Clayton (The Postmistress of Paris) delivers an irresistible story of 1950s Hollywood featuring a restless ingénue who befriends a blacklisted screenwriter. It’s 1957 and Isabella Giori has just debuted in a supporting role opposite Janet Leigh. She’s hoping Hitchcock will pick her as his next favorite blonde actress, but the studio, having caught on that she’s pregnant, sequesters her in Carmel, Calif., until she agrees to have an illegal abortion. In Carmel, she meets screenwriter Léon Chazan, who’s out of work due to accusations that he’s a communist. After Léon shares his work in progress for feedback, she’s intrigued to find all the hallmarks of a great Hitchcock film, down to the part she envisions for herself, “the dreamboat of a girl who might be evil or might be good.” A parallel narrative set in 2018 follows the late Léon’s granddaughter, Gemma, an aspiring screenwriter who arrives at his Carmel cottage to prepare it for sale. After meeting aging star Isabella, who still lives next door, Gemma finds a script in her grandfather’s safe that he wrote, which bears striking similarities to a film Isabella was credited with writing. Clayton expertly interweaves Gemma’s, Isabella’s, and Léon’s tales as each attempt to forge their path in a cutthroat industry. Readers will be riveted. Agent: Margaret Riley King, WME. (July)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ostlund (After the Parade) explores queer identity and complex truths in this piercing collection. The lesbian college senior in “The Bus Driver” unexpectedly reunites with her “unlikely” childhood best friend, Jane, during a visit to her Minnesota hometown. Jane, now a reluctant mother, is saddled with an unsatisfying job at a chicken factory, and the women reflect on the disparate paths they’ve each taken into adulthood. The somber title story explores the bittersweet relationships between several gay men and their lovers. Other standouts include “Clear as Cake,” which puts Ostlund’s talent for crisp, sharply drawn characterization on display; and “The Peeping Toms,” where two lesbians’ lives are upended by a voyeur. Whether with a teacher’s horrific encounter with an unhinged student in “The Stalker” or the lesbian woman’s stressful visit with her unmoored newly widowed mother in “Just Another Family,” Ostlund’s collection coheres with her characters’ shared need for emotional and physical safety and their desire to love and be loved—or simply to be seen. These stories will dazzle readers. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Harvey (A Happier Life) serves up an arresting tale of women working together to solve their hardships. With “hunky investment guru” Bill Sitterly under investigation for fraud, his and his wife Charlotte’s assets are seized. While Bill sits in jail, Charlotte and their 11-year-old daughter, Iris, are locked out of their sparkling new home in Juniper Shores, N.C. They check into thrice-widowed Alice Bailey’s nearby “mommune,” a former bed and breakfast that now hosts a handful of single mothers in varying circumstances. Believing that Bill is unjustly accused, Charlotte gets a job at a local insurance agency and sets out to clear her husband’s name with the help of fellow mommune residents and Alice. Along the way, Alice tries to find the courage to date again and lose the “black widow” tag following her around town. Harvey keeps the twists and turns coming with her well-constructed plot, including a shocking development on the charges Bill faces. This first-rate tale is perfect for summer reading. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Michel (The Body Scout) spins a riveting tale of a sci-fi writing group and its obsessive hanger-on, Michael Lincoln. Borrowing the arch tone and annotated book-within-a-book form of Pale Fire, the novel consists of a collection of stories written by the group and edited by Michael with extensive notes and digressive passages about the writers’ interrelationships and Michael’s own tenuous connection to them. The group, called the Orb 4, includes Taras K. Castle, a talented author with whom Michael grew up in Vermont, and who shares an apartment with Michael in Brooklyn; their other roommate, Castel Ocampo, a queer and nonbinary writer who uses the pen name Merlin; Jane Noh Johnson, whose “dual nature” explains her enrollment in an MFA program where she churns out “dreary literary realism” when she’s not writing exciting “escapades” for the group; and Darya Azali, the group’s “loud and proud geek.” Michel has a knack for exploring the characters’ complex relationships, as Michael’s delusional view of himself and the world around him careens toward its breaking point while the Orb 4’s stories bleed into the writers’ real lives (Jane writes of a thinly veiled Michael as “the awkward, merely tolerated friend who misunderstands social cues”). This captivates. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Two beautiful and biting classics of Russian modernism come to life in this collection of two novels from Vaginov (1899–1934), sharply translated by Morse and Cebula. The eponymous entry, set mostly in and around 1920s Leningrad (“Now there is no Petersburg,” Vaginov writes woefully) features a cast of idealists who imagine themselves as “the representatives of high culture” but are growing increasingly adrift under communism. After settling into a marriage and leaving his life of letters, critic Baumcalfkin realizes that “all of them spoke in a general way about a culture to which they did not belong.” The Works and Days of Whistlin focuses on a writer, Whistlin, who befriends local characters, including Cuckoo, an important-looking man with no opinions of his own (“Whatever everyone approved of, he approved of as well”) and the esoterically minded quack Psychofsky. Whistlin is a keen observer and manipulator of his acquaintances, and he stifles any guilt he feels about absorbing details of their lives into his work. Like Whistlin, Vaginov wrote lovingly and mercifully about his friends in his race to document a vanishing world. Readers will be rewarded. (June)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

The stellar latest from Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory) chronicles a sensitive boy’s coming-of-age and his family’s private pain. “Wayward” adolescent Jay is the youngest of the Lim family, who leave their unnamed Malaysian city during his summer break from high school for their small farm in the south. Aw evokes a mood of pervasive decline, describing the financial troubles plaguing the country, the farm’s economic problems, and the deterioration of family patriarch Jack, a severe, unlikable math teacher. Against this melancholy backdrop, Aw masterfully juxtaposes the hopes and desires of the younger generation, crystallized in the tender, slow-burning relationship between Jay and a slightly older and stronger boy named Chuan, son of the farm’s manager. Questions of how to manage one’s inheritance, whether of material assets or emotional baggage, are central to the novel, as Aw explores how the characters, especially Jay’s mother, Sui, feel indebted and trapped. Through alternating close-third perspective, and occasional first-person passages from Jay, Aw offers a clear view into the characters’ inner lives, revealing their aching desires and the secret relationships and personal crises they hide from each other. In addition to the perceptive characterizations, Aw uses rich symbolism, such as the Lims’ ever-present tamarind grove, alive and beautiful but terminally diseased. This masterwork of psychological realism brings to mind the classic novels of E.M. Forster. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

A young woman longs for a new life outside of her rural Spanish town in the arresting English-language debut from Levi. Lea, 19, has spent the past year preparing for the apocalypse that her town’s mayor had claimed would arrive by now. It’s New Year’s Day, 2013, and when she meets a man passing through town whose dog has just wandered into the nearby forest, she warns him against entering, claiming that “people who go into the forest never come out.” She proceeds to tell him the story of her life, detailing how she’s helped her mother care for her younger sister, Nora, who can’t speak or move, and recounting their fruit-picker father’s accidental death on the job. When a family arrives from the city in early 2012, Lea gets the itch to leave for bigger things, and near the end of the year, Nora begins acting strangely, trying to bite her tongue off and refusing to eat, prompting Lea to take drastic action. The cruel depictions of “empty-headed” Nora can be tough to stomach, but for the most part Levi’s frank and acerbic prose works to the book’s advantage, highlighting the story’s absurd nature and brutal action. This eerie tale is worth a look. Agent: Elianna Kan, Regal Hoffman & Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bender’s impressive latest (after The New Order) explores relationships between friends and family with a mix of speculative and realist tales. The narrator of “The Words of Dr. L” lives in a dystopian future where pregnant women are required by law to become mothers. She hopes to end her pregnancy, breaking from her best friend Joanne, who joins a group called Protection, established to shield women’s fetuses from their “untoward thoughts.” In the unsettling and dreamlike “The Extra Child,” a couple drops off their youngest child at college, only to return home and find another child who “looked to be about ten” and claims to be theirs (“Suddenly, I knew it,” the mother thinks. “I had given birth to him, clearly in some sort of haze, and then I had forgotten him”). The most moving story, “Arlene Is Dead,” follows a family who care for their elderly relative Sylvia while weathering the Covid pandemic. In the monotony of quarantine, they become delighted by how animated Sylvia becomes when ranting about a self-absorbed friend. Bender’s more fantastical stories recall the work of Isaac Asimov, while her realist takes offer insight into the complex lives of characters navigating loss and disappointment. It’s an accomplished collection from a seasoned storyteller. Agent: Maria Massie, Massie & McQuilken. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Huang’s provocative if uneven sophomore outing (after Natural Beauty) blends speculative elements with a story of friendship and jealousy between two artists from opposing backgrounds. Enka, the narrator, was a “fringe kid,” whose family lived on the poorer side of the impenetrable “buffer” in her native Florida. When, despite unlikely odds, Enka is accepted to a prestigious art school, she is immediately fascinated by Mathilde Wojnot-Cho, the “supremely gifted” wunderkind everyone is too nervous to befriend. Mathilde grew up protesting the buffers despite living on the affluent “enclave” side, and she and Enka develop an intense bond, “dream[ing] the same dreams.” A rift forms when Mathilde is invited to show her work at the Whitney Museum and the Venice Biennale but Enka receives no such opportunities. Later, after Enka marries into a wealthy family and Mathilde suffers an unimaginable loss, the two decide to connect their psyches via a technology called the Scaffold, which allows its users to “inhabit” each other’s minds. Unsurprisingly, the results are harrowing. At times the dialogue lapses into melodrama, but Huang writes evocatively of Enka’s waxing and waning jealousy of Mathilde, which comes at the expense of developing her own artistic voice. This bracing novel gives readers plenty to chew on. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Browner (Everything Happens Today) portrays the Trojan War from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy in this stirring novel. Hani is left alone in his home village, his brothers having joined the fighting in Troy followed by their father, who brought along Hani’s younger sister, Arinna, in the wake of their mother’s death. Believing himself destined to protect Arinna, Hani makes it his mission to bring her home. Despite having little sense of “where he’s going or what hidden dangers lie in the way,” he confidently sets out with his donkey. He eventually reaches Troy, where he glimpses remnants of the Greeks’ Trojan Horse amid scores of dead bodies and toppled buildings. Hani’s tragic quest takes a surprising turn, one that gives the boy hope after despair. Along the way, Browner brilliantly conveys the impact of war through its collateral consequences, such as the farms in Hani’s village left barren without able-bodied men to tend them. The novel also playfully subverts Homer’s heroic tropes; for instance, Hani puts a twist on the opening line of the Odyssey while calling out to the amphibians he plans to catch for food: “Sing to me now, you frogs who hold the shores of the pond!” It’s a worthy counterpoint to the classic myths. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink