An aspiring novelist seeks fulfillment and attempts to come to terms with her past in Whitaker’s witty debut. At the University of Texas, Joan West resisted her evangelical Christian upbringing, growing out her armpit hair, kissing girls, and developing an Adderall addiction. Now, 23 and clean for three years, she enjoys right-wing talk radio and embraces traditional gender roles. She spends her days interning for a conservative legislator in Austin and her evenings at a coffee shop, where she strikes up a friendship with Roberto, the barista, who is also a writer. In an effort to impress Roberto and after seeking counsel from her troubled cousin Wyatt, she decides to write a love story. For research purposes only, she begins dating Vince, a 30-year-old music producer and student at her womanizing father’s for-profit trade school. Simultaneously, she pursues a fling with Roberto, only to have both relationships go in unexpected directions. Further complicating matters is her Adderall relapse and abuse of painkillers, a crisis involving Wyatt, and her father’s disastrous relationships. Though Joan often comes across as superficial, Whitaker adds depth to the characterization as she unpacks Joan’s family history. This portrait of a wannabe artist as a confused young woman is compulsively readable. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Uthaug, who is of Norwegian, Sami, and Danish descent, makes her English-language debut with a provocative dystopian tale of a world dominated by women, where biological males are kept sedated in spa centers and allowed to exist only for the purpose of procreation and women’s pleasure. The novel alternates among the viewpoints of four women. There’s Medea, a witch living in a small convent who keeps venomous snakes for elixirs and is secretly raising a male child she took in as an infant. Her lover, Christian priestess Wicca, uses Medea’s snakes in salvation rituals. Silence, a member of Medea’s convent, atones for her long-ago betrayal of a friend, while Eva, who works at one of the spa centers, harbors her own secret. After Medea’s boy, now seven, flees from the convent, the four women search for him, and Uthaug reveals the surprising connections between them. The speculative elements are peppered with bizarre and lurid details, such as an underclass of sex-worker “manladies” who sew toy penises onto their bodies, but readers will be immersed in this world by the time the satisfying conclusion rolls around. It’s an intriguing thought experiment about the consequences of gender oppression. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jenkins (Caul Baby) delivers a plaintive story of a present-day Black couple and their ancestors in the post–Civil War South. In 1865, Union soldier Harrison returns to the plantation where he was enslaved in Natchez, Miss., to look for his beloved Tirzah. Unable to find her, he seeks help from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Meanwhile, Tirzah, who is living in Louisiana and working as a schoolteacher, writes letters to Harrison and sends them to the bureau, but they’re delayed in reaching him. In a parallel narrative set in 2019 New York City, physician Oliver Benjamin gives his fiancée, Ardelia Gibbs, a family heirloom, one of Tirzah’s letters to Harrison. After one of Oliver’s patients dies, he retreats emotionally, and Ardelia spends her free time digging through her own family tree, leading to some life-changing discoveries about her and Oliver’s ancestors. Jenkins meticulously links Ardelia’s and Oliver’s stories with those of Tirzah and Harrison, uncovering secrets held by the couple’s families and revealing what happened to Tirzah’s letters and how one of them managed to be passed down through Oliver’s family. The result is a memorable tale of love and legacy. Agent: Monica Odom, Odom Media Management. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Solomonik probes trans identity in this provocative debut collection. The narrator of the title story, a college graduate who “always hated” the “realistic” and plotless fiction he was assigned in school, rediscovers his affinity for the crime novels preferred by his dad, an epiphany that comes to him while on his first date with a woman after transitioning. In “August, 1962,” an homage to the TV show Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett uses his time machine to inhabit the body of a Kennedy White House intern. While having sex with Kennedy and an aide in the woman’s body, he finds an erotic thrill in being used for pleasure by a president who “vaingloriously sought to reassure the nation.” In “The Hot Tub Story,” a writer, desperate for social connection, is excited by an invitation to participate in an LGBTQ+ reading series. They’re so focused on using the occasion to get back at a girl that blocked them online, though, that they don’t give themself enough time to write. Solomonik slips in plentiful philosophical musings and highbrow wit without taking himself too seriously. Fans of weird and punchy short fiction will enjoy this. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Geye (The Ski Jumper) sets this masterful tale about the limits of faith and fidelity on the rugged shore of Lake Superior. After Radcliffe student Willa Brandt’s father dies by suicide in 1910, her mother insists she return home to Duluth, Minn., and marry someone with the means to save them from destitution. Willa reluctantly weds Theodulf Sauer, the rigid Catholic son of a leading Duluth family. The couple move to the lake shore, where Theodulf has just been made chief keeper of a new lighthouse. Theodulf, who harbors shame over a sexual encounter a decade earlier, finds solace in his nighttime routine at the lighthouse and gazes at the lake’s abyss while struggling to pray. Willa, who studied astronomy and is more interested in Halley’s Comet than cooking, defies Theodulf’s demands for wifely obedience and never consummates the marriage. Instead, she bonds with their fisherman neighbor, Mats Braaten, and finds glimmers of a more authentic and satisfying life when they become lovers. Geye portrays the stark landscape in luminous prose, and he eschews a simple black-and-white story of marital conflict for something much more surprising and complex. This bittersweet narrative astounds. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hickey’s engrossing debut revolves around a tribal power struggle and a young political fixer’s reckoning with his identity. At 30, narrator Mitch Caddo is the youngest-ever operations director for the Passage Rouge Nation of Lake Superior Anishinaabe in Wisconsin. Due to his “white-passing face” and Cornell law degree, Mitch is derided as a “J. Crew Indian,” but his close friendship with tribal president Mack Beck, whom he helped get elected, affords him power and prestige. Now, however, Mack’s facing a tough reelection challenge from opponent Gloria Hawkins, whose campaign levels the same allegations of inaction and mismanagement against Mack that plagued his predecessor, and who happens to be backed by Mack’s adoptive father, Joe. As the campaign’s de facto fixer, Mitch launches a smear offensive against Hawkins, which dredges up evidence that Joe embezzled tribal funds. Though the prose can be clunky (Mack’s face is described as “ursine” six times), there’s a great deal of satisfaction in watching Hickey gradually peel back the layers of Mitch’s ambition, bravado, and questionable ethics to reveal his vulnerabilities, especially as the political machine begins to falter during the increasingly explosive election season. It’s a fresh take on the political novel. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Welsh writer Morris (We Don’t Know What We’re Doing) puts a singular spin on familiar themes such as parental abandonment and the search for meaning in this staggering collection. In “Wales,” the crushing and sharply funny opener, superstitious 10-year-old Gareth attends a soccer match between Wales and Northern Ireland with his deadbeat dad, who left him and his mom three months earlier. Gareth clings to the belief that if Wales wins the game, he and his mom will never see the repo man again. The long and surprisingly moving “Aberkarid” centers on a family of male seahorses whose lovesick father promises them that their absent mother will one day return. The narrator, one of the sons, rejects their uncle Nol’s advice to live like he does, mating with as many “fillies” as possible and never giving a thought to the thousands of seahorses he’s birthed. Later stories explore young men’s passivity and resentments, as in “Little Wizard,” about a short fellow who’s convinced himself he’s a victim of “unconscious bias” at his low-paying office job. In “Passenger,” a Dubliner on vacation in Croatia with his Irish girlfriend defers to her and struggles with sharing about his impoverished background in the Welsh town of Caerphilly. The depressed narrator of “Birthday Teeth,” also from Caerphilly, identifies as a vampire and hopes to find happiness by having his teeth filed into fangs. No matter how abject the characters, their hope feels well earned thanks to Morris’s impressive ability to plumb their emotional depths. This is unforgettable. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Szalay (Turbulence) offers a heartbreaking and revelatory portrait of a taciturn Hungarian man who serially attempts to build a new life after his traumatic adolescence. At 15, István struggles with adjusting to a new town in Hungary. After a married neighbor coerces him into sex, they regularly see each other until they’re caught by her husband, whom István accidentally kills by knocking him down the stairs. He’s sent to juvenile detention. Once out, he joins the army and fights in the Iraq War, where a good friend dies in an ambush and he feels responsible. István then tries to start over in London, finding work first as a bouncer at a strip club, then as a driver and security guard for a wealthy family. As the gritty narrative unfolds, István presents himself as little more than a hunk of flesh, preyed upon by married women who are hungry for something missing from their own lives. The propulsive narrative is heavy on dialogue, in which István regularly responds with a simple “okay” to questions about how he’s doing, though Szalay makes clear that István is far from okay. Near the end, István is forced to make a difficult moral choice, and the outcome starkly reveals the degree to which his life is shaped by fate. This tragedy will leave readers in awe. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

An orphaned teen takes on powerful men in this rousing series launch from Lane (the Ramsbolt series). Charlotte Morris and her younger brother, Emmett, hail from the coal mining town of Stoke, Pa., where her miner father agitated for better working conditions. After both of their parents die from illnesses related to pollution from the coal mine in 1900, Charlotte and Emmett go to live with foster parents in North East, Md. The Ryans, alcoholic Finn and stern Regina, offer the siblings a cold welcome and put them to work with fishing and other chores. When Charlotte sees the town’s mayor on a train platform meeting with the owner of Stoke’s mine, she suspects the mayor of corruption and starts connecting the dots between the pollution in Stoke and the massive fish die-off in North East. Gathering allies, including a group of suffragists, Charlotte concocts a plan to continue her late father’s labor activism and expose the truth behind the environmental devastation. Her crusade is complicated by increasing tension with Emmett, who chafes against Charlotte’s protectiveness, and Charlotte struggles with whom to trust. The pacing and character work are a bit rough, but Lane succeeds at making Charlotte a heroine to root for. Those who appreciate muckraking social realism in the vein of Mary Doria Russell’s Women of Copper Country ought to check this out. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Kalfus’s resonant latest (after 2 A.M. in Little America), a political reporter reflects on the Clinton years during a present-day sexual harassment scandal. When Adam Zweig receives news that his former boss Max Lieberthol, a legend in the liberal establishment, has been “#MeToo’d,” he initially pleads ignorance to a reporter before reflecting back 30 years earlier, when he was a young staff writer at the magazine Next Deal under the charismatic Lieberthol’s stewardship. The accuser, Valerie Lovine, was a Next Deal freelancer at the time and a close friend of Adam’s. In flashbacks, Kalfus reveals that Valerie told Adam about the assault soon after it happened, and that Adam offered comfort but took no action against Max. Later, Adam and Valerie have a brief and awkward affair. As Adam considers the contemporaneous events of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, he questions whether he was as enlightened about gender relations as he’d thought. The insights are subtle, as Kalfus writes with economical prose and avoids polemics even as Adam’s soul-searching leads to devastating honesty, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. This is sobering. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink