Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note (after Sublunar) with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk’s deathbed visions. While Othlo’s body lies broken in the monastery, waited on by his fellow monks, his spirit soars to the Garden of the Head-bearers, where... Continue reading »

Fielding’s excellent latest (after The Housekeeper) nestles a murder mystery inside a witty novel of friendship and loss. Linda Davidson, 76, is starting to admit she’s growing old. Since she lost her husband to cancer two years ago, she’s opened her home in Jupiter, Fla., to her youngest d... Continue reading »

Johnson (The Endless Song) builds a robust and bizarre world in this wildly original and wholly transportive fantasy. During the Reagan presidency, a strange mathematical text circulated among world leaders, persuading them to set aside half of all land on Earth for natural “Harbors” to pre... Continue reading »

Hammett makes an effervescent debut with this enemies-to-lovers sports romance. Lucas, a cox for the Cambridge crew team, has always had issues with George, the club president, an underwear model from Wisconsin. After losing a big race against their rival, Oxford, the teammates hate each other more ... Continue reading »

Boyd’s understated yet deeply moving second graphic memoir (after Chicken Rising) recounts her experience as a shy girl entering junior high in late 1970s Canada. Dawn’s mom, a bridge- and bingo-playing paragon of small-town decency, thunders against sex in movies, declares that the Legion ... Continue reading »

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding... Continue reading »

In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »

Howard University English professor Williams (In the Light of Likeness—Transformed) spotlights Toni Morrison’s efforts to shepherd Black literature into the mainstream in this enthralling chronicle of her tenure as an editor at Random House in the 1960s and ’70s. Drawing on Morrison’s corre... Continue reading »

Menopause is both “shit” and “amazing,” according to this spirited anthology edited by journalist Eltahawy (The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls). Aiming to present an “antidote” to a type of taboo-busting feminist approach to the topic that mainly appeals to “white, wealthy, cisgen... Continue reading »

Historian Fletcher (Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century) incisively explores the dark underbelly of American evangelical missionary work via the experiences of missionaries’ children. Drawing on her own childhood in Kenya and interviews with 80 others who w... Continue reading »

Via spare, poetic language as well as watercolor and pencil illustrations that take hazy, desaturated hues, Tallie (Layla’s Happiness) and Becker (The Last Zookeeper) celebrate the time shared between a child and caretaker as they together meander through a metropolitan neighborhoo... Continue reading »