live in the worlds of matter, mind, and ideas. To navigate them, Yon argues, the brain functions as a kind of internal scientist, continually evaluating input and constructing or editing perceptual models to help make better predictions. (In linguistic models, for example, “I put butter on my...” primes the brain to hear a word like “toast”; when an unexpected “semantic violation” like “socks” follows instead, it elicits a mental jolt.) Upon encountering a mismatch between data and expectation, the brain must decide whether to revise its model, a choice that’s highly dependent on its overall sense of the world’s unpredictability. Social calamities like the Covid-19 pandemic make the brain more open to editing its models, but can cause it to inadvertently latch onto “malignant ideas” or assign outsize significance to unimportant evidence, creating mental distortions. Yon persuasively argues that better understanding how the brain’s perceptual models work might reveal how to improve social communication, combat harmful dogma, and treat mental illnesses. It’s a scintillating and surprisingly accessible look at why humans think as they do. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kernan, a poet and editor of The Diary of James Schuyler, delivers an evenhanded and incisive biography of Schuyler (1923–1991), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Morning of the Poem and a central figure in the 1950s and ’60s New York poetry scene. Kernan is exhaustive in his approach, tracing Schuyler’s roots to one of America’s founding families and detailing his difficult Depression-era childhood. A transformative friendship with the poet W.H. Auden in the 1940s opened him up to the world of poetry. After moving to New York in the 1950s, he met fellow poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, who together became known as the New York School—a group of close friends whose work shared similar sensibilities, including a conversational tone and engagement with surreal and abstract art. Kernan generously excerpts Schuyler’s poems throughout, drawing poignant connections between his subject’s life and work; for example, he notes how Schuyler’s affinity for the Midwest, where he was born, is reflected in his writing, with “its unfussy diction and sense of expansiveness.” He also addresses Schuyler’s history of mental health issues—he experienced anxiety attacks, mental breakdowns, and delusions—carefully and sensitively, sharing friends’ accounts of the poet’s manic episodes, but noting his hospital records were not preserved so his diagnosis remains unclear. The result is a captivating portrait of a complex individual at the heart of a turning point in American poetry. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cheever, the daughter of novelist and short story writer John Cheever (1912–1982), blends literary analysis and memoir in this transcendent look at her father’s most influential works. Married with three children, John was a closeted gay man who battled alcoholism for most of his life. Despite his prolific output—he published more than 100 stories in the New Yorker between 1935 and 1982, plus three mid-career novels—his family was burdened by financial worries until the success of the novel Falconer in 1977 and his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, in 1978. Those stories, though celebrated, plundered the family’s personal lives and frequently savaged their neighbors and friends; Cheever writes that her father was “a wise man on the page and an idiot at the dinner table,” never quite able to extend the empathy he showed his characters to the people in his life. John’s emotional struggles, meanwhile, went unexamined within the family, “but what was left unsaid... often leaked out into the pages of the New Yorker.” Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever’s narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It’s equal parts wrenching and edifying. Agents: Andrew Wylie and Rebecca Nagel, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Cate opens her Salacious Legacy series, a spin-off of her Salacious Players Club series, with this ultrasteamy romance introducing the next generation of the Parisian sex club’s owners and members. Among the new owners is widowed father Jack St. Claire, who has spent the two years since his wife Emmaline’s death throwing himself into his work. After bookseller Camille Aubert finds a love letter from Jack to Emmaline tucked inside a book in the used bookstore in Giverny where she works, she is moved by the depth of feeling it expresses and decides to return it to the sender. When she arrives at Jack’s doorstep, however, she’s mistaken as a nanny candidate for his five-year-old daughter, Bea, whom she quickly comes to adore after taking the job on a whim. On her first night off, she spies Jack heading into his sex club and, curiosity piqued, persuades him to teach her the basics of BDSM. Casual kinky sex soon transforms into a committed relationship—but when Jack learns the truth about why Camille sought him out, their love could be in jeopardy. Cate intercuts the red hot erotic plot with plenty of business drama among the new owners of the club. Returning fans and newcomers alike are sure to be titillated. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

A hospital patient grows increasingly suspicious that the motives of her caretakers are far from benevolent in this suspenseful tale of medical horror from Starling (The Starving Saints). Twenty-six-year-old Meg Culpepper, who has a debilitating autoimmune disorder called Fayette-Gehret syndrome, agrees to a pharmaceutical company’s offer of an all-expenses-paid experimental treatment dubbed SWAIL that promises to “rebuild” her “confused immune system.” Isolated in a special ward at the hospital, Meg acquiesces to a protocol of restrictions and medicinal infusions that puzzle her but raise no alarms—until she discovers that the death of a fellow patient in the same treatment program has been kept from her by hospital personnel. Meg’s frustration at her bewildering circumstances quickly curdles into the paranoid suspicion that she is being held prisoner by sinister forces with malevolent intentions. Starling expertly immerses the reader in Meg’s anxiety, showing how even the most routine experiences during a hospital stay become cause for concern to her unsettled mind. The novel’s horrors are all the more palpable for tapping into the squeamishness that many feel toward medical care. Readers are sure to be frightened. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

House (Lark Ascending, as Silas House) pivots from literary fiction to crime fiction with this solid 1950s-set whodunit. Dave Hendricks was the mayor of Shady Grove, a small town on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, for seven years before his best friend, county sheriff Victor Burns, started an affair with Dave’s wife, Janet, and Dave entered a downward spiral that ended up costing him his job. Now, Dave has divorced Janet and receded from public life, opting instead for a quiet existence on a houseboat with his dog. The past rears its head, however, when Dave hears screams from a nearby fishing camp and rushes there to find Esau Campbell, the sleazy head of the camp, stabbed to death in the shower house, “Sins of the Father” scrawled in red paint on a nearby wall. Victor arrives a short time later and, despite his and Dave’s bad blood, asks for his old friend’s help to catch the killer. It’s a well-worn setup, but House makes the most of it, plausibly dramatizing Dave and Victor’s gradual reconciliation while maintaining taut suspense and introducing plenty of suspects. It’s a page-turner. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Baum, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, debuts with a dishy if underwhelming novel about a ghostwriter’s tangled relationship with a convict. Wes Easton visits Dr. Roya Delshad, a former Los Angeles plastic surgeon imprisoned for insurance fraud, with plans to write a magazine profile. Instead, Roya, a larger-than-life woman who’s had much work done to her own body, talks him into ghostwriting her memoir. Roya began her career at a prestigious Beverly Hills practice before striking out on her own. Her clientele consisted mostly of those who couldn’t afford her services, and she told herself she was disrupting the system by empowering her patients with good looks and getting insurance companies to foot the bill. As Wes soon learns, Roya is domineering, manipulative, and at times untruthful, and her aggressive attempts to flirt with him throw him off balance. Baum packs the novel with well-researched and fascinating details about plastic surgery, such as “lunchtime lasers” and other “quick-turnaround procedures” that give people the “Photoshopped” look, but his satirical portrait of Roya as misguided altruist doesn’t pack much of a punch, nor does he provide insight into what drives his self-serving and cynical main characters. Unfortunately, this one only goes skin deep. (July)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

British writer Quincy debuts with an elegiac narrative that dips into the lives of characters the 30-year-old narrator encounters in Oxford, where he’s returned to care for his ailing mother. While out running errands, the unnamed narrator bumps into his former teacher, Iain Rothlan, whom he greatly admired and hasn’t seen in many years, since Iain’s sudden and unexplained departure from the school. The narrator accepts an invitation to dinner with Iain and Iain’s professor friend, Gilles, and enjoys catching up. Soon after, Gilles finds Iain dead by suicide. Later, Gilles hands the narrator a letter from Iain to a former classmate of the narrator’s, which reveals the tragic details of Iain’s life. The novel’s other stories of withdrawn, troubled individuals in the narrator’s life also follow sad trajectories. Among them are the narrator’s godfather, described as “sitting on the edge of oblivion,” and the narrator’s “estranged and reclusive” former landlord. Throughout, Quincy beautifully explores the ways in which his characters are affected by resurfaced memories, as when the narrator, caring for his mother, remembers how she used to read Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” to him as a boy. Readers of W.G. Sebald will find much to enjoy. Agent: Tucker Smith, Wylie Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Two childhood friends reunite in Gonzalez’s expressive if underdeveloped debut. Ingrid still lives in the Cuban enclave of Hialeah, Fla., where she grew up with the bold and sassy Mayra, who once helped draw Ingrid out of her shell. The women haven’t seen each other since Mayra headed north for college a decade earlier, but Ingrid accepts Mayra’s invitation to join her at a remote house in the Everglades. Expecting to be there alone with Mayra, Ingrid is “deflated” to discover that Mayra’s boyfriend, Benji, whose family owns the house, is there, too. During her visit, Ingrid witnesses such strange things as Benji devouring the lint he’d just cleaned from a window, and she finds a staircase that leads into what appears to be a tree trunk. Eventually, Ingrid uncovers clues about the house’s mysteries in an old diary kept by a woman who lived there decades earlier. The plot is weighed down by extended flashbacks to Ingrid and Mayra’s childhood, but Gonzalez offers a nuanced depiction of their intense friendship and what drove them apart, exploring Ingrid’s resentment of Mayra for leaving and bitterness at the way Mayra now views Hialeah as a “gringa” would. Though uneven, this promises good things to come from Gonzalez. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (July)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink