Pataki, author of Finding Margaret Fuller, reimagines the life of famed Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit (1884–1967) in this winning tale of how a woman’s beauty transforms her life. When Evelyn is a teen, her widowed mother struggles to make ends meet for her and her younger brother, Kit. Hoping for better opportunities, they move from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, where Evelyn and her mother land jobs at Wanamaker’s department store. Outside the store one day, an artist asks Evelyn to model for her, which leads to similar gigs and eventually a chance to work as an artist’s model in New York City. There, in 1901, Evelyn becomes a chorus girl on Broadway, where she garners the attention of Stanley Pierce, a wealthy and much older architect who pays for Evelyn and her mother’s hotel suite, while Kit remains at boarding school in Pennsylvania. When Stanley becomes sexually abusive, Evelyn fears she won’t be able to maintain her and her mother’s new lifestyle if she leaves him. Then she meets Pittsburgh millionaire Hal Thorne, who turns out to have demons of his own, and the story builds to a shocking confrontation between Hal and Stanley. Pataki expertly highlights how Evelyn’s naivete is shattered, leading her to rely only on herself to overcome physical and psychological trauma. Historical fiction fans will be riveted. Agent: Lacy Lynch, House of Story. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Huisman follows The Book of Mother with a mostly spellbinding but occasionally stultifying autofiction about her paternal lineage. It begins in the early days of Covid-19, after the unnamed narrator and her family have left Brooklyn for a cottage Upstate. They then move to France to be closer to her dying father, Denis. The narrator originally left France for New York at 19. Now, in her 40s, she attempts to make sense of her history by sifting through memories of her father, a colorful academic and womanizer. Many of Denis’s own memories revolve around his father, Georges, founder of the Cannes film festival and once director-general of the Beaux-Arts administration of the Third Republic, whose titles were stripped due to antisemitism in the 1940s. After Denis dies in early 2021, the narrator contacts her half brother, Bruno, as well as Béatrice, a graduate student who wrote about Georges for her dissertation, to learn more about Georges and his mistress Choute. Later sections on Georges’s life lack the punch of the novel’s first half, in which Huisman brilliantly toggles through time, often structuring her narrative as a direct address to Denis (“You fall asleep mid-sentence. I enjoy watching you at rest”). Despite its flaws, this offers an enthralling view into a family’s mysteries. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

News anchor Radford debuts with a dramatic novel of a journalist reckoning with her mother’s traumatic past in revolutionary Cuba. In 1991, Lily Walker begins her first semester at Harvard, where she’s proud of her Black Cuban heritage but knows she’ll have to work twice as hard for her achievements. She tentatively begins a relationship with a classmate named Vikram, despite his family’s expectations that he marry an Indian woman, but eventually breaks it off. After college, she publishes an op-ed in a small California newspaper about the racist response to the O.J. Simpson verdict, which gains attention after it’s syndicated by the Los Angeles Times and lands her a job at NPR in New York City. Meanwhile, Lily’s mother Marisol, hoping to strengthen their bond, writes Lily letters about her past in Cuba. She includes details she’d never been able to talk about with Lily, such as falling in love with revolutionary José Antonio Echeverría, who convinced her to join the revolution in 1956 while she was an intern at a radio station. After José was killed along with the rest of their group, Marisol was captured and raped for months. In straightforward prose, Radford lays out the parallels between Lily and Marisol, showing how their lives were impacted by love and a desire for a better future. It’s an affecting family drama. Agent: Johanna V. Castillo, Writers House. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A suspicious death sparks an investigation and heated gossip in an Indian American enclave in the excellent debut from Bansinath. Matthew Pillai, 55, is found dead in his car on a New Jersey highway, surrounded by pills. The police interview multiple women whose addresses showed up on his GPS record, including recently widowed Anita Sharma, whose late husband, Ashok, was a colleague of Matthew’s and introduced him to their neighbors on Willow Road. The nonlinear narrative then dives into the Sharmas’ unhappy arranged marriage and move to the U.S. in the 1990s, revealing how in the years since, Anita, who hates America and calls it “death by QVC,” constantly criticizes both Ashok and their daughter, Leila. When Ashok brings avuncular Matthew home for dinner, he takes a shine to Leila, 13, and becomes fast friends with the families in the neighborhood, gaining their trust. He encourages Leila’s desire to become an actor, paying for her drama classes and taking her to Broadway shows, at first with his wife, Louise, then by himself. By the time Leila is 15, she realizes Matthew has been grooming her for sex, driving the story to its crisis point. Bansinath is an impressive storyteller with a firm grasp on the intersecting story lines, showing how Anita’s bitterness drives away Leila, making her vulnerable to a predator. The author also breathes life into the tight-knit community, where neighbors grow jealous of Leila over Matthew’s doting on her and badmouth Anita, whom they view as a snob. Readers will be engrossed by this clear-eyed and explosive tale. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A Native American girl discovers her sexuality and reels from sexual abuse in this frank outing from Hart (Native Love Jams). Winnow Sticks is five when she and her friends mimic a sex scene from a movie they glimpsed their parents watching. At 10, Winnow is sent by her parents, who are getting divorced, from their Red Lake Nation home in Minnesota to live with her aunt Shelly in Arkansas. There, she befriends a girl named Sarrah, who kisses her. Shelly gives Winnow a pornographic magazine to explain sex, which she and Sarrah look at. Then Winnow moves with her aunt to Texas, where Shelly forces her to attend a weekly Bible study session at a local church, during which Winnow regularly locks herself in the bathroom to masturbate. The narrative blends Winnow’s coming of age with harrowing episodes of sexual assault, as when she’s abducted as a preteen by two boys who threaten to kill her if she doesn’t have sex with them. Here and elsewhere, Hart’s gritty and plainspoken chronicle glimmers with poetic insight—Winnow, humiliated by the attack, spends the night outside, “staring up at the stars, wondering how far my pain and fear stretched out beyond my body. It felt like it was traveling to at least the edge of the solar system.” This bracing tale is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Riffing on Doctor Doolittle, the exciting and hilarious debut from Isaacs follows a 28-year-old New Yorker who suddenly develops the ability to hear what animals are saying. Henry Parsons is on a first date in Central Park with a woman named Molly when he hears a magnolia warbler tell the couple to “fuck off.” Henry is the only one who can hear the bird, and soon he’s hearing other animals: the betta fish his housemate owns, two dogs talking while he’s waiting for a bus, and two rats conversing in the subway about dead human bodies being dumped in an abandoned tunnel. The rats’ story leads Henry to leave an anonymous tip with the police, and he tells Molly what he heard, omitting the source. She proposes they search for the body, and when they do, late one night, they overhear two men with Scottish brogues dumping another corpse. Henry loses his smartphone as he and Molly flee, causing the pair to worry the men will find it. Isaacs, who ushers the mystery to a surprising final twist, effectively combines absurd humor with literary references (evoking Kafka, Henry shudders to “imagine the weltschmerz of a cockroach”), and it’s satisfying to watch Henry evolve from milquetoast to man of action. This is a hoot. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this arresting posthumous novel from Kraf (Find Him!), who died in 2013, washed-up writer Marlane Frack attends a mysterious retreat for former artists. In residence are “ex-artists” of various disciplines: poets, composers, ballerinas, choreographers, the “original abstract expressionists” and their “silenced and battered” wives, preeminent physicists, and even a dentist who invented a surgical procedure for nuclear dental transplants. Some seek rehabilitation and “creative rebirth,” while others are “permanent residents” who staged their deaths to “resign” from their work. Having left behind an erratic husband haunted by combat in the Vietnam War, Marlane reignites an old rivalry with fellow resident and former friend Nadia Lagoon, a poet who forces her to confront her tortured relationship with her father. She undergoes a series of surreal treatments, including an olfactory “memory rejuvenation and excision” from Doctor Amazing, a tall, smiling man in a striped dashiki who stuffs her nostrils with cotton soaked with the smells of her childhood. An eerie dreamlike logic expands Marlane’s struggle for creative agency into a hypnotic consideration of how memories can distort or shape reality. In this funhouse narrative, meaning slips away into an accelerating spiral of bizarre events. Readers will find it an impressive exploration of an artist’s inner life. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Suzanna, the narrator, was raised by her grandparents in New York City. Now a young woman, she recounts how she spent her early childhood regularly visiting a hilltop prison outside the city where her mother was serving a life sentence for her role in a bank robbery that resulted in the killing of a guard. The mother, a former revolutionary, is a cause célèbre, but as a child Suzanna doesn’t understand the details. Her grandfather, with whom she visits the prison, describes the crime as a “misguided attempt... to steal from the rich and give to the poor.” He dies when Suzanna is nine, and her unyielding grandmother, disgusted by and ashamed of her daughter, refuses to take Suzanna to the prison or read her daughter’s letters, even as her own health deteriorates. A sympathetic nun from the prison arranges for Suzanna’s regular visits, and as she grows up, she begins to question what she wants for herself. Vexed by her push-pull relationship with her mother, she wonders if she’s continued visiting the prison only at the nun’s insistence, and senses that her grandmother, who pressures her into skipping the seventh grade, is impatient for her to become the successful young woman she’d wanted her daughter to be (“Everywhere I turned in my seventeenth year someone was saying, Go”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Guatemalan writer Halfon (Canción) reflects on his time at a nightmarish summer camp in this resonant autofiction. At 13, narrator Eduardo and his younger brother are sent by their parents from Florida to their native Guatemala to attend a remote camp for Jewish students. Expecting to learn a few survival skills and sit around a campfire, Eduardo is shocked and unsettled when they’re subjected to a “military” regimen, complete with hazing, surprise 3 a.m. drills, and Zionist sing-alongs, which he gathers are intended to indoctrinate them into supporting the Israeli state. This disturbing ordeal has stayed with Eduardo, now a writer raising a family in Berlin. He remembers trying to escape, feeling so frightened that “my own shadow was trying to get away, that it no longer wanted to follow me across the mountain.” A chance meeting with a former camper puts him back in touch with their sinister and unapologetic counselor Samuel Blum, who, in Eduardo’s memory, carried a snake in his pocket and a tarantula on his arm. As the dreamlike story shifts back and forth in time, Eduardo confronts a chilling realization about the camp’s abuses and reflects on the effects of inherited trauma and victimhood. It’s a breath of fresh air. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

A 77-year-old Texan grapples with the astonishing news that she’s pregnant in the amusing latest from Frankel (Family Family). Pepper Mills, a straight-talking Brooklyn native, blames her silly name on her ex-husband, Roger, whose surname she took when they married. After getting into a fender bender, she loses her driver’s license and reluctantly moves into the same continuing care community where Roger lives. She starts up a new relationship with a charming British man named Moth and describes their new home as “like moving back into your college dorm, if your college dorm had been a Hampton Inn.” Feeling queasy and lightheaded, she sees a doctor, wondering if she might have dementia, only to learn that she’s pregnant. After the initial shock, the doctor assures her the pregnancy will probably terminate naturally. While she wonders if her body can handle giving birth or an abortion, which is illegal in Texas, word gets out about a pregnant septuagenarian, stirring the public into a frenzy over what she should do. Frankel blends humor and gravitas in her portrait of an expectant mother who’s also facing her own mortality. Fans of the author’s quirky family stories about hot-button issues will find much to enjoy. (May)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink