Former actor Lenz (Hello, Rest of My Life) delves into Hollywood film lore with his immersive latest, about a personal assistant’s quixotic 1970s quest to complete an obscure unfinished film rumored to have costarred John Wayne and James Dean. Emily Bennett first hears about Showdown’s 1955 production from a fellow extra on a 1973 TV shoot. A few years later, while working for an actor on the set of The Shootist, Wayne’s final film, she works up the courage to ask the taciturn star about Showdown but fails to convince him to finish it (“I’m too old to play myself,” Wayne says). After Wayne dies in 1979, she recruits Wayne impersonator Tom Manfredo and Dean impersonator Jimmy Riley to act in the film, and a love triangle develops as she falls for Tom while Jimmy nurses his feelings for her. Things get a bit unwieldy in the melodramatic third act with a pair of shoehorned and occasionally confusing Oedipal motifs (one character has killed his father and another may have had sex with his mother), but for the most part Lenz, who also appeared in The Shootist, offers a fascinating perspective on Hollywood’s Golden Age and its pull on his cast. This is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Redel’s sensuous latest (after Paradise) explores the fraught relationship between Dutch Golden Age painter Maria van Oosterwijck and Gerta Pieters, her servant turned apprentice. Gerta enters Maria’s household disguised as a boy named Pieter, chopping wood and slaughtering rabbits for Maria’s father while becoming quietly enthralled by her magnetic presence. Maria tells Gerta that she knows Gerta’s secret and reveals it to the family, declaring that Gerta will join her in Utrecht as a maid, where Maria plans to study flower painting. There, and later in their shared Amsterdam home, Gerta works as Marta’s assistant while secretly honing her own painting skills. Their intense and turbulent bond is tested when Maria humiliates Gerta in front of a prominent collector by saying she’s taught her maid how to paint, and Gerta takes her cue by making a mess on a canvas. In private, Maria recognizes Gerta’s talent and calls her Pieter, a form of role-playing that leads to sex. Gerta is engrossed in the physical relationship with her tempestuous employer, until their arrangement is tested by the arrival of Maria’s entitled nephew. The erotically charged studio scenes vividly capture the complexities of Gerta’s devotion to Maria and her eventual resistance to Maria’s dominance. Readers will relish this memorable portrait of two fiercely independent women. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ríhová makes her English-language debut with a devilishly creepy work of folk horror set in rural Czechia. Bohumil and Bohumila move from present-day Prague to Podlesí with their developmentally disabled 12-year-old son, expecting a charming retreat and a chance to start fresh. Instead, they find themselves in a cold, dark home surrounded by shifty neighbors. For years, they have grappled with their son’s undiagnosed condition, which has driven a wedge between them. When they arrive in Podlesí, Bohumila is bandaged and stitched, and she scratches at her unspecified wounds incessantly. Meanwhile, Bohumil drinks heavily to cope with insomnia. Alone one night at the pub, Bohumila imagines the local hunters and farmers are viewing her as prey, fueling the fear she shares with her husband that the townsfolk are out to get them. One morning soon after, the point of view switches to that of Sláva, the game warden, who takes the couple’s boy on a fox hunt and reimagines “Little Red Riding Hood” with Bohumila as the girl and himself as the wolf. The author effectively builds tension from the couple’s fears, which are heightened by physical threats, as when Bohumil finds a large paw print outside their home, as well as by their failure to find comfort in each other. It’s a hair-raising tale of a culture clash. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Psychic twins join a carnival sideshow to escape a madman in Chaon’s spectacular latest (after Sleepwalk). Born in 1901 Ohio, Eleanor and Bolt Lambkin can read each other’s minds and, sometimes, the thoughts of others. Their father, Jasper, an itinerant mentalist whom they never knew, died by suicide, and after their mother dies in 1914, Bolt and Eleanor are taken in by a man who calls himself Uncle Charlie and claims to be their only living relative. Turns out Charlie is actually a murderous grifter and onetime friend of Jasper’s, who hopes to make money from the twins’ paranormal abilities. Bolt and Eleanor stupefy him with spiked beer, talk their way onto an orphan train, and are adopted in Iowa by traveling carnival operator Harland Jengling. Eleanor is standoffish with Jengling and his troupe but Bolt bonds with performers Elmer the Dog-Faced Boy, Gladness the half-ton woman, and even the eerie Rosalie, who has a partial second head and can predict people’s deaths. Determined to punish—and profit from—the twins, Charlie follows their trail westward, setting the stage for a climactic encounter that tests their ability to protect each other. Chaon dazzles with his vision of family, strangeness, and the tension between care and exploitation. This captivating adventure is not to be missed. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Follett (The Kingsbridge series) offers an engrossing tale of the neolithic British Isles and the construction of the Stonehenge monument. The narrative is grounded in the parallel stories of Seft, a flint miner and craftsman; and Joia, the sister of the woman he loves, who aspires to become a priestess. Seft is the youngest son of a physically abusive widower, who treats him like a slave, prompting him to flee home and take a position with Wun, another miner, who’s impressed by Seft’s work ethic and creative approach to repairing a damaged lintel. His life continues to look up after he falls for Neen, a young woman he met at the Spring Rite. They become a couple and eventually start a family. Meanwhile, Joia is enraptured by the songs and dances at the Monument, a wooden structure surrounding a sacred circle. As farmers and herders clash over the use of common land, the Monument is destroyed. In the aftermath, Seft devotes himself to the task of rebuilding the site, which will become Stonehenge. Follett builds tension as Seft grapples with the engineering challenge of transporting such large stones to the site, and keeps the reader invested in the story with well-developed characters. The author’s fans will be pleased. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Moss’s layered and poignant latest (after the memoir My Good Bright Wolf), an aging divorced Englishwoman reflects on the nature of home and family while living in Ireland. Edith enjoys a casual relationship with a German potter and a fulfilling friendship with long-married local woman Maebh in County Clare. Edith’s story is informed by alternating flashbacks to the mid-1960s, when she comes of age in northern England and is dispatched by her mother, a WWII refugee from France, to assist her older sister, Lydia, a professional ballerina, who is about to give birth in rural Italy. With the paternal details of Lydia’s pregnancy shrouded in secrecy, Edith busies herself with Lydia’s physical and emotional care as she vows to give the baby up for adoption. In the present day, Meabh receives a letter from an American man claiming to be her half brother, but is ambivalent about inviting him to visit. Meanwhile, Edith rues the man’s claim on a land to which he’s never been while she eternally feels like a “stranger,” especially given the rising anti-refugee sentiment. Moss’s characters are delightfully complex, giving shape to the narrative’s meditation on belonging. This leaves readers with much to chew on. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Rindo (Breathing Lake Superior) delivers a spellbinding story of an eight-foot-tall sports star from a humble Wisconsin Amish community. Gabriel Fisher is born weighing 18 pounds and measuring 27 inches. His mother, Rachel, who was pregnant out of wedlock and shunned by her Amish community, dies not long after giving birth to him in a pickup with help from veterinarian Thomas Kennedy. Raised by his grandparents, Gabriel has a soothing effect on farm animals, which attracts Thomas’s attention, and he brings the young boy with him on house calls. However, where Gabriel particularly stands out is in his athletic prowess, first in baseball and then, as a teenager, on the football field, prompting him to leave his community to attend college on an athletic scholarship. After an injury, Gabriel pivots to professional wrestling. Through it all, Gabriel continues to grow in both physical size and professional stature as he navigates life in the spotlight. Rindo spins an exciting chronicle of Gabriel’s athletic ability and the modern world’s mesmerizing pull on his cloistered hero, but he also exhibits a subtle touch, setting the stage for a surprising and moving final plot twist. This will linger in readers’ minds. Agent: Julia Livshin, Julia Livshin LLC. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this searching epistolary narrative from Varela (The Town of Babylon), a married middle-aged gay man tries to move on from an ex-boyfriend who wasn’t prepared for polyamory. The unnamed narrator, 43, a public health researcher raising two young children in Brooklyn with his husband, remains stuck on Ben, an attractive 30-something who took him to trendy parties and spiced up his sex life. When they met, Ben claimed he could handle sharing the narrator with his husband and children, but after a few months, Ben broke it off, realizing he wanted more. To cope, the narrator writes but doesn’t send a series of emails to Ben, which, along with other scattered missives, comprise the novel. Among the subjects explored are the narrator’s academic field, which he entered out of a hope to “make the world better”; unfortunately, the musings on public health add little to the story. Much better are the narrator’s descriptions of everyday routines as he attempts to forge a love life on his own terms and be a good dad. While riding the subway with his eight-year-old child, Jules, who is nonbinary, he responds boldly to a man’s taunts over Jules’s gender-nonconforming outfit: “Why do you care what my kid wears?” It’s a refreshingly candid tale of modern love. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Dommu’s heartwarming debut, a trans woman returns to Florida for her brother’s wedding and finds more drama than she bargained for. Julia Rosenberg, 29, has been living her best life in New York City since she began transitioning four years earlier, and her family has been more accepting than she expected. But when Julia agrees to be the best woman in her 27-year-old brother Aiden’s wedding, Jenna, the transphobic maid of honor, refuses to walk down the aisle with her. Aiden and his fiancée, Rachel, replace Jenna with Kim Cameron, a lesbian who went to college with Rachel, and who was Julia’s high school crush. When Julia and Kim reconnect at the bridal store, Kim assumes that others in the wedding party have also been transphobic, and Julia doesn’t correct her, relishing Kim’s attention and sympathy. Julia can’t sustain the lie forever, though, and eventually it threatens the women’s growing mutual attraction. Dommu supplements the slapstick rom-com plot with Julia’s strong voice and lucid self-reflections (“I’m just a person who used to show up in the world in one way that didn’t work for me and made me fucking depressed”). This fun bit of fluff has surprising depth. Agent: Jessica Spitz, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

The wild and quirky debut novel from Barrodale (You Are Having a Good Time, a story collection) ranges across two continents and the afterlife to tell the story of a mother and son’s failure to connect. Sandra, a career-driven PBS correspondent, arranges with her ex-husband to place their autistic 15-year-old son, Trip, in a treatment center before flying to Nepal to cover a conference on dying. There, Sandra dies from a freak accident and is guided into a Tibetan Buddhist version of the afterlife by one of the conference attendees, who reads out loud from a religious text on his phone (“Do not be attached to your surroundings. Instead, look forward to a greater endeavor”). Meanwhile, Trip has run away from the treatment center and, while hitchhiking, is picked up by an unstable man named Anthony, who drives them to a party on a hurricane-stricken island off the coast of Georgia. After the pair get into a misadventure involving a stolen boat, Sandra desperately attempts to enter another body in order to save Trip. The story lines never quite converge, beyond providing a frame for Sandra to contend with her regret over neglecting Trip. Still, Trip’s adventure story is great fun, and Barrodale’s depiction of the afterlife is amusing and wonderfully surreal. It’s a hoot. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/04/2025 | Details & Permalink