National Jewish Book Award winner Balson (The Girl from Berlin) delivers a middling portrait of an altruistic American diplomat in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and the woman who meets him decades later during her search for her long-lost sister. In 2002, crotchety Teddy Hartigan, who lives at an assisted-living facility, agrees to meet with freelance journalist Karyn Sachnoff, who was born into a Jewish family in Amsterdam shortly before the Nazi occupation, to help her find out what happened to her long-lost sister, Annie, when both girls were adopted by separate families. Teddy has one condition: that Karyn write his life story as a legacy for his grandchildren. After much buildup, Teddy recounts the central narrative. In 1938, Teddy is tapped to process visa and travel applications at the U.S. embassy in Amsterdam, where fears of a German invasion have led to a huge backlog. As Hitler continues his belligerence, Teddy is forced to improvise to protect his new love interest, a Jewish teacher named Sara, and to save as many Jews as he can. The dialogue rings false—Teddy says of Hitler, “He may have the world’s largest army, but I wouldn’t bet against the rest of the free world”—and most of the plot developments are predictable. It’s a superficial and hackneyed treatment of the period. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Enriquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) offers a masterful collection full of grotesque body horror, red-hot terror, and mysterious events, revealing the pain and loss endured by women in modern-day Buenos Aires. In “My Sad Dead,” Emma, a doctor, is routinely visited by the ghost of her mother, who died from cancer, and the ghosts of three teenage girls who died in a recent drive-by shooting. For Emma, the apparitions amount to a veritable “ghost pandemic,” caused in part by her neighborhood’s uptick in violence, where there’s “more money in crime than in lawful work.” In “Face of Disgrace,” the narrator tells of how his mother suffered from a dreadful disorder where her facial features began disappearing years after she was raped by a faceless man, and the erasure is passed down through the generations. “Metamorphosis” portrays a perimenopausal woman lamenting her body’s transformation (“No one tells you, there’s no warning. Your skin dries out, the fat builds up on your hips and legs, and the cellulite deepens from one day to the next”). She has a fibroid removed during her hysterectomy, and later has it implanted on her spine to restore her sense of feeling complete in her body. Enriquez’s stories gain their power through surprise, as they often begin with a realistic setting before taking a terrifying or unsettling swerve, and she brilliantly explores themes of guilt, shame, and vanity. These provocative tales are first-rate literary horror. Agent: Maria Lynch, Casanovas Lynch. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Resnick debuts with a striking and unabashedly political fable set in an alternate present where the nation of Israel vanishes into a black hole. The story follows tech writer Ethan Block and magazine photographer Ella Halperin, who are raising Ella’s young son, Michael, in an unnamed city loosely modeled on New York, where residents are dismayed by the First Event: Israel’s disappearance. As other, smaller black holes form in cities around the world, “sucking in birds, clouds, light, sounds, Jews,” some Jewish people feel a strong “pull” toward them, believing the holes provide an escape from persecution. Their migration to the holes causes others to scapegoat Jews for the black holes’ existence. With antisemitism on the rise, Ethan and Ella are forced into a ghetto called “the Pale,” where they try to get on with their lives (“No one talked much about what they saw or did not see”), until encroaching civil unrest compels them to make an irreversible decision for their and Michael’s safety. Resnick skillfully uses the raw materials of postapocalyptic fiction and speaks lucidly to his Jewish characters’ legacy of displacement. This timely tale will appeal to fans of speculative fantasies by Michael Chabon and Lavie Tidhar. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mellors (Cleopatra and Frankenstein) delves into sibling drama with this frank and soulful offering. The four Blue sisters form a tight bond while sharing a bedroom in the family’s New York City apartment and dealing with their domineering, alcoholic father and aloof mother. They remain close after leaving home, until Nicky, the second youngest, dies at 27. On the first anniversary of Nicky’s death, the surviving sisters learn their parents are selling their childhood home, and reunite at the apartment. Avery, the oldest at 33 and a successful lawyer in London, has taken to hiding her smoking and shoplifting habits from her wife. Thirty-one-year-old Bonnie, a retired boxer, works as a bouncer in Venice Beach, Calif., while former model Lucky, 26, can barely through the day without drinking. As the siblings dredge up old wounds and regrets about Nicky, a kindhearted teacher who lived with all-consuming pain from endometriosis, they’re brought together by their enduring love for one another, even as they judge each other for how their lives have spiraled. Mellors draws each of the characters distinctly, including Nicky, who comes to life via the others’ memories. This story of addiction and grief will resonate with readers. Agents: Mollie Glick and Emily Westcott, CAA. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

The blistering latest from Aitken (The Island Child) gives voice to Alice Kyteler (1280–1325), the first Irish woman convicted of witchcraft. Aitken portrays Alice, who evaded her punishment by fleeing the country, as a formidable figure and nobody’s idea of a victim. Having inherited an inn and a banking and lending business from her father, Alice goes through four wealthy husbands, all of whom die suspiciously, before coming to the attention of an ambitious new bishop, who accuses her of witchcraft. Alice makes a beguiling heroine whose lust for money, power, and sex are constrained but never thwarted. Some of her actions are horrifying—she shoves one of her husbands down the stairs to his death, and fatally poisons another—but Aitken never wavers in portraying her humanity. Particularly striking are the depictions of Alice’s sorrow at the death of her young daughter and at the growing distance between her and her son. The novel moves through the decades in sharp, poetic vignettes told from Alice’s point of view, which are interspersed with commentary from a chorus of judgmental villagers (“I always thought there was something unnatural about her”; “Rich people are so odd”). It adds up to a fiercely intelligent and often surprising examination of a woman’s choices and their consequences. Agent: Hellie Ogden, WME. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Critic Elkin (Art Monsters) explores themes of change and desire in this stylish parallel narrative about two women who occupy the same Paris apartment decades apart. Anna, who’s dealing with depression following a miscarriage, stays in present-day Paris after her husband moves to London for a career opportunity. While considering Lacan’s theory of desire and reminiscing about past relationships, she meets Clémentine, a younger woman who has moved into the building with her boyfriend, and the two women become close. Their building is undergoing renovations, and Anna elects to update her kitchen, “a minefield of other people’s choices” that makes her feel like she’s “fighting with the past.” After a surprise encounter pushes Anna to a breaking point, Elkin shifts focus to another couple living in the apartment in the 1970s. The woman, Florence, who inherited the apartment from her grandmother and redesigned it (in the way Anna dislikes), is having an affair, and she, too, weighs Lacan’s theory while considering her choices. The links between Florence and Anna feel a bit forced, but there’s a great deal of depth and intelligence to the descriptions of their feelings around desire. Readers will find much to sink their teeth into. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Neff debuts with a moving story of love and mortality centered on an octogenarian couple’s decision to end their lives. Evelyn and Joseph have spent decades running a bed-and-breakfast in the Connecticut beach town where they fell in love back in the 1940s. Now it’s summer 2001, and they’ve invited their three children home to share upsetting news: Evelyn has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and the couple plan to die by suicide together one year from now, before the disease overtakes her. The children object, preferring to have more time with their parents, and emotions run high during the visit. Old wounds open for Jane, the oldest, who ran away as a teen in the ’70s after a misunderstanding with her mother (the complex and twisty subplot involves a love triangle with a college-age employee at the bed-and-breakfast). Thomas, the middle child, has been facing fertility issues with his wife, and worries his parents will never have a chance to see his family grow; while Violet, who’s remained close to her parents and lives nearby, immediately begins to mourn them. Poignant revelations and dramatic turns ensue as the narrative alternates between the couple’s attempt to celebrate their lives over their last year and the story of their love’s origins during WWII, when Joseph served with Evelyn’s brother, who died in combat. Fans of The Notebook will gobble this up. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk (The Books of Jacob) delivers the disarming tale of a Silesian tuberculosis ward and a series of mysterious deaths in the surrounding countryside. Mieczysław Wojnicz, a frail engineering student, has been sent to the ward in 1913 to convalesce. While awaiting a room in the main facility, he chats in the guesthouse with a group of fellow patients, whose misogynistic views reflect the period’s prevailing attitudes. Tokarczuk places the modern institution against a rural backdrop where locals remain enthralled by ancient folk superstitions, and she explores this dissonance as Wojnicz learns of the witch trials that purportedly drove some women into the wilderness centuries earlier and gave rise to legends of female shape-shifters. Each November, the bodies of mutilated men are recovered from the woods, and hikers stumble upon Tuntschi, female dolls fashioned from natural materials to gratify sex-starved itinerant laborers. At the novel’s crisis point, Wojnicz uncovers a chilling connection between the legend and the sanatorium. Tokarczuk concocts a potent blend of horror tropes and literary references (Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann) as she realizes the potential of her tale’s uncommon setting—a community set apart by the omnipresence of sickness and death, where the rules of civilized propriety give way to more fantastic possibilities. Readers will find much to savor. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

A gay poet struggles with a mysterious and agonizing pain in Greenwell’s intense latest (after Cleanness). Wracked with debilitating agony that stretches through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the unnamed narrator is urged by his partner, L, to see a doctor. After waiting for hours in the emergency room, he endures a battery of examinations and tests. Eventually, he receives a shocking diagnosis of life-threatening aortic tearing. Weeks of hospitalization and grueling procedures follow, and over the course of his slow recovery, the narrator juxtaposes raw depictions of his vulnerability and helplessness with excoriating critiques of the healthcare industry’s inequities and inefficiencies and the alienation he feels among the “relentlessly heterosexual” staff. The narrator also reflects on his dysfunctional family history; meeting L as a creative writing student in Iowa City, where he’s remained after graduating seven years earlier; and the negotiations he and L have gone through to find happiness and fulfillment in their shared living space. The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator’s bracing account of his grueling ordeal (“The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale”), serving as a palpable reminder to never take one’s health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink

Quatro (Fire Sermon) reckons with faith and the nature of evil in her daring and disturbing latest. The narrative centers on a 70-year-old man, known as the Prophet, who lives alone in a ramshackle cabin in the hollows of Alabama’s Lookout Mountain, where he carries on dialogues with a shadowy Lucifer-like figure whom he calls Two-Step. When the Prophet spies a girl bound by zip ties in the custody of two sex traffickers, he rescues the 14-year-old, who’s named Michael, and becomes convinced she’s a messenger sent by God. The Prophet carefully tends to Michael as she suffers through opioid withdrawal and later rebuffs her attempts to repay his kindness with sexual favors. Once Michael is well enough, the Prophet sends her to Washington, D.C., with instructions to deliver his divinely inspired message to the White House. But Michael has been harboring a secret from the Prophet, and she embarks on her own course of action. Quatro’s descriptions of child abuse can feel gratuitous, but she poses provocative questions about consent by drawing parallels between Michael’s sex work and Mary’s immaculate conception (“As if obtaining the consent of a fourteen-year-old exonerated Creator of the crime!” Two-Step says). It’s hard to turn away from Quatro’s electrifying vision. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2024 | Details & Permalink