What You Make of MeSophie Madeline Dess. Penguin Press, $29 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-83082-6
A brother and sister’s artistic rivalry intensifies when they fall for the same woman in Dess’s electrifying debut. In the novel’s framing device, Ava Stern’s older brother, Demetri, is near death from a tumor. Ava, a painter, writes about their life together while the 31-year-old documentary filmma... Continue reading »
LeoDeon Meyer, trans. from the Afrikaans by K.L. Seegers. Atlantic Monthly, $28 (464p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6423-0
Meyer’s excellent eighth novel featuring Benny Griessel (after The Dark Flood) finds the South African police detective longing to return to the high-stakes missions he and his partner, Vaughn Cupido, embarked on before they were exiled from Cape Town for exposing corruption within South Af... Continue reading »
Blood on Her TongueJohanna Van Veen. Poisoned Pen, $17.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-72828-157-5
Van Veen’s stunning sophomore outing (after My Darling Dreadful Thing) is gothic horror for the ages. In 1887, Sarah finds a body in the bog surrounding her husband’s isolated mansion in the Netherlands and develops an obsession with the corpse that transforms into a mysterious illness. Wor... Continue reading »
Never Gamble Your HeartLindsay Lovise. Forever, $17.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-5387-4055-2
Lovise’s scintillating second Secret Society of Governess Spies Victorian romance (after Never Blow a Kiss) reintroduces Perdita’s Governess Agency, a front for an all-female spy ring set up by a mysterious figure code-named the Dove. After Frankie Turner’s younger sister, Fidelia, goes mis... Continue reading »
Ultra Heaven Keiichi Koike, trans. from the Japanese by Ajani Oloye. Last Gasp, $24.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-86719-929-1
Koike (the Heaven’s Door series) brings readers into a dazzling, drugged-out cyberpunk future in the first English language translation of the series widely regarded as his masterpiece. Cub, a stubble-faced junkie who escapes his grimy apartment through daily drug trips, is a typical citizen in a Bl... Continue reading »
Something About LivingLena Khalaf Tuffaha. Univ. of Akron, $16.95 trade paper (82p) ISBN 978-1-62922-273-8
The brilliant third collection from Tuffaha (Kaan and Her Sisters), who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, evokes the weight of a homeland’s genocide, but is equally about the joys of heritage and the righteous pursuit of justice for one’s oppressed brothers and sisters. She ... Continue reading »
The Long March HomeMarcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »
To Rob a Bank Is an HonorLucio Urtubia, trans. from the Spanish by Paul Sharkey. AK, $22 trade paper (312p) ISBN 978-1-84935-578-0
Spanish forger and revolutionary Urtubia (1930–2020) recounts his life and crimes in this enthralling autobiography. Beginning with his early years growing up in Basque country, where poverty was a “spur to creativity,” Urtubia makes clear that his own political commitments as an anarchist are groun... Continue reading »
We the Pizza: Slangin’ Pies and Savin’ LivesMuhammad Abdul-Hadi. Clarkson Potter, $32.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-593-79640-5
“This book is a testament to the creative output Black people give birth to, time and again, in the midst of oppressive machinations,” Ajima Olaghere writes in the preface to this powerful debut from restaurateur Abdul-Hadi, who was on house arrest and wearing an ankle monitor when he launched Phila... Continue reading »
Aflame: Learning from SilencePico Iyer. Riverhead, $30 (240p) ISBN 978-0-593-42028-7
Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitu... Continue reading »
The Undead Fox of Deadwood ForestAubrey Hartman. Little, Brown, $17.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-3165-7572-0
Clare, the undead fox of Deadwood Forest, is cast as a monster by the local children who gather each Halloween around the forest’s edge to chant about how he “waits to feast/ On little bones.” But Clare isn’t a monster: he’s an Usher, one who helps wandering souls find their way to their respective ... Continue reading »
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