My Girl Missing
Kristen L. Berry
There’s something inherently secretive about families, according to Kristen L. Berry. “A lot of folks I grew up with have a self-protective attitude of ‘what happens in this house stays in this house.’ ”
Berry, who hails from a Detroit suburb and currently lives in Los Angeles, presents a stark version of that domestic reticence in her first novel, We Don’t Talk About Carol (Bantam, July). Sydney, a Los Angeles PR specialist, is cleaning out her deceased grandmother’s house in Raleigh, N.C., when she comes across an old picture of her Motown-loving aunt Carol as a teen. Carol supposedly ran away from home in the 1960s to pursue a music career in Detroit, but Sydney learns she vanished during the same period in which other Black girls in the neighborhood went missing, presumed victims of the Creek Killer. Sydney, a former crime reporter, can’t resist taking on the case.
Berry’s inspiration came from true crime podcasts like Crime Junkie and My Favorite Murder, through which she says she learned about the “disproportionate cases of Black people going missing in America,” which are less likely to be solved by police or covered by the press. For research, she visited her aunt and uncle in Raleigh, peppering them with questions about what it was like growing up there during the civil rights era. Berry began submitting chapters of the novel to an online writing group without a sense of where the mystery was heading. “I tried to write this as a reader who’s always asking, What will happen next?”
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Berry did summer internships at the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Daily News before deciding journalism wasn’t for her. “I didn’t like asking personal questions of people during difficult times in their lives,” she says. She pivoted to public relations at a firm in Detroit, a city that makes its presence heard in the novel. Carol, hoping to make it big, practices by singing hits from the Impressions, Mary Wells, and other Motown greats. “Growing up with Motown right there, I couldn’t help it,” Berry says with a chuckle.
Couch Potato
Adelaide Faith
A therapist’s request for an online review opened a floodgate for Adelaide Faith. Faith wrote several different versions, some serious, some funny, all longer and more idiosyncratic than those by other patients. After the therapist read them, she suggested Faith pursue her writing seriously, which eventually led to Happiness Forever (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Apr.), the story of a supercharged therapeutic transference.
In the novel, Sylvie, a vet technician who has trouble connecting with people, enters therapy following a toxic relationship and finds transcendent happiness in the sessions with her unnamed therapist. She fantasizes about hugging the therapist and scours the woman’s mannerisms and clothing for clues as to what she is really thinking. “Sylvie almost finds it unbearable that she doesn’t know what’s inside another person,” Faith says, speaking from her home on England’s southeast coast.
Faith was born in Yorkshire, where her father worked at a chicken processing plant. After a stint editing educational materials in London, she became a vet technician. She left the city after the birth of her daughter for Hastings, an idyllic seaside town full of priced-out Londoners, where she found work as a dog walker. Her editing process involved listening to her phone dictate her drafts during walks on the beach. “I cut out all the bits that made me feel terrible,” she says.
From this process emerged the taut vignettes that make up Happiness Forever, including sketches of Sylvie’s therapy sessions; her budding friendship with a woman who shares her nostalgic love of Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte figure of unrequited love; and her memories of past romantic relationships. There’s a hypnotic, off-kilter energy to the narrator’s voice as she luxuriates in fantasy and gets overwhelmed by reality.
While Happiness Forever will be published this spring, Faith’s therapy reviews never saw the light of day. “The therapist didn’t put them on her website,” she says.
Maternal Intuition
Sarah Harman
The working title of Sarah Harman’s debut novel, about a missing 10-year-old boy who went to a posh London school, was Dirtbag Detective, in reference to the spirited, sleuthing mother of another student. The final title, All the Other Mothers Hate Me (Putnam, Mar.), resonated with early readers. “We all have moments when we feel like outsiders,” Harman says, “and there’s something about parenthood that brings that out in spades.”
Harman, who is American but lives in London and has a six-year-old son, graduated with a degree in English and psychology from Georgetown University, then spent nearly a decade in Germany as a TV news reporter and anchor before taking a London correspondent position with NBC News in 2018. Three years later, burned-out and with her contract expiring, she decided to pursue her long-held ambition to write a novel. Her darkly funny mystery, which is in development for an FX series, is narrated by Florence Grimes, a brash American and former pop star who was unceremoniously dropped from her girl band after getting pregnant. When her son Dylan becomes a suspect in his classmate’s disappearance, she seeks to clear his name, in between nail appointments and boozy dates.
A journalist accustomed to writing on deadline, Harman made steady progress despite her “extreme ignorance” (her words) of the mystery genre, ending up with an “anti-detective” novel as much about Florence’s journey of self-discovery as the fate of the missing boy (“a little shit,” according to Florence). “It was a technical challenge to have a mystery solved by a sleuth only interested in nail art and reality TV,” Harman says, though she notes that Florence’s bleached hair and crop tops are a “disguise enabling her to do more than people would assume.”
Beneath the novel’s entertaining veneer lie deeper concerns about the sexist treatment of female stars, judgmental attitudes toward mothers, and the way shame can lead people to adopt a defensive social posture. Harman compares Florence
to the sharp-elbowed but vulnerable heroines of Fleabag and the movie Young Adult. “Part of the joy was writing a character who was trying as hard as I was,” she says of being tested as an American transplant in England. Unlike Florence, though, Harman is fairly confident that the mothers in her circle don’t harbor any hatred for her at all.
Moral Reservations
Jon Hickey
Mack Beck, the tribal president of Wisconsin’s Passage Rouge Nation in Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, Apr.), is in a tight reelection battle with a reform-minded candidate and has no qualms about using dirty tricks to remain in power. His childhood friend Mitch Caddo, a half-Anishinaabe law school graduate and budding political operative, implements Mack’s shady tactics, but with increasing reluctance. Reeling from the tragic death of his Anishinaabe mother, Mitch has a “spiritual void,” Hickey explains, “and is trying to fill it with politics.”
Set in the days leading up to the election, the novel is a tightly coiled study of power and greed. Hickey, who belongs to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, stresses there is nothing inherently corrupt about reservation leaders. “These are not the natural systems of government for Native people,” he says.
Hickey’s grandparents moved from their reservation in northern Wisconsin to Chicago in the 1950s, among the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans relocated as part of the government’s Indian termination policy. They returned years later, as many older people do, according to Hickey, who currently lives with his wife and two sons in San Francisco. “I’m on track to move back when I’m 75,” he says with a laugh. Raised in Minnesota and then Milwaukee, Wis., he regularly visited family members on the reservation with his mother. “The reservation was always like a homeland, which I think was strange because it was only four hours away.”
Mitch, derisively called a “J. Crew Indian” by an anti-Mack tribal member, is torn between competing desires to escape the reservation and to forge a connection. “All of my writing has been about that separation from the true part of your soul,” Hickey says.
Spilt Ink
Jared Lemus
“They didn’t tell me the truth about anything,” Jared Lemus says about his parents. As a result, he grew up immersed in fiction of a kind. They told him contradictory tales about their lives, from how they met to how his father got shot. “I almost didn’t believe I was born in Queens until I ordered my birth certificate.” Recently, he received a text from a half sister he never knew he had (another parental omission) while getting a tattoo in Malaysia.
Much of Lemus’s childhood was spent shuttling between Little Rock, Ark., where his father worked as a long-haul truck driver, and his parents’ homeland of Guatemala. “The worst part was that I was in school year-round because of the different school calendars,” he says.
Like his upbringing, the tales in Lemus’s debut collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody (Ecco, Mar.), are divided between Guatemala and the U.S. Caretaking is a central theme: a custodian cleans up graffiti on a college campus, the steward of a Guatemalan waterfall wipes away graffiti by an entitled American tourist, a medicine man attempts to revive a badly beaten child, and a bus driver offers a drug-addicted young man another future. Most characters are at crucial transitional periods, a phase very much
on Lemus’s mind as the parent of two children in elementary school.
Lemus spent his teens and early 20s being a “dumb punk rock kid,” he says. After getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was 22, he enrolled in college in Little Rock, majoring in creative writing at the offhand suggestion of a guidance counselor. He went on to an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill.
Lemus is a lover of tattoos, and one of Guatemalan Rhapsody’s standout stories, “Heart Sleeves,” concerns an aspiring tattooist desperately seeking to make his mark. Referring to his own tumultuous upbringing, Lemus says, “I hope the marks I’ve made on the world are stronger than the ones that were made on me.”
An Exile's Inheritance
Sanam Mahloudji
Sanam Mahloudji’s parents fled Iran with her and her newborn sister shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, first to France and then to the United States. They always hoped that they’d be able to return one day. “We were waiting and waiting, but that day never came,” says Mahloudji, who now lives in London. She drew on her family’s exile for The Persians (Scribner, Mar.), which chronicles the fate of the Valiats, a once-powerful Iranian family separated by the revolution. Elizabeth, the matriarch, and her granddaughter, Niaz, remained in Iran, while Elizabeth’s children lead gilded but rootless lives in America.
Mahloudji wrote the book to understand what it means for a person to be suddenly uprooted. “Iranians are really tied to their past,” she says. “My mother is still furious that her sister named her son after Alexander the Great, who invaded Persia, even though
he died around 300 BC.”
The Persians is narrated by five female members of the family, making up a “fractured story where everyone has their way of seeing what happened and what the future might bring,” Mahloudji says. The most forthright among them is Elizabeth’s daughter, Shirin, an event planner who caters to Houston’s wealthy Iranian community. Undaunted by a career-threatening scandal, she scoffs at her adopted nation’s lack of ancient history (“America is younger than my favorite ring”) and clings to the fading glory of her family name.
Mahloudji worked briefly as an investment banker in New York City before attending law school at UCLA and joining
a labor law firm in Pasadena. The job was fulfilling, but she felt a persistent nag to write and began experimenting with fiction. Her father died unexpectedly shortly thereafter. “Writing was tied up with losing my father,” she says—“a way to cope with life, to have somewhere else to be.”
While working on The Persians, Mahloudji didn’t tell her family. After she finally came clean, she remembers that her mother “talked with me about those early days of life in the U.S. in a way that I’d never heard.”
Net Work
Benedict Nguyễn
Benedict Nguyên likes to write about people in motion, drawing on her knowledge of movement as a professional dancer. She’s been writing about dance since 2018, but in 2021 she stumbled upon a YouTube clip of a volleyball match, at which point game recognized game. “I was so in awe of their range of physical tasks and sensory awareness,” Nguyên says.
The algorithm did its work, pulling Nguyên deeper into the sport that would provide the subject for her debut novel, Hot Girls with Balls (Catapult, July). It’s about an international indoor volleyball league whose two biggest stars—Six, standing at 6’7”, and Green, 6’1”—are an Asian American trans couple. As the narrative unfolds, the two document their relationship on a weekly online show.
From its jolting title to its bold conceit, the novel invites readers to suspend disbelief and overlook the “structural obstacles and social stigmas” that would make Six and Green’s story impossible in real life, Nguyên says. “I wanted to lean into the improbability of multiple trans players. And why not make them Asian American too?” she says with a laugh.
Nguyen describes Hot Girls with Balls as in some sense an “office novel,” emphasizing the intense labor that contemporary athletes put into their personal branding. The pressure Six and Green feel to monetize their life together strains their relationship and affects their play as they face off in an international tournament. Nguyên’s daring vision of the sporting landscape also gives ample space to spectators and online commenters, whose remarks function as a kind of Greek chorus, alternately adulatory, leering, witty, and vicious. Nguyên calls this anonymous mob her “doomscroll polyphonic narrator,” an apt literary term for the Internet Age.
An Acquired Taste
Lucy Rose
“I’ve seen every kind of imaginable death on screen,” says Lucy Rose, a “massive lover” of horror movies, whose macabre novel The Lamb (Harper, Feb.) has a queer feminist flavor. It follows the cannibalistic adventures of Margot, a girl living in the woods in England with her mother and feasting upon the unfortunate “strays” who stumble upon their moldy cabin. When her ravenous mother begins a relationship with a beautiful woman who shares her carnal appetites, Margot is the odd one out, an edible obstacle to their domestic bliss.
Even without the cannibalism, the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of The Lamb is a monstrous one. “It’s normal to unpack incompatibilities in romantic relationships, but it’s taboo to portray a familial relationship in such terms,” Rose says. Margot is on the cusp of adolescence, a “liminal space where your thoughts are becoming your own thoughts,” the author explains. She exists in two separate moral realms—the twisted household and normal life at school—and reconciling them becomes increasingly difficult.
Rose grew up in rural Cumbria on a farm, delighting in folktales told to pass the time and exploring the surrounding, and often eerie, fells. “You never quite feel like you’re by yourself, which is not a good feeling when you actually are by yourself,” she says.
Despite her love of Cumbria, Rose was “desperate to just see a bus or something that resembled modern society.” After high school, she moved to Newcastle, where she worked as a cleaner and, surrounded by “clever and creative” people, “fell into the arts.” She studied film production in college, though she was “so jealous of everybody who was writing.” She went on to write and direct five shorts between 2018 and 2023, and the economical approach to storytelling in those projects came in handy when writing The Lamb.
Rose adores the horror genre but is critical of its tendency to treat the victims as faceless “under-characterized” fodder. Her addition to the genre strives to give each victim Margot’s mother boils a “pinch of humanity,” Rose says, even if it’s followed by a few dashes of salt and pepper.
Revenge Play
Charlotte Runcie
As an unpaid intern covering Edinburgh’s annual Fringe Festival, Charlotte Runcie found out what it feels like to go through public shaming. After she panned a comedy show, the comedian began skewering Runcie in her set, prompting Runcie to skulk around Edinburgh wearing dark glasses.
“It’s rare that art is either exceptional or terrible,” says Runcie, who currently lives
in South Wales. It follows that middling reviews are often as forgettable as the work itself. Critical pans, by contrast, are “intriguing and delicious,” she notes. They spur online debate, provoke alterations, and, if Lord Byron is to be believed, can even be fatal: Keats, Byron sneered in Don Juan, was “killed off by one critique.”
With her novel Bring the House Down (Doubleday, July), Runcie turns a critical eye to reviewers behaving badly. Alex Lyons is a savage theater critic with a louche charm. He attends Edinburgh’s annual Fringe Festival with narrator Sophie, his junior colleague, where he files a blistering review of performer Hayley Sinclair’s earnest one-woman show about climate change, then sleeps with Haley before she sees his review. Afterward, Hayley incorporates Alex’s betrayal into her act, inviting women to come forward with tales of his shoddy behavior. The play becomes a phenomenon.
Runcie grew up immersed in the theater world—her parents worked in the industry. After graduating from Cambridge University, she began reviewing multiple performances a day at the Fringe Festival, filing up to a half-dozen short reviews before a nightly recharge at the pub. “It made me a very concise writer,” she says. “But it troubled me how quickly you were being forced to form an opinion.”
After a long career as a critic, most recently at the Telegraph, Runcie still questions “who gets to decide the difference between good
and bad art.” Bring the House Down complicates matters by throwing sex into the mix. “The late #MeToo era,” Runcie says, “is a really good time to explore the moral complexities of holding someone to account and taking revenge—and how those two things can sometimes look very similar.”
Cruel Immortality
Austin Taylor
As a Harvard undergraduate, Austin Taylor was on track to major in chemistry when she took a literature elective called Very Contemporary Fiction. She enjoyed it so much she rethought her focus, becoming one of only two Harvard students ever (the other was her classmate) to double major in chemistry and English.
With Notes on Infinity (Celadon, June), a tangled tale of biotech gone awry, Taylor shifts the boundaries of the campus novel, portraying a newly pressurized student culture. “If students aren’t doing something incredible, they’re failing,” she says. In the novel, Harvard undergraduates Zoe and Jack launch Manna, an anti-aging startup—the “ugly stepchild of science,” says Taylor—on the claim that they’ve discovered a revolutionary gene-editing technology that could lead to immortality.
Despite providing Manna’s key theoretical breakthrough, Zoe assumes a public-facing role, spinning a narrative to investors and the public while Jack works in the lab. Taylor wanted to explore what it’s like to be a woman in STEM. “We’re very much invited to the party, but our presence does change the party, and not all of the attendees are thrilled,” she says.
The specter of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos who was convicted of fraud, haunts the novel. “Her gender affected the narrative on both ends of the scandal,” Taylor says, noting that Holmes was first viewed as a “girl wonder” and then as “some sort of devil.”
Taylor, who graduated in 2021 and currently splits her time between the Boston area and central Maine, was accepted to Harvard Law School but deferred and ultimately withdrew to write her novel. She is in the process of reapplying, and plans to focus on ethical issues around technologies like artificial intelligence and gene editing. She recalls asking one of her professors what he thought young people should be working on, and he told her, “We need to figure out what the boundaries are around what makes us human, because technologies are emerging that will erode those boundaries.” In Notes on Infinity, she explores arguably the most human boundary of all—mortality.
Matt Seidel is a writer and translator living in Massachusetts.
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