Sayed’s impressive debut tells the parallel stories of two gay men who meet in 2015 Istanbul. Delbar flies there from Washington, D.C., after his Afghan mother, Qandul, kicks him out, ashamed to find he’s been performing in drag shows. Two years earlier, in 2013 Tehran, Mansur brings shame to his own mother after she learns of his relationship with a man. Arriving in Istanbul, Mansur connects with Leif, who runs an aid program for gay refugees. Shortly after Delbar arrives, he meets Mansur at one of Leif’s programs, happily recognizing in Mansur a “fellow mutant or a lover from a former life.” The men soon attend a pride parade together, but the risky event comes under attack from the police and their friend and fellow refugee, Anahita, is arrested, jeopardizing her asylum case. Meanwhile, Delbar looks at Mansur with an “expectant fire in his eyes,” but Mansur is romantically involved with Leif. When they have a threesome, it complicates their relationships. Though the ending feels rushed, Sayed skillfully balances the personal with the political, as in tender moments between Qandal and Delbar when she visits him in Istanbul, despite refusing to acknowledge his sexual identity. It’s an auspicious first effort. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Booker finalist Smith offers a clever and enjoyable companion piece to her 2025 novel, Gliff. Growing up in the 1990s, sisters Petra and Patch Wild are unsettled by wartime stories told at a family party, such as one about a soldier in WWI who was executed for putting a blinded horse out of its misery. They deal with their terror by creating a game in which they communicate with a made-up ghost. As adults, the sisters become estranged. Halfway through the novel, Petra is visited in her bedroom by a ghostlike horse. Unsure if she’s going crazy, she leaves a voicemail with Patch, asking for help, and the novel takes on exciting new dimensions over the course of their reunion, as Patch’s foster child Billie gets to know Petra for the first time, and the three of them explore what makes a family and a future. Smith effectively deploys narrative devices that will be familiar to readers of her fiction—precocious children, rapturous wordplay, and references to current events (the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine factor into the plot)—but her commentaries on AI can feel obvious and pedantic (“Every person has a soul. And no machine ever will”). Still, even a minor work from this accomplished and gifted writer remains a pleasure to explore. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

The marvelous debut novel from National Book Award finalist Aguda (Ghostroots, a story collection) follows a young woman whose arrival in Lagos for an exciting career opportunity coincides with a series of harrowing suicides by pregnant women. After graduating university, Yosoye Bakare, lands an internship at Jegede & Kyari Design, the architecture firm developing Omi City, a controversial reclaimed land project for Lagos’s elite. Meanwhile, pregnant women are drowning themselves in the Atlantic and in lakes throughout Lagos, an inexplicable phenomenon that worries Yosoye, who’s recently gotten pregnant from a one-night stand. Though she is haunted by dreams and visions of the dead women luring her to water, Yosoye clings to her workplace relationships, which improve after the firm’s enigmatic and prophetic leader likens her pregnancy to the firm “gestating” the “blank slate” that is Omi City. But the discovery of four bodies along a nearby coastline—and the firm’s directive to bury the scandal lest investors pull their funding—pushes Yosoye to a breaking point both liberating and horrifying. Aguda delivers a clear-eyed exploration of daughterhood, community, and the human costs of urban development, powered by an immersive portrait of a woman wrestling with the question of whom and what she’s willing to sacrifice for the life she wants. This is unforgettable. Agent: Renée Zuckerbrot, Renée Zuckerbrot Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

A ghostwriter uncovers her client’s secrets and finds love and danger in this enticing tale from Mekler (Sunrise Shows Late). In 1980 Paris, wealthy industrialist Luc Kasten hires 30-something American journalist Diane Jameson to ghostwrite a memoir to share with his family. Diane accepts, intrigued by the charming older man, and agrees to spend the weekend with him at his home in the south of France. Despite Luc’s claim that he wants to set the record straight (“My life has been half-truths for a very long time”), Diane has trouble getting him to disclose seemingly innocuous details, like the name of his childhood best friend. When she presses him, he redirects by flirting, and she begins to fall for him. She also starts digging into his past, casting doubt on his stated birth year of 1920 and discovering that Guy Thibault, an old enemy of Luc’s who was responsible for sending him to a concentration camp during WWII, is now blackmailing him, having recently figured out his long-ago misdeed, which Mekler doesn’t reveal until late in the novel. With Diane enmeshed in Luc’s life and Guy after him, the narrative blends an enriching morality tale with a suspenseful game of cat and mouse. WWII fiction fans won’t want to miss this. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

White debuts with a riveting and tender literary thriller about a young man exploring his sexuality while trying to find his footing in the crime world. Tony Ward has returned to his native Dublin from England, where he fled after fatally stabbing the man he believed to have killed his mentor. A friend connects him with enforcer Darren “Flute” Walsh, who collects money for his drug kingpin stepfather, Aengus Lavelle. After Tony partners with Flute to shake down a series of Aengus’s debtors, he is unsettled by the violent work and by the attraction he feels toward Flute. The pair share a kiss while high on cocaine during a party, and then embark on a secret relationship. Meanwhile, Tony navigates tension with his family and the creeping sense that his past is catching up with him. After he learns a hard truth, the story lurches toward a wrenching conclusion. In between taut action sequences, Tony reflects with piercing insight on the violence he commits (“it leaves a layer of grime on you like a charred bit of toast, and when you scrape it all away into the sink some of you goes with it”). It’s a memorable story of a man’s ill-fated attempt to transcend his hopelessness. Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pressfield (A Man at Arms) spins a thrilling tale of a mysterious former mercenary and the young woman who is bound to him by fate in 16th-century Spain. Telamon of Arcadia, known as the “iron man” for his current occupation as a blade sharpener, has a mysterious tattoo on his arm that matches the branding of his horse, which farm girl Mariah takes a shine to. The plot kicks into gear when Portuguese troops invade Mariah’s village, ordering the villagers to procure a long list of supplies. If they don’t, every man in the village will be killed, and women and children will be forced into servitude. Mariah’s older brothers bring Telamon’s horse to the Portuguese to be slaughtered, prompting Telamon to attack the Portuguese soldiers before being captured. Mariah helps free Telamon and his horse, and the Portuguese commander, Severiano, orders his nephew, a lieutenant, to pursue the trio and capture them by whatever means necessary. Pressfield blends exciting action with meaty meditations on the brutality of war and its dehumanizing effects on combatants, noting that warfare is “the labor of brutes and savages.” Readers will become closely invested in Mariah and Telamon’s plight over the course of this stirring adventure. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

Booker Prize winner Stuart (Shuggie Bain) showcases his impressive gift for characterization in this perceptive and propulsive story of a tight-knit community of Gaelic-speaking sheep farmers and weavers on the remote Scottish isle of Harris. When John-Calum “Cal” Macleod returns from college on the mainland, his father, John, issues a stern accounting: “So, all that money, four years, no woman, and no job.” John, a strict Calvinist and lay pastor at the local church, is both loving and violent, embittered that Cal’s mother abandoned him for his own brother, leaving him to raise Cal with his contentious mother-in-law. John loves Cal, but not his long dyed hair or soft demeanor, and their altercations often end in slaps or with John making a fist while pronouncing his disapproval (“I could do without becoming known as the man who has a hugger for a son”). Cal finds solace with his Walkman and hides his continuing attraction to a neighbor, with whom he experimented sexually when they were teens, and Stuart adds a surprising and deeply affecting layer to the narrative by exploring John’s own secrets. Stuart’s deeply humane character work extends beyond father and son to their neighbors, including a sensitive middle-aged bachelor who belongs to John’s book club and cries while discussing Wuthering Heights. The author continues his winning streak with this brilliant novel. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 03/13/2026 | Details & Permalink

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