Kearsley (Vanished Days) draws on the mysterious 1618 death of Henry, Prince of Wales, in this noteworthy historical. Andrew Logan, a messenger for King James I, is tasked with investigating the prince’s untimely death after rumors swirl that he was poisoned. The first order of business is tracking down Sir David Moray, who served as Henry’s Gentleman of the Robes and who had aroused suspicion by traveling to France soon after Henry’s death. Logan travels to Moray’s native Scotland, accompanied by scrivener Laurence Westaway, to arrest Moray there. Because Westaway is in poor health, his daughter Phoebe joins the party to tend to her father. After Logan locates Moray, he comes to doubt Moray’s guilt and leads the group back to London in hopes of finding the truth. A detailed afterword lays out the historical record and where Kearsley has taken creative license, and her reveal of how Henry died is both surprising and logical. Kearsley’s deep character work includes flashbacks depicting Moray’s close relationship with Henry and an unexpected but convincing bond between Logan and Phoebe. Fans of C.J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series will appreciate this. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Written in 1915 and never published, this daring if uneven novel by Armed with Madness author Butts (1890–1937) explores a woman’s sexual desire in Edwardian London. Agnes Helen Ormonde flouts convention, carrying on an affair with a married professor and courting the affection of a girl philosophy student. On a voyage to Australia to visit her brother, she embraces the lifestyle of a courtesan and returns to England as a thoroughly “fallen woman,” unable to find a husband and only attracting interest from a man looking for a “feminine distraction.” Her success with men is prodigious (one admirer describes her as a “miracle of a woman”), but she is less likely to conquer the heart of the reader. Initially, Butts casts Agnes as intriguingly enigmatic, but by the farcical third act she’s been flattened into a villain, “absorbed in her own greed” and frequently compared by the author to a snake. Still, the sharp prose and the audacity of the plot offer early signs of Butts’s later brilliance. For modernist fiction fans, this is worth a look. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Collins debuts with a finely tuned tale of artistic ambition and cultural shifts in the 1970s Texas music scene. Married Austin bar owners Deanna and Wendell hire up-and-coming singer-songwriter Doug Moser to lead the house band at their Rush Creek Saloon, hoping to drum up business. Doug, along with his wife and son, move into a house on the bar’s property, and soon the Rush Creek is buzzing with a hip new clientele. Not all is hunky-dory, though. Regulars lose their barstools to hippies, an odd loner named Steven starts hanging around the band, Deanna stifles budding feelings for Doug, and Wendell sees his usefulness to the Rush Creek diminish (“This is my bar, Doug, ain’t it?” he angrily asks at one point). Collins mostly focuses on Doug’s and Deanna’s points of view, and she keenly captures their individual desires: Doug seeks fame and purpose, while Deanna wants a disruption from life’s routine. Though the narrative loses steam by its tragic final act, which turns on a gnarly rainstorm, Collins brilliantly conveys the nitty-gritty details of a working musician’s day-to-day. Music lovers will especially dig this. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Mahloudji’s ebullient debut, a Persian family reckons with their exile and loss of prestige in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. In December 2005, middle-aged Shirin Valiat, a charismatic events planner based in Houston, is arrested for prostitution in Aspen, Colo., during a vacation with her family. News of Shirin’s arrest harms her thriving business, prompting her to move into her niece Bita’s cramped Manhattan apartment and court new clients at the funeral of a prominent Persian woman with ties to her estranged mother, Elizabeth, who still lives in Tehran. Mahloudji interweaves the story of Elizabeth’s life in the early 1940s, when she’s an aspiring painter and falls for Ali Lufti, the son of the family’s chauffeur. Eventually, Elizabeth marries a much older man, choosing her family’s approval over her love for Ali Lufti, but she’s deeply unhappy, especially as she abandons her art career to care for her three children, all of whom flee with their own children during the Revolution. Only Shirin’s six-year-old daughter, Niaz, remains with Elizabeth. Mahloudji keeps the reader turning the pages as Elizabeth teases and finally reveals her darkest secrets about Ali Lufti along with the reason behind Niaz’s remaining behind in Tehran. It’s a memorable family saga. Agent: Emma Paterson, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kitamura (Intimacies) serves up a taut and alluring novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man. The unnamed narrator, a well-known theater actor, meets Xavier at a restaurant in New York City. Their first meeting took place two weeks earlier, and the woman doles out sparse and subtle clues in her narration, comparing her lunch with Xavier, now a college student, to one she had with her father in Paris. Kitamura keeps the reader guessing as to whether the characters are mother and son, lovers, or something else. Shortly after the lunch, Xavier becomes more involved in the narrator’s life, working as an assistant for the director of a play in which the narrator stars. She reflects on her ambivalence toward motherhood and the long-ago miscarriage she had with her husband, Tomas, after which she had a series of affairs. About Xavier, the narrator is secretive not only with the reader but with Tomas, and his suspicion that they’re having an affair threatens their marriage. In the novel’s second half, Kitamura further complicates the narrator and Xavier’s murky relationship. Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters’ blurry boundaries. Readers won’t be able to put this down. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Strange and macabre events animate the stories in this exquisite English-language debut from Egle. In “The Debt,” a pregnant mother of five attempts to calm herself after opening a threatening debt collection letter by tending to domestic tasks at her house in the forest. The story’s tragic arc is foreshadowed by the arrival of a small bird, which stares at her creepily from a windowsill. “The Duck” quickly swerves from a lighthearted romp about an office romance to a harrowing story of a stalker. The title character in “Aleksandra Is Beautiful” makes regular visits to her local library in her wheelchair, where she has a series of increasingly fraught interactions with a librarian who finds her attractive. In the remarkable and tense “Runaway Train,” a young woman returns home to celebrate the birthday of her younger brother, whose childhood room their alcoholic parents have kept as a shrine since he went missing years earlier. Egle blends realistic depictions of her windswept northern settings with a subtly off-kilter vibe, creating an unsettling effect. Readers will hope for more from Egle. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

English writer Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. The year is 1968 and Beth Johnson, wife of gentle sheep farmer Frank, remains shattered by the death of her nine-year-old son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier. Her first love, Gabriel, a bestselling novelist who grew up wealthy on a nearby estate, returns with his young son, Leo, after separating from his American wife. Beth reconnects with Gabriel, fantasizing about rewinding her life to a simpler time, and she forges a bond with Leo, who reminds her of Bobby. An unreliable narrator, Beth provides a blinkered view of the action, mentioning early on that a farmer has been murdered and someone close to her is on trial for the crime, but neglecting to reveal the identities of these two characters until more than halfway through the narrative. As a result, readers are kept guessing about the precise consequences of Gabriel’s return and the circumstances behind Bobby’s death. Hall makes Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment, and the other characters’ motivations prove to be different than they seem at first glance. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

irshenbaum (Rabbits for Food) offers a deeply moving and playfully arch narrative of an artist dealing with her husband’s mental and physical decline. A typical “internal weather report” for Addie, a middle-aged New Yorker, is “overcast with anxiety.” Her husband, Leo, who runs a university medical research lab, begins showing signs of dementia in his early 50s. Addie tries to meet his changes with humor, as when he hallucinates Mahatma Gandhi outside their window (“Is he wearing anything more than a dhoti?” she says, adding, “You might want to bring him a coat”). At a low point, she calls a suicide hotline. She finds occasional relief by going out for drinks with a suave man named Z, whose departure for Europe angers her, and she mocks Z for calling Europe “the continent.” After Leo is diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, Kirshenbaum sardonically outlines the disease’s seven stages, showing how Addie’s reaction to the news mirrors the various stages of grief, beginning with denial. The bulk of the story is delivered in Addie’s crisp second-person narration and her interstitial journal entries, in which she remarks on Leo’s transformation (“Asks if I want to go to Times Sq. to watch the ball drop* / *Stark raving mad question”). Kirshenbaum puts her lively wit to good use, tempering the sadness of her drawn-out depiction of Leo’s deterioration and Addie’s attempts to wrap her head around the ultimately lonely nature of existence. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Newman (The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies) serves up a collection of artful if rambling novellas set in the 20th-century American West. The sinuous title entry takes place in 1964 Reno, Nev., where ambitious college student Julie’s dreams of becoming a school principal are dashed after she picks up hitchhiker Howi, a young Sioux man, and they begin a romance. Julie unexpectedly gets pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, Nia, who has no hands. The rest of the narrative traces the family’s adjustment to Nia’s disability, her coming-of-age, and the aftermath of a family tragedy after she leaves for college in Boise. In “City of Angels,” an unlikely friendship forms between an art student and a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vet, who meet and hang out at the Los Angeles Library in 1986, and whose lives are changed by the famous fire there. Another fire figures into “Saints of Death Valley,” about an orphan raised by an eccentric family in Death Valley, where their house is consumed by a deadly blaze. Though the stories are baggy, Newman has a gift for jumping gracefully from one point of view to another and revealing the connections between multiple characters. Patient readers will enjoy these intriguing byways. Agent: Kathryn Green, Kathryn Green Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

A gay Korean American man wakes up from a coma and reckons with unresolved family issues in this perceptive story of arrested development from Chong (Flux). Jack Jr., the 30-year-old narrator, has no recollection of the car accident that put him in the hospital two years earlier, and his family is silent about the whereabouts of his fiancé, Ren. Told that he’s lost his copywriting job along with his Manhattan apartment, he reluctantly moves back in with his parents in Fort Lee, N.J., the hometown he fled at 18 after refusing to take over the family sushi restaurant. Now, with nothing else to do and heartbroken to learn Ren has married someone else, he starts pitching in at the restaurant. His parents remain reticent, however, preferring to act like he’d never left. Just as he begins to settle back into his old life, he starts a new romance. Torn once again between forging a new path and meeting his family’s expectations, he realizes he’s never really matured. Chong expertly captures the family’s complicated dynamics and ratchets up the tension as they finally break the silence about the past. It’s a satisfying drama. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink