Javed (Ashes, Wine and Dust) illuminates the lives of members of the Pakistani diaspora in this nuanced collection. In “Rani,” a divorced Muslim woman cares for her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s. Remembering the twice-divorced young woman who worked as a live-in maid in her house when she was a girl, she’s surprised to feel a kinship with the other woman. A father supports his heroin addiction in “Stray Things Do Not Carry a Soul” by killing stray dogs for a 50-rupee bounty, which unsettles his son who narrates the story (“He enjoyed aiming and watching the dogs tremble, fall... it was like a melody to his ears, or a game. A game he always won”). One of the most insightful entries, “Worry Doll,” reveals the inner life of Zara, a Pakistani immigrant in Maryland, brought over as a “dependent” by her husband, who is studying for his PhD. Having given up a career in public relations in Karachi, Zara struggles in her new, smaller life in the U.S., and gradually gains independence after she learns how to drive. Here and elsewhere in the collection, Javed skillfully captures the tedium of daily life, showing how Zara’s “days were cloaked in dullness.” It’s an impressive outing. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

McConigley follows her PEN/Open Book Award–winning collection, Cowboys and East Indians, with a witty and ultimately profound tale centered on two angsty preteens’ plot to kill their abusive uncle. From the beginning, the reader knows the killing will take place, and the bulk of the novel explores the lead-up to the crime. The mixed-race 12-year-old narrator, Georgie Ayyar Creel, agrees with her 13-year-old sister, Agatha Krishna, that the legacy of British colonialism is the reason they feel so out of place in 1986 Wyoming. (“They were the reason we were quiet around most white people,” Georgie reflects about the British.) They blame everything on the British, including the arrival of their Indian mother’s odious brother, Vinny, from India. After Vinnie rapes them, they plot to murder him by putting antifreeze in his drinks. Initially, the scheme strengthens the sisters’ bond, but after they go through with it, Georgie is filled with newfound heartache. McConigley blends the macabre material with clever stylistic devices, such as quizzes in the style of teen magazines (“How Do You Know If a Boy Likes You?”), which mirror the plot as Georgie works herself up to the murder (“Do You Have What It Takes to Kill”). This thrilling bildungsroman is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this charming debut, a London woman catfishes her dead sister’s Hinge match. Photographer Poppy Greene, 37, finds an intriguing message on the phone left behind by her sister, Dandelion, who died several months earlier, from a man named Jake. Despite having a live-in boyfriend, Sam, Poppy replies to Jake and sets up a date. When they meet, their attraction is instant, but Poppy isn’t sure if Jake likes her or her persona, which is part spontaneous Dandelion and part her more boring self, who always lived in Dandelion’s shadow. While Jake is smitten, he’s dealing with demons of his own, such as guilt over his past infidelity and abandonment issues from childhood. It turns out a colleague at Jake’s advertising agency used to date Dandelion, and when he tells Jake about Dandelion’s wild past, Jake figures out he’s dating Poppy, not Dandelion, breaks it off, and blocks her, prompting Poppy to try to patch things up with Sam. But as Poppy continues to flip-flop from Sam to Jake, the lies stack up on both sides, and both must figure out how to be honest with each other and with themselves. Storey handily balances the heavy themes of grief and trauma with snappy wit and intriguing character development. It adds up to a moving and wildly entertaining tale of self-discovery. Agent: Jemima Forrester, David Higham Assoc. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this deeply affecting English-language debut, German writer Hermann reflects on the connections between art and experience, delving into her protagonist’s family history in West Germany and the relationships that shaped her life. In part one, set shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, Judith, a writer, is ending a night out in Berlin when she runs into her erstwhile psychoanalyst, Dr. Dreehüs. The encounter prompts Judith to remember Ada, an old friend who had recommended the analyst to her; and Marco, another friend, who died young. Ada was determined to overcome her own traumatic past, and for an idyllic period in the 1990s, when the trio were in their 20s and 30s, Marco and Judith become part of Ada’s “chosen family... made up of her husband, her child, and a close circle of other women and men.” Judith continues her reflections in the second part, remembering her childhood in the 1970s and her father’s time in a mental hospital in the ’90s. In the third and final part, she visits her parents in fall 2020, and develops a new understanding of her family’s dynamics. Interspersed with these events are thoughts on writing: Judith insists, “It doesn’t matter whether a story is invented, true, or only half-true.” Despite proceeding by association and ranging freely between past and present, the work is tightly and satisfyingly unified by the depth and intelligence of the narration. Readers are fortunate to have this remarkable meditation on family, identity, and writing from a master storyteller. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

The sharply observed sophomore effort by Champine (Knife River) examines the double-edged bond between two teen girls. Ida, the neurodivergent 14-year-old narrator, spends most of her free time helping her mother at the family’s convenience store in their fading logging town of Mineral, Wash. At school, she’s regularly bullied by her classmates. After her guidance counselor calls her a “square peg,” she’s overcome by a “sick feeling... of having done something wrong, and everyone could understand what it was but me.” Her perspective shifts when her 16-year-old cousin, Elna, arrives from San Francisco for an extended stay. Elna turns out to be a hustler, earning money by mending clothes for the loggers. Ida envies the pretty older girl’s free spirit (“Like there was a formula my cousin had cracked that made the world, and the people in it, easy for her to navigate”). When Elna gives Ida a butterfly charm, Ida feels “a surge of belonging so powerful I thought my heart might explode.” But Elna’s charisma belies a dark side, and her magical effect on Ida evaporates during their confrontation with a logger, which turns violent after he catches them stealing from him. In Ida, Champine has crafted a singular perspective, and the plot builds to a surprising twist. This satisfies. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Tomaski debuts with a fresh story of an eccentric English family and its crumbling manor. It begins in 2002, when the Gilberts hand over Thornwalk House to a hotelier, and then rewinds to unfurl the life stories of the five Gilbert siblings, who were raised by their mother and their late father’s sister. At age 15 in 1928, Lydia, the eldest child, was routinely locked in her room to stop her from seeing the tutor with whom she had fallen in love. A burn mark remains on the library rug from an incident in 1921, when five-year-old Annabel quietly watched a blaze spread from the fireplace. Readers may initially struggle with the multiple story lines and crowded cast of characters, but the narrative coheres as Tomaski reveals the backstabbing, mental illness, and other problems that brought about the estate’s decline, showing how imperious Hugo, the oldest of two brothers, takes over the family’s mercantile business, while his restless younger brother, Jeremy, and their troubled youngest sibling, Rosalind, each take off in search of greener pastures. Along the way, Tomaski imbues the narrative with pathos and wit (“A woman scorned is nothing compared to the girl whose lover suddenly has a reputation for bad breath”). Patient readers will find much to enjoy. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this sweeping and lyrical narrative from Restrepo (The Dark Bride), a South American writer retraces a journey once taken by the Queen of Sheba. Bos Mutas has been obsessed with Sheba from an early age. His fixation takes him to Yemen, where he’s denied entry at the airport after telling a customs agent that he’s there to “search for the Queen of Sheba.” A parallel story follows Sheba from her birth, when her mother, known as the Maiden, calls her Goat Foot due to the twisted limb she’s born with. Several years after Sheba’s birth, the Maiden orders the servants to bury her alive. The young princess survives and goes on to travel across what is now Yemen, gaining strength and power by cultivating the evergreen Boswellia sacra tree, known for its curative frankincense resin. She then catches the eye of Solomon, the “wildly handsome” king of Judea, who attempts to woo and marry her. Back in the present, Bos manages to get a Somali midwife to bail him out of trouble, and she takes him in Sheba’s footsteps through the refugee camps that dot the landscape, where disease and poverty run rampant. As Bos likens Sheba to Frida Kahlo and Patti Smith, Restrepo conveys the queen’s mythology in powerful prose (“muse to poets, to sleepwalkers, to mystics and punks; the goddess of drug addicts, of the dying, of geniuses and illuminati; a prophetess among lunatics and sages; the stormy moods of artists and depressives”). It’s an undeniable ode to an inspiring figure. Agent: Thomas Colchie, Colchie Agency. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Edwards debuts with an inspired tale of a devout and defiant young woman in medieval Bruges, in Flanders. Aleys, 16, grows up with adoration for the church. After her mother dies, she becomes more devout. Her friend Finn teaches her Latin and she falls in love with him, but her hopes for their future together are dashed when he says he’s joining the monastery. Then her father declares that she’ll marry the head of a guild. Distraught, Aleys runs away from home. She’s taken in by the beguines, a group of women who secretly translate religious texts from Latin into Dutch. Deeply committed to finding her calling, she asks God, “What’s my gift,” and an answer seems to come while she prays for a deathly ill boy, whose infected wounds disappear. Nervous about the attention paid to Aleys for the miracle, the bishop places her in isolation, where she’s preyed upon by a sexually abusive priest. Her efforts to escape threaten the beguine community, already under scrutiny for the translations, and Aleys is forced to make an impossible choice. Drawing on stories and biographies of medieval saints, Edwards faithfully highlights the lives of 13th-century religious women and the sacrifices they were forced to make. Readers of Lauren Groff’s Matrix ought to take a look. Agent: Jonah Straus, Straus Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Devereaux (Escape to Tuscany) serves up a dramatic story of fascist resistance and a love triangle in 1944 Genoa. After Anna Pastorino’s home is destroyed by an RAF bomb, Father Vittorio arranges to hide her in the home of a typographer and his wife, knowing that the fascist police would arrest and turn her over to the Germans if they find out she is Jewish and has been using false papers. The industrious Anna once worked as a bookkeeper for a prominent shipbuilder. Now, seeking to keep busy, she helps aviator Massimo Teglio create forged identity cards for the resistance. As they work together, Anna falls for Massimo, who remembers meeting her brother years earlier. Meanwhile, as Father Vittorio’s tuberculosis symptoms worsen, he grapples with his attraction to Anna. The plot thickens when Vittorio learns Anna had been fired by the shipbuilder shortly before the war for being Jewish and her dismissal was linked to her husband’s death. Devereaux sustains an acute sense of the danger faced by her characters, and she adds depth with their personal dilemmas, such as Vittorio’s crisis of faith. Fans of WWII fiction won’t want to miss this. Agent: Broo Doherty, DHH Literary. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink

Davis (X) unfurls a fascinating if at times frustrating narrative of art and desire. Adrian, 29, is so beautiful that people follow him on the street in New York City, and he takes any lover he wants, man or woman. Suddenly, with spring fever in the air amid the first wave of Covid-19 vaccinations in 2021, he finds he’s either lost his beauty or people no longer see him. He books an appointment with therapist Lola and tells her how “it kind of feels like I’m disappearing.” Meanwhile, in Northern California, Adrian’s painter friend, Mark, is dying of a mysterious undiagnosed illness that previously claimed the lives of his mother and sister. He invites Adrian to visit, and Davis adds intrigue and subtle connective tissue with the cache of VHS tapes left behind by Mark’s sister, notably one entitled “Hot World,” which Adrian and Mark view together. These videos depict strange and surreal scenes such as “a woman draped like Salome” dancing while “behind her, an alcazar stretches back against the dunes blurred by the setting sun.” The main plot line eventually resolves as the pair grapple with their mortality. Despite being a bit unfocused, this ethereal work holds the reader’s attention. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (Dec.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misquoted the line about the alcazar.

Reviewed on 10/03/2025 | Details & Permalink