Livonia Chow Mein: A NovelAbigail Savitch-Lew. Simon & Schuster, $29 (368p) ISBN 978-1-6680-7523-4
An ambitious journalist chases a big scoop and seeks to understand her Brooklyn roots in Savitch-Lew’s impressive debut. The story hinges on events from decades earlier, when Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, a Black Puerto Rican community organizer, ran a Freedom School to empower children of color out of ... Continue reading »
To the End of ReckoningJoseph Moldover. Mysterious Press, $26.95 (312p) ISBN 978-1-61316-758-8
Criminal psychologist and YA author Moldover (Just Until) makes an auspicious adult debut with this humane mystery about a stage actor investigating a murder alongside his ailing father. Lukas Moore, 23, has given up the lead in a Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire to car... Continue reading »
The Photonic EffectMike Chen. Saga, $20 trade paper (448p) ISBN 978-1-6680-8379-6
Chen (A Quantum Love Story) shows off his worldbuilding chops in this ingenious 24th-century space opera. Humanity is now in contact with multiple intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms, including the Lumersians, whose bodies are comprised of “planes of pink light” and who have shared thei... Continue reading »
Enemies to LoversAlisha Rai. Avon, $18.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-311950-5
Rai follows Partners in Crime with another wildly entertaining rom-com/caper mash-up. Brooklynite Sejal Chaudhary makes a living by taking bar bets on her impressive card tricks. It’s not the most stable life, but Sejal never plans for more than the short term. She feels like she can’t, giv... Continue reading »
The WoodchipperJoe Ollmann. Drawn & Quarterly, $25 trade paper (216p) ISBN 978-1-77046-823-8
Nothing comes easy for the denizens of Hamilton, Ontario, in these wry, bruising, and mordantly funny stories from Ollmann (Fictional Father). In “Nestled All Snug,” a toppled pile of boxes traps a bookstore employee in a dingy staff bathroom. In “Meat,” a security guard at a meat-packing f... Continue reading »
The Distance of a ShoutMichael Ondaatje. Knopf, $35 (240p) ISBN 978-0-593-80501-5
Ondaatje (A Year of Last Things) presents a superb and comprehensive collection of selected works, or “condensary of time,” that crystallizes for devotees and new readers alike the poet’s lifelong devotion to place. “From now on I will drink my landscapes,” he writes, “here, pour me a cup o... Continue reading »
The Long March HomeMarcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
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 »
American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos CastanedaRu Marshall. OR, $29.95 trade paperback (670p) ISBN 978-1-68219-461-4
Anthropologist–turned–New Age celebrity author Carlos Castaneda was a fraud and a cult leader, but also a powerful writer who tilled psychologically fertile material, according to this entrancing biography. Novelist Marshall (A Separate Reality) probes the 1968 book that launched Castaneda... Continue reading »
Southern Roots: Recipes and Stories from Mama Dip’s DaughterSpring Council. Countryman, $29.99 (248) ISBN 978-1-324-11132-0
Council devotes her warmhearted debut to the culinary heritage passed down by her mother, Mildred Council, the restaurateur behind North Carolina’s Mama Dip’s Kitchen, which closed in 2025 after a 50-year run. Drawing on food traditions from Chapel Hill’s Northside Black community, these 100 recipes... Continue reading »
We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American ChristianityKristin T. Lee. Broadleaf, $27.99 (256p) ISBN 979-8-88983-502-8
In her penetrating debut, physician Lee uses the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, to illustrate how she repaired a faith fractured by a childhood steeped in Western theology. Lee grew up in an immigrant church in Iowa that practiced Chinese customs ... Continue reading »
Piece by Piece: How Stephen Sondheim Made Musical Puzzles Come AliveErin Frankel, illus. by Stacy Innerst. Calkins Creek, $19.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-66268-095-3
Frankel’s starry-eyed portrait of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) places curiosity at the heart of the musical theater virtuoso’s success. Staccato introductory lines establish Sondheim as an expert puzzle solver (“Choosing notes/ Choosing words/ Putting it all together”), and inq... Continue reading »
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