Holder debuts with an uneven saga of a reality TV couple and their explosive breakup. Luke Griffin met his husband, Barnes, on the first season of the adventure show Endeavor. Barnes is now a Republican senator, and when he’s caught in a sex scandal, Luke leaves him and petitions to gain full custody of their children. Desperate for money, Luke joins Endeavor’s 20th season. He and the other contestants forge alliances and try to make the show’s contests, which include pickaxing through ice sculptures to retrieve a key, “feel like a game and not a gulag.” As Luke competes, he “remember[s] what it felt like to be a winner.” He cozies up to fellow contestant and roommate Shawn, a former porn star, but fears a relationship with Shawn will jeopardize his custody battle. After Barnes joins the cast mid-season, chaos ensues: a video leaks of Shawn and Luke together, a punch is thrown, and someone is blackmailed. Holder is inventive with Endeavor’s increasingly bizarre challenges­­—at one point, contestants race to solve a jigsaw puzzle underwater­—but bites off more than he can chew with an overcrowded cast and timeline jumps that overexplain rather than add depth to the action. Readers will hope Holder finds firmer footing his next time out. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

Actor and director Nelson follows City of Blows with another cutting satire of contemporary Hollywood, this time about a disgraced movie star who lands a redemptive role in a Marvel-like franchise. Peter Compton is clean and sober after spending three years in prison for a series of drug offenses, and once again at the top of his game. He arrives in Atlanta to play the popular Major Machina comic book character, a combination of man and machine. An exacting Peter clashes with the film’s young director, Joel Slavkin, who sometimes wishes he had followed the same route as his best friend, an indie filmmaker. Joel’s job is further complicated after Peter forms a “cabal” with the film’s temperamental cinematographer, Javier Benavidez, and the two routinely overrule his choices. During the shoot, studio executives enter crisis mode after a video of Peter berating an intimacy coordinator goes viral. Peter then disappears, and the execs consider using AI to complete the film without him. Nelson thoroughly skewers Hollywood’s outsize egos, artistic compromises, and takeover by superhero franchises, even while paying tribute to the characters’ sincere creative ambition. The result is vivid and entertaining. (Dec.)

Reviewed on 10/10/2025 | Details & Permalink

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