Stevens (Briefly, a Delicious Life) crafts an accomplished portrait of an art forger and the dubious return of her long-lost aristocratic cousin in 1899. Sixteen years earlier, Grace, now 25, was sent to live at Inderwick Hall in Oxfordshire with her aunt, uncle, and cousins after her parents were committed to an insane asylum. Growing up on the vast estate, Grace felt like “a person who belonged nowhere,” and became a skilled copyist with help from her cousin Charles, a painter. Charles was presumed dead at sea at 17, three years after Grace moved into the house. Now, he’s written to his only surviving family, Grace and his mother, calling them to Rome where he is recovering from illness. Many, including the family’s lawyer, Mr. George, question Charles’s true motives, given his position as heir of the family’s estate. Meanwhile, Grace, who’s expected to be married off to a man, grapples with her preference for women, and falls for the daughter of an artist brought in to verify Charles’s claims by examining his paintings. As the brisk plot unfolds in chapters alternating between the perspectives of Grace and the presumed Charles, Stevens raises thorny questions about the nature of art and identity. This will stay with readers. (July)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Chilean writer Catrileo debuts with an impressive story of catastrophe and culture clash in near-future Chile. Mari, the 26-year-old narrator, has recently decamped with her partner, Pascale, from the overcrowded Capital City of her birth for Pascale’s homeland, the quiet and mysterious island of Chilco. Famous for its rebellious spirit and strong Indigenous communities, Chilco seems to move at a slower pace than the mainland, but that’s not the only thing Mari has a difficult time adjusting to. Pascale’s friends and neighbors don’t believe a city girl such as herself could ever fully appreciate or understand Chilco, though Mari is also of Indigenous descent. The narrative moves backwards in time, weaving in stories of Mari’s upbringing in a matriarchal household and the political unrest and natural disasters that begin to plague Capital City—from demonstrations in which houses are intentionally destroyed, to a series of sinkholes that devour pockets of the city—and finally force the couple to flee to Chilco. Though the dialogue often feels stiff, particularly in moments of tension, such as when Pascale and Mari debate whether to leave the city, Catrileo keeps the novel afloat with razor-sharp observations on the city’s exploitive colonial history and staggering decay. It’s a rewarding story of chosen family. (July)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Barnás (The Parasite) spins an arresting but jumbled tale of a man’s dissociation in Budapest near the end of communism and its downfall. The unnamed 40-year-old narrator, a former literature professor, is purportedly working on a novel, for which he receives financial support from a German man named Michael. The narrator met Michael six years earlier, while the narrator was playing Mozart on the street after a mental breakdown, which was triggered by his lover leaving him. Instead of writing the novel, the narrator devotes his time to an obscure manuscript titled Transcriptions while reflecting on his life. Once the book is complete, he struggles to find a job, eventually settling on a position as a guard at a local museum. At work, the narrator repeatedly loses track of time, finding himself unexpectedly in different towns and forgetting how he got there. Over the course of 10 years at the museum, he slowly unknots his troubled past. There are many resonant passages on the narrator’s unraveling (“The changes underway inside us are often nearly impossible to notice; we may not want to. Then suddenly you realise everything is moving of its own volition”). Too often, though, Barnás leaves the reader feeling as lost as his protagonist. Despite moments of brilliance, it’s a bit of a slog. (July)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bennett (Checkout 19) serves up a striking novel about a writer’s retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair. Having relocated from London to the English countryside, the unnamed middle-aged narrator ruminates on the past, beginning with memories of her former lover Xavier, a “jetsetting” and unscrupulous private banker. She thinks back on the keepsakes she left behind, such as the dozen roses she left wilting in a vase, and tries to remember the sound of his voice. As time goes on, the past begins to intrude in physical form, including with the arrival of a package of books from her first publisher that contains a handwritten note from her former English teacher, whose voice comes back to her from three decades ago, prompting her to reflect on the way in which the past steadfastly refuses to die: “half-buried distorted things have a habit of rearing their noxious malformed heads again.” Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses’s Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema. Through it all, the narrator seeks to form a picture of herself apart from what she imagines others think of her: “I have removed myself so that I can think of you which I cannot do while you think of me,” she reflects, to no one in particular. It’s an intellectual tour de force. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/15/2025 | Details & Permalink

Okonkwo debuts with a competent campus novel about immigration and love. Sommy is a Nigerian graduate student from Lagos studying English literature in Iowa. When her roommate, Bayo, invites her to a gathering of Black graduate students, she meets future friends Kayla and Nia, as well as future love interest Bryan. Meanwhile, her brother Mezie, who recently tried to kill himself, won’t return her calls. As the semester progresses, Sommy grapples with loneliness and feeling homesick until she begins a casual affair with Bayo. When she begins simultaneously dating Bryan, her secret love triangle threatens to upend her new American life. Bryan accompanies her to Nigeria to find his birth father, where tensions boil over during an argument in the car between the couple and Mezie, who is driving, and who accidentally hits a pedestrian. Though Okonkwo’s writing can be pedantic and simplistic, the novel offers a well-rounded depiction of the difficulties faced by a young woman torn in opposing directions. Describing the attraction between Sommy and Bryan, Okonkwo writes, “He is intrigued by her stories about Nigeria. He likes her tales about Lagos, the people, the traffic, the hustle and bustle. It’s the opposite of the quiet suburbs of Illinois, where he’d grown up.” It’s a solid coming-of-age story. (June)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

The elegant latest from Zarn offers a new and seemingly autofictional version of the love story central to her previous novel, Inverno. Caroline, the narrator, has recently separated from her husband, Daniel, in New York City, and fallen inconveniently in love with her longtime friend Lorenzo, an Italian who himself is involved with two other women. Zarin reflects Caroline’s head-spinning emotional state in the novel’s form, a choppy series of digressions and vignettes, most of which are addressed to Lorenzo. Among Caroline’s preoccupations are her interest in the nature of disappearance, and she muses on the story of Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of Nelson Rockefeller who vanished in New Guinea in 1961 when his father was governor of New York. Caroline’s preteen daughter, Pom, her youngest, appears repeatedly, while other minor characters float through the novel, including her three older children, as Caroline ricochets around Manhattan and reflects on trips to Europe, literature, art, her years with Daniel, and other lovers. The fleeting and kaleidoscopic images don’t all cohere into a narrative, but Zarin’s lucid writing impresses, especially when the author has Caroline taking stock of her situation, describing herself as a “woman who cannot love anyone unless she is backing herself into an abyss.” This slim tale gives readers plenty to chew on. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hobson (The Removed) spins an inspired but confusing story of art and friendship. In a foreword, Hobson claims the bulk of the novel is a manuscript written by a man named Milton Muleborn, with whom Hobson spent time in the Tophet County Juvenile Correctional Facility. The novel proper opens with a captivating scene at the facility, as Milton and a group of fellow detainees are conscripted by the guards to search for their escaped friend, Matthew Echota, “a cripplingly shy, talented, smart, and handsome boy.” Matthew has escaped before, but in Milton’s view, he has little hope of getting out of their impoverished town of Old Dublan. The allusion to Dublin is meant to reference James Joyce’s Dubliners, one of many distorted nods to literature peppered in by Milton, an ambitious neophyte writer. (He also mistakes a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as being from Hamlet.) Hobson vividly portrays Oklahoma’s furious storms and scores of screeching grackles, and shows how both protagonists find solace in art. The manuscript is full of contrasting versions of events, some of which veer into fantasy and horror, as when Milton and Matthew encounter terrifying wood spirits who resemble lepers. It’s a bit tough to follow, but Hobson holds the reader’s attention with appealing surrealistic asides, such as the boys’ encounter with a doppelgänger of painter Salvador Dalí, who rhapsodizes over the band Duran Duran. There’s plenty of fun to be had with this cerebral novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

This wonderful novel by Tristana author Perez Galdos (1843–1920) peers into 1880s Madrid through the prism of the middle-class Villaamils family. There is patriarch Ramón, an unemployed civil servant desperately seeking one final appointment so he can retire soon after on a decent pension; his spendthrift wife, Pura; her sister, Milagros; and his daughter, Abelarda. Pura, Milagros, and Abelarda regularly frequent the theater, where they have derisively been dubbed the Miaows by fellow patrons for their catlike appearance. Their humiliation is contrasted with depictions of Ramón’s “sweet and humble” young grandson, Luis, who charmingly and comically dreams of conversing with God about the fate of his family. Luis’s mother died when he was a toddler, and upon the reappearance of his absentee father, Víctor, Ramón’s son-in-law, who embodies the calculating, dishonest order of corrupt civil servants whom honest, hardworking Ramón abhors, the family fortunes become even more unpredictable. Perez Galdos reflects the characters’ theatrical predilections in arch parenthetical asides, as in Pura’s dressing down of her husband: “You’ll never be anything, and if they do give you a job, they’ll pay you a pittance, and we’ll still be in the same mess. (Growing more heated),” and he flits with remarkable ease from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. This is a tragicomic triumph. (June)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Nigerian British writer Okojie makes her U.S. debut with a bewitching if underdeveloped time-warping novel following contemporary Londoner Therese and 17th-century migrant Zulmira in Gethsemane, Cape Verde. Both women are followers of the shaman god Oni, who leaves gifts with her worshipers to indicate the offerings and sacrifices they’re meant to make in return. Among these gifts is a rib cage placed with Therese and her three male roommates, all of whom bear the birthmark on their neck that marks them as one of Oni’s disciples. This rib cage, which they name Ovida, contains berries that make the four roommates have visions of Zulmira, including her arrival in a new land after being forced to leave her baby. In Zulmira’s story line, she is taken in by a fisherman named Domingos, whose wife, Marguerite, and daughter, Sueli, veer into madness as Zulmira harnesses Oni’s energy in their presence. After Sueli makes a devastating sacrifice, the reader uncovers the girl’s link to Ovida. The ending, which is meant to connect the two threads, feels like an abrupt turn, but there are plenty of vivid images and stimulating narrative swerves along the way. Though it’s a mixed bag, it contains plenty of gems. Agent: Tucker Smith, Wylie Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

The disarming close to Bowring’s Road to Dalton trilogy (after Where the Forest Meets the River) largely centers on the budding romantic relationship between a single mother and a widower in small-town Maine. Rose Douglas’s relationship with police officer Nate Theroux, whose wife died by suicide several years earlier after giving birth to their daughter, is threatened when her abusive ex-fiancé, Tommy Merchant, returns to Dalton, claiming he has changed for the better because he wants to be a good father to their two young sons. Rose is skeptical and imposes conditions upon him if he wants to see her and the children, namely that he must stop drinking. Tommy struggles with being the third wheel to Rose and Nate, and loses the job he’d just landed at the local lumber mill, after which he hints that he may turn back to his old tricks. Meanwhile, a taut subplot follows 19-year-old college student Greg Fortin, who comes to terms with his bisexuality and falls for a young local woman he once rescued from drowning. Bowring excels at humanizing her characters via nuanced backstories—especially Tommy, who was a one-dimensional lout in The Road to Dalton—and she teases out the joy that can come from fresh starts without flinching from the challenge of second chances. It’s a satisfying conclusion. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink