The Town of BabylonAlejandro Varela. Astra House, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-66260-103-3
A gay Latinx man reckons with his past when he returns home for his 20th high school class reunion in Varela’s dazzling debut. Back in his unnamed suburban hometown, Andres, now a professor of public health, crosses paths at the reunion with Jeremy, his first love; and Paul, a homophobic bully. As a... Continue reading »
Kingdom of BonesJames Rollins. Morrow, $28.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-06-289298-0
Bestseller Rollins’s exhilarating 16th Sigma Force novel (after 2020’s The Last Odyssey) takes a Sigma Force team, including former Army Ranger Tucker Wayne, to a UN refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been overwhelmed by a simultaneous invasion of unusually violent ... Continue reading »
And Then I Woke UpMalcolm Devlin. Tordotcom, $13.99 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-250-79807-7
A prescient premise drives this stunning weird tale from Devlin (Unexpected Places to Fall from, Unexpected Places to Land): a disease renders the infected vulnerable to perceptions of relative realities, making them susceptible to “the fiction between the real and the perceived,” or what t... Continue reading »
A Duke, the Spy, an Artist and a LieVanessa Riley. Zebra, $15.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-4201-5227-2
The marriage of convenience trope gets a fresh spin in Riley’s outstanding final Rogues and Remarkable Women Regency romance (after An Earl, the Girl and a Toddler), which sees a Jamaican heiress marry a British spy to save his life. When widower Lord Felton Lance Gantry is almost captured ... Continue reading »
Hakim’s Odyssey, Book 2: From Turkey to GreeceFabien Toulmé, trans. from the French by Hannah Chute. Graphic Mundi, $29.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-63779-008-3
The harrowing second volume in Toulmé’s Hakim’s Odyssey series (after From Syria to Turkey) provides a rare and detailed account behind the headlines about migrants making dangerous overseas journeys. In the previous volume, Hakim—a young man (interviewed by Toulmé) who fled Syria ... Continue reading »
Breath Better Spent: Living Black GirlhoodDaMaris B. Hill. Bloomsbury, $25 (176p) ISBN 978-1-63557-647-4
Hill (A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing) combines in this urgent collection photographs and essays that capture the lives of young Black women and girls past, present, and future. Per Hill's luminous preface, "These poems explore the interior and public lives of Black girls, the visible...... Continue reading »
An Unexpected Amish ChristmasRachel J. Good. Zebra/Kensington, $8.99 mass market (352p) ISBN 978-1-4201-5040-7
Good (An Unexpected Amish Courtship) returns with a jovial story about finding hope in the aftermath of tragedy. Jeremiah Zook can’t walk and struggles to use his hand as a result of the horse and buggy accident that also killed his mother. But after he reads an article about Ketubah Etsch,... Continue reading »
Constructing a Nervous System: A MemoirMargo Jefferson. Pantheon, $27 (208p) ISBN 978-1-5247-4817-3
Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and memoirist Jefferson (Negroland) refashions her nervous system into a “structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words” in this bold and roving work. As most people refine their adult selves, she posits, they become calcified and ... Continue reading »
Sweet Paris: Seasonal Recipes from an American Baker in FranceFrank Adrian Barron. Harper Design, $29.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-304023-6
In this delectable debut, a love letter to the City of Light, self-taught baker Barron recipes that marry American comfort bakes with French pastry-making techniques. After moving to Paris from the U.S. in 2012, Barron, homesick for the familiar layer, loaf, and bundt cakes of his California roots, ... Continue reading »
Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle Shannen Dee Williams. Duke Univ, $29.95 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-1-47801-820-9
Williams, a history professor at the University of Dayton, brings to light in her ambitious debut the overlooked contributions of American Black Catholic nuns to the fight for civil rights. Williams provides a crucial amendment to standard histories of U.S. Catholicism and Black religion generally b... Continue reading »
The AquanautDan Santat. Graphix, $24.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-545-49761-9
In a dramatic cold open, Caldecott Medalist Santat renders the catastrophic sinking of an ocean research vessel: marine biologist and captain Michel Revoy goes down with the ship, leaving behind a labeled canister and message in a bottle, but his brother Paul survives, charged with caring for Michel... Continue reading »
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