YA author Levithan (Another Day) collaborates with singer-songwriter Lekman for an accomplished novel about a wedding singer’s relationship troubles. J is a “bookish, folkish” Swedish singer-songwriter who writes an original song for each wedding. He interviews the couples to learn their story and tailors the lyrics and tune to them, whether the bride is his childhood friend’s mother marrying the same man for the fourth time or the celebrants are an influencer couple who insist he name-drop the brands sponsoring the ceremony. After his girlfriend, V, travels to New York City with her much younger boss to secure funding for his tech start-up, J becomes unmoored when her communications taper off. He follows her there and calls on a friend who connects him with performance artists to stage a sham wedding as cover for his true intention to monitor V. Geographic proximity, however, only exacerbates the tension between J and V. Levithan’s heartfelt prose and Lekman’s songs for each of the novel’s 10 weddings offer genuine and often funny depictions of love’s messiness. It adds up to an impressive meditation on love and letting go. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Natera (Neruda on the Park) riffs on The White Lotus in her gripping tale of disaster unfolding at a Dominican resort over the course of a week. Laura, 27, a manager at the resort, has cared for her wild younger sister, Elena, now 17, since their mother’s suicide over a decade earlier. She’s close to securing a promotion and with it her and Elena’s future. Meanwhile, Elena works as a babysitter for guests’ children. After one of her charges has a bad fall while Elena’s high on ecstasy, Laura seeks help from a witch friend to heal the child and urges Elena to flee the country. To pay for a flight to London, Elena hatches a plan to pocket $10,000 from the child’s father in exchange for sex with a brothel owner’s two underage daughters, but she warns the girls not to spend time with him. Just as a hurricane bears down on the area, the two girls go missing, sending locals on a frantic search to bring them home. Meanwhile, Laura desperately tries to clear Elena from suspicion of human trafficking. Natera adds lush details of Dominican culture and heavy themes about the power and burden of family bonds. It’s a worthy pick for the beach bag. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

An MFA student reveals secrets about her writing professors’ marriage in Adrian’s clever if underwhelming latest (after The Second Season). The novel takes the form of a manuscript written by Robbie Green, a woman studying at Edwards University in Upstate New York, and it follows the story of tenured faculty member Simone, who’s well-known on campus for her sex appeal and her marriage to fellow professor Ethan. While Ethan is in Portland, Ore., visiting his mother, he sleeps with Abigail, the creative writing department’s secretary, who’s in town visiting her father. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Ethan, Simone becomes intensely close with Robbie, as the two read Mrs. Dalloway and train for a marathon together. After Abigail emails Simone about her affair with Ethan, Simone holds the betrayal over Ethan’s head and withholds the truth of her “emotional affair” with Robbie. When Robbie joins Ethan’s workshop, she begins writing about their complicated foursome for her thesis. Adrian poses intriguing questions about the nature of betrayal, the blurry ethics of professor-student intimacy, and the right to tell another person’s story, but too often the narrative favors Robbie’s snarky barbs (“Abigail, who was not attractive but to whom Ethan was attracted”) over meaningful insights. This is a mixed bag. Agent: Susan Ginsberg, Writers House. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

This intriguing offering from Angleton (White Man’s Graveyard) centes on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where a group of immigrant workers are met with injustice. Max Eyer, 19, emigrates from Germany to live with his uncle in St. Louis, Mo., where he finds work caring for exotic animals at a fair exhibit called Hagenbeck’s Animal Paradise. He’s drawn to fellow employee and Sinhalese dancer Shehani and feels protective toward her, especially when she attracts unwanted attention from the concession owner’s American business partner. In the novel’s third act, one of the principal characters winds up dead, and what at first looks like a grisly accident in the alligator pool turns into a murder investigation as Max, who distrusts the police, launches his own inquiry. Angleton conveys the magnificence of the fair with well-drawn details, and she stirringly portrays the ill treatment of the immigrants who work the exhibits. This explosive tale will keep readers turning the pages. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

A young woman sets out to restore a decaying Mexico City mansion and uncovers dark secrets in the provocative latest from Barrera (The Forgery). It’s 2015 when graduate architecture student Jasmina accompanies her neglectful boyfriend, Zuri Vargas, a photographer, to the neocolonial mansion, which belonged to his recently deceased uncle, Eligio, a famous photographer. She’s captivated by the old house and Eligio’s personal affects, and she accepts Zuri’s commission to restore the mansion, which she sees as a last-ditch chance to save their crumbling relationship. Before Zuri departs, Jasmina discovers a trove of disturbing items, including graphic photographs of dismembered women, and she becomes increasingly anxious, especially after Zuri snatches them from her and forbids her from entering Eligio’s locked darkroom. Upon Zuri’s return, he coerces Jasmina into taking part in a photo shoot that leaves her frightened and speechless. A parallel narrative from the perspective of Eligio’s wife portrays his emotional abuse and manipulation and illuminates the darkroom’s secrets. Barerra adds depth to the gothic tropes with insights on the Vargas family’s legacy of misogyny and clever references to Mexican literature and French folklore. Readers won’t be able to turn away from this macabre tale. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

John le Carré meets Evelyn Waugh in Mann’s terrific second novel (after The Torqued Man), set mostly in California on the eve of WWII. Adventurer Richard Halifax, a thinly veiled Richard Halliburton, is presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1939, until he begins sending off-color tall tales to his Junior Adventurers fan club (“Ah, boys, if you come by a sidekick as good as Roderick, think damn hard before you eat him”). His story intersects with those of painter Hildegard Rauch, the daughter of a famous German writer in exile who brings to mind Thomas Mann, and hapless British intelligence officer Simon Faulk, siloed to California to keep tabs on Nazi sympathizers. In a series of letters to her twin brother, Hank, whose apparent botched suicide attempt has left him in a coma, Hildegard expresses her annoyance at the scandal he caused (“to Werther yourself right out of existence? What a horrible cliché”). Before Hank’s coma, he sent her a cryptic message about Halifax, and she embarks on a quest to solve the mystery. Faulk, meanwhile, tries to out Halifax as a spy. Mann displays an extraordinary comedic gift for outlandish embellishment, and makes hay out of the incompetence and hubris on all sides of the impending war (as Faulk puts it, “The problem with America... is that everything here is a cartoon”). This is a hoot. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this vivid and prescient 1922 novel from Swiss author Ramuz (Great Fear on the Mountain), rapid climate change brings about societal breakdown. The days seem like they will last forever during one particularly hot August. Then news arrives that Earth is on a collision course with the sun. Thermostats strain in once bucolic countries where it soon becomes too hot to sleep, heavy traffic makes escape from the cities impossible, and bathers get burned beyond recognition. Soon the electricity fails and city squares empty out, villages split into small republics, and looting runs rampant (“Everything is ours; everything is allowed,” Ramuz writes in fluidly shifting first-person plural narration). In the small impressions and vignettes that make up the novel, a boy and girl on a desperate sojourn encounter survivors lurking in the woods, children parent themselves now that adults have ceased to bother, and a desperate office worker takes up arms. Near the end, a lone pilot, one of the last human survivors, finds himself grounded in a wasteland, where beauty is fleeting and disintegration a certainty. The crisp translation enhances the stark imagery and uncanny foresight. This is striking. (July)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

This piquant outing from Gould (The Hammerhead Chronicles) examines the fraught but loving relationships among a father, son, and grandson. When retired English teacher and part-time shoe salesman Elwin learns his father is dying, he returns to the tiny river town of Kingstree in the South Carolina Lowcountry for the first time since his mother’s funeral 15 years earlier. He’s accompanied by his precocious 13-year-old son Thom, the product of a one-night stand with Roma, 25 years Elwin’s junior, with whom he shares custody. Back in town, Elwin strikes up a tentative rapprochement with “the Old Man,” whom he’s resented for quickly moving on from his mother’s death by taking up with the woman next door. Thom, meanwhile, develops a sweet romance with the bookish daughter of the perpetually stoned owner of the motel where he and Elwin are staying. Gould’s sly sense of humor and talent for old-fashioned storytelling keep the narrative flowing briskly along over an eventful few days, as a death takes place, a boat overturns, a snakebite threatens a life, Roma unexpectedly shows up, and Elwin contends with the past. It’s a rewarding slice of life. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

The scathing latest from Mott (Hell of a Book) follows two Black writers from North Carolina as they grapple with the violence of American society and the mixed blessings of success. Soot, whose story is told in the third person, is invited to speak at a college in Minnesota that was recently the site of a mass shooting (“It’s all going to be okay, now that you’re here,” says the school representative who picks him up from the airport). In his writing and public appearances, he’s known to “speak to grief,” having lost his daughter Mia to suicide when she was 16. Mott alternates the story of Soot’s college visit with that of a writer who bears similarities to Mott (his name is revealed near the end) and who buys a Colt .45 (a gun he chooses because it’s “as American as apple pie”) to protect himself after receiving death threats. When he’s offered a Faustian bargain from a French billionaire—patronage for life, on the condition that he never return to the U.S.—he bitterly accepts and moves to Paris (“For the right price, leaving America just might be the new American Dream,” he reflects). There, the novel’s mischievous humor gradually gives way to a frightening fever dream. Mott’s satire is thoroughly uncompromising, which makes it all the more refreshing. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Citchens debuts with a stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin, revolving around a Baptist preacher and his family. Rev. Sabre Winfrey Jr. is Dominion, Miss.’s most prominent citizen, the linchpin of the Black community, and the owner of a barbershop, radio station, and blocks of real estate. He’s also one hell of a letch. (As Citchens wryly puts it, he “believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.”) Indeed, Sabre’s sermons provide scant cover for the philandering his highly medicated wife Priscilla is powerless to rein in. But Dominion’s “First Lady” has an even bigger problem: her youngest son, Emmanuel, better known as Wonderboy—a star quarterback with the singing voice of an angel—has taken up with 17-year-old Diamond Bailey, a “worldy hussy” in Priscilla’s eyes. Neither she nor Diamond know how depraved Wonderboy has become or where he goes when he disappears at night, and their efforts to protect him risk repeating the sins of the father as Citchens reveals the snake coiled in the heart of Dominion’s prelapsarian garden. This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher shot through with unforgettable images (here’s Priscilla describing a church banquet where tickets for seating in “heaven” and “hell” were priced according to their value: “Hell was packed, but there was only one full table in heaven”). Readers will be stunned. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink