In this entertaining adventure from Cromley (What We Build upon the Ruins), a ragtag crew embarks on a search for Sasquatch. When Jute Ramsey was 11, he went on a camping trip in Montana’s Elkhorn Mountains with his father, during which they felt they were being watched and found a massive handprint on their car. Now, some 30 years later, Jute—who holds onto the idea that he encountered a Bigfoot as a child—has formed a Bigfoot society of two with his friend Vergil. The two make regular expeditions around Montana in search of the creature. After they meet evolutionary biologist Dr. Marcus Bernard and documentary film student Vicky Xu in a bar, the group hatches a plan to search for Bigfoot together, with Vergil’s daughter, Rye, tagging along. Bernard, previously known as a Bigfoot nut, now wants to prove the creature doesn’t exist, while Vergil, who’s harboring a secret—he has terminal pancreatic cancer—is waiting for the right moment to tell Rye, who has already lost her mother. In the mountains, the group find human stick figures outside their tents and hear bizarre whistling as they make their way toward the site of Jute’s purported encounter. Cromley hits just the right tone, balancing satire, horror, and heartfelt drama. It’s a lot of fun. Agent: Sarah Bedingfield, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (July)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

A pair of Salvadoran American Harvard students attempt to uncover their family histories with the aid of a time-bending experimental device in Reyes’s marvelous debut novel (after the collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven). It’s 2018, and Ana Flores and her boyfriend, Luis Guzmán, are preparing for their joint research trip to Havana and San Salvador. At the latter destination, Ana hopes to trace the paths of her family members and understand how their country’s civil war has shaped Salvadorans’ collective memory. To aid her research, Ana routinely uses the Defractor, an experimental AI video device that allows its user to see alternate histories. Her use of the technology causes tension with Luis, who is ethically opposed to it. Meanwhile, Luis hopes their stop in Havana will help him uncover the truth about his great uncle Neto, a shadowy Salvadoran revolutionary. A parallel narrative set in 1978 San Salvador follows a forbidden love affair between Neto and his Nicaraguan boyfriend, Rafael, both of whom work as document forgers for their countries’ revolutionary forces. Through unflinching depictions of government-sanctioned disappearances and other atrocities, Reyes powerfully excavates the rippling effects of the Salvadoran civil war on his characters. Equally remarkable is his depiction of tech’s alluring yet dangerous frontier, which also affords the narrative a bit of fun (Ana’s Defractor interlocutor is an avatar of Alanis Morisette, who begins answering one question by saying “you oughta know”). Readers will be riveted. Agent: Aemilia Phillips, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/09/2025 | Details & Permalink

The ecstasy and devastation of first love illuminate this tender debut from Howarth. It begins in 1989 with narrator Lucy, 15, reflecting on life during summer break in her small town of Crossmore, Ireland: “I spend my days waiting for something to happen.” She passes her time with a group of girls she doesn’t especially like, and who make her feel like an outsider. Lucy, however, has a secret: She’s in love with Susannah, a “dazzling” member of her friend group. When, against all odds, Susannah returns her feelings two years later, Lucy believes her life has “finally started.” But in conservative Crossmore, their relationship isn’t just taboo, it can’t exist. To quell suspicions, Lucy pretends to return the affections of her longtime admirer and best friend, Martin. Susannah, however, is done with living “in secret” and compels Lucy to make a devastating choice the following summer. Howarth’s wrenching and beautifully written bildungsroman captures Lucy’s slow and then suddenly fast journey into adulthood as she tries to find where she belongs. It’s enchanting. Agent: Elizabeth Counsell, Northbank Talent. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this nuanced debut, Williams explores the allure of a toxic relationship between a young publicist and much older author. Charlie Turner, 24, has been a rabid fan of world-famous author Richard Aveling, now in his 50s, since she was a preteen, so she’s thrilled when the London publisher she works for assigns her to his new book. Charlie’s relationship to Richard’s work runs deep— his novels helped her climb out of a depression following her mother’s death when she was 16. When Charlie and Richard meet, their attraction is immediate. Though he’s married, they begin seeing each other. As time passes, however, Richard grows more critical and controlling of Charlie, isolating her from her friends and taking out his frustrations on her. Charlie, in turn, becomes obsessed with Richard, which drives a wedge between her and her concerned friends at the publishing firm and puts her job in jeopardy. More than a story about the pitfalls of power imbalances in workplace romances, the narrative plumbs the depths of Charlie’s desire and rootlessness, exploring how her family dynamic might have shaped her relationship with Richard, given that she never knew her father and her stepfather has started a new family with a younger woman. Readers will be moved. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Yates revisits the stiff-collared and secretive Oxford University setting of Black Chalk in his tantalizing latest, which chronicles a student’s discovery of nefarious deeds there in the mid-1990s. Alistair “Ali” McCain, 18, is the illegitimate son of renowned British rocker Gel McCain, who abandoned him as an infant. After returning to his birth country from California, Ali yearns to join the Saracens, a notorious secret society of upper-crust students. His feminist classmate, Izzy, a love interest, receives an invitation to the society’s annual first-week ball. Ali hopes she’ll bring him along, but she explains why she plans to decline: “Let’s just say I probably haven’t been invited because the rich boys of Oxford are interested in my views on gender and sexuality.” Eventually, Ali drops his father’s name to one of the Saracens and is invited to join their membership trials. But his realized dream quickly turns into a nightmare, as he comes to suspect that a professor’s mysterious death is linked to the group. Yates effectively builds suspense as Ali and Izzy face increasing danger, and a subplot involving Ali’s father’s reappearance adds depth. Dark academia fans ought to snatch this up. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pager debuts with the charming story of a magical portal between a 1917 Matisse painting and present-day Philadelphia. It begins when Claire, a 21-year-old janitor at an unnamed museum, becomes fixated on Matisse’s The Music Lesson. Having somehow crossed into the world of the painting, she falls in love with one of its subjects, Matisse’s older son, Jean, a young man who has been watching Claire from the painting and has feelings for her, too. With Jean, Claire enters more of the museum’s paintings from the period, and while inhabiting these works, they embark on an exciting romance. Halfway through, Pager reveals a secret that Claire has been keeping about her life in Philadelphia, but before she gets a chance to share it with Jean, the museum is shuttered by a pandemic, and she loses access to him. When the museum reopens a few months later, the stage is set for a hackneyed plot twist involving the discovery and subsequent theft of a journal written by a woman painter from the early 20th century. Still, Pager effectively peels back the curtain on the museum’s inner workings and evokes her protagonist’s deep relationship to art. There’s plenty here to admire. Agent: Ariele Fredman, UTA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Across these subtly interconnected stories, Park (Same Bed Different Dreams) crafts a world animated by pulp fiction and space operas as much as by the mundane joys and sorrows of modern relationships. In the opener, “A Note to My Translator,” the author of a novel titled Mexican Fruitcake decries the dadaist liberties taken by a translator with his hard-boiled prose. Such gems as the unnamed narrator’s complaint that “the doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball” set the tone for the tongue-in-cheek humor that suffuses the collection. “Bring on the Dancing Horses” is narrated by a man who grows increasingly jealous when his girlfriend, a literary critic specializing in science fiction, develops a bond with the FedEx courier who regularly delivers review copies and who turns out to be a gifted writer of speculative fiction. “Seven Women” comprises sketches of women whose fates revolve around Hannah Hahn, the elusive but “legendary” editor of a cult literary journal from the late 1980s, including Hannah’s stepmother, Dr. Emma Chew, “a revered psychoanalyst in her day.” The name Hannah appears in several entries, including the stellar “Weird Menace,” a transcript of a conversation between an actress and her director as they rewatch their low-budget sci-fi B movie turned cult classic decades later. Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hayford debuts with a poignant tale of ghosts and found family. In 1967, Genevieve Charbonneau has just left the circus where she worked following a stint in an Alabama psychiatric hospital, having been committed because of her ability to communicate with ghosts. Now, yearning for her ancestral home in Arkansas, she travels aimlessly through Louisiana, “sleeping most nights in some cemetery or another.” One morning, Genevieve meets Vietnam War veteran Mercer Ives, who’s also on the way to Arkansas, and the pair complete the journey by motorcycle. There, she meets Mercer’s mother, Wreath, who recognizes her as a distant cousin. She and Mercer visit the site where her grandmother’s home once stood, now overgrown with pine trees and vines, which they pick through with help from the ghost of an American soldier killed in Vietnam, who has been benevolently haunting Mercer. Genevieve witnesses Wreath’s preacher husband, John Luther, physically abusing Wreath, and then learns that he is also sexually abusing a young female parishioner. Afterward, Genevieve plots ways to expose John Luther, setting in motion a dramatic chain of events. Hayford seamlessly weaves the supernatural elements with lush details of the Southern landscape. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. Neige chronicles how her stepfather began raping her when she was seven. Along the way, she attempts to understand the mind of a child rapist, which, unlike the mind of a victim, is “beyond comprehension.” Her mother dated the “tall, athletic, personable” man, who goes unnamed, for just a few weeks in 1983 before moving in with him—along with Neige and her younger sister, Rose—in a cramped basement apartment. Neige remembers how during that time, she tried to hold her pee in for as long as she could in the mornings to avoid getting out of bed and attracting her stepfather’s attention after her mother left for work. She wasn’t sure his assaults qualified as rape until she was 12, when he penetrated her for the first time, and she felt oddly joyful to finally know what was happening to her. The accounts from his eventual 2000 trial for raping her are especially gut-wrenching as Neige comes to realize he was attracted by “the purest innocence.” Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature. This is brilliant. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink

The latest from Jenner (Every Time We Say Goodbye) is a fun if implausible tale about Jane Austen’s Victorian admirers. Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, the unmarried daughters of a Massachusetts judge, write a letter praising Austen, their literary idol, to her last surviving sibling, Francis “Frank” Austen. Now elderly and frail, Frank writes back that he’s unsure what to do with Jane’s letters. Over the course of their ensuing correspondence, he accepts the sisters’ offer to help, prompting them to defy their father’s wishes and board a steamship to England in June 1865. Also aboard are two other Jane Austen devotees whom Frank invited to visit: bookseller brothers Nicholas and Haslett Nelson. Charlotte, an aspiring actor, attracts the attention of a theatrical producer during the voyage, while Henrietta meets up with British journalist Denham Scott , who, unbeknownst to her family, had been courting her in Boston. During the crossing, they are married by the ship’s captain. In England, the Americans learn that Frank’s daughter Fanny-Sophia wants to burn Jane’s letters, which she deems indiscreet. Frank’s decision to involve four young American strangers in his sister’s posthumous reputation strains credulity, as does a plotline involving Denham’s attempt to divorce Henrietta only a month after their wedding. It’s not Jenner’s best work, but her fans will still enjoy the mix of fact and fiction. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 05/02/2025 | Details & Permalink