Strange and macabre events animate the stories in this exquisite English-language debut from Egle. In “The Debt,” a pregnant mother of five attempts to calm herself after opening a threatening debt collection letter by tending to domestic tasks at her house in the forest. The story’s tragic arc is foreshadowed by the arrival of a small bird, which stares at her creepily from a windowsill. “The Duck” quickly swerves from a lighthearted romp about an office romance to a harrowing story of a stalker. The title character in “Aleksandra Is Beautiful” makes regular visits to her local library in her wheelchair, where she has a series of increasingly fraught interactions with a librarian who finds her attractive. In the remarkable and tense “Runaway Train,” a young woman returns home to celebrate the birthday of her younger brother, whose childhood room their alcoholic parents have kept as a shrine since he went missing years earlier. Egle blends realistic depictions of her windswept northern settings with a subtly off-kilter vibe, creating an unsettling effect. Readers will hope for more from Egle. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

English writer Hall serves up twist after twist in her canny U.S. debut, a story of grief, love, and murder set in the Dorset countryside. The year is 1968 and Beth Johnson, wife of gentle sheep farmer Frank, remains shattered by the death of her nine-year-old son, Bobby, in an accident two years earlier. Her first love, Gabriel, a bestselling novelist who grew up wealthy on a nearby estate, returns with his young son, Leo, after separating from his American wife. Beth reconnects with Gabriel, fantasizing about rewinding her life to a simpler time, and she forges a bond with Leo, who reminds her of Bobby. An unreliable narrator, Beth provides a blinkered view of the action, mentioning early on that a farmer has been murdered and someone close to her is on trial for the crime, but neglecting to reveal the identities of these two characters until more than halfway through the narrative. As a result, readers are kept guessing about the precise consequences of Gabriel’s return and the circumstances behind Bobby’s death. Hall makes Beth a fascinatingly complex lead who vacillates between restlessness and contentment, and the other characters’ motivations prove to be different than they seem at first glance. This sharp morality tale will stay with readers. Agent: Wendy Strothman, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

irshenbaum (Rabbits for Food) offers a deeply moving and playfully arch narrative of an artist dealing with her husband’s mental and physical decline. A typical “internal weather report” for Addie, a middle-aged New Yorker, is “overcast with anxiety.” Her husband, Leo, who runs a university medical research lab, begins showing signs of dementia in his early 50s. Addie tries to meet his changes with humor, as when he hallucinates Mahatma Gandhi outside their window (“Is he wearing anything more than a dhoti?” she says, adding, “You might want to bring him a coat”). At a low point, she calls a suicide hotline. She finds occasional relief by going out for drinks with a suave man named Z, whose departure for Europe angers her, and she mocks Z for calling Europe “the continent.” After Leo is diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, Kirshenbaum sardonically outlines the disease’s seven stages, showing how Addie’s reaction to the news mirrors the various stages of grief, beginning with denial. The bulk of the story is delivered in Addie’s crisp second-person narration and her interstitial journal entries, in which she remarks on Leo’s transformation (“Asks if I want to go to Times Sq. to watch the ball drop* / *Stark raving mad question”). Kirshenbaum puts her lively wit to good use, tempering the sadness of her drawn-out depiction of Leo’s deterioration and Addie’s attempts to wrap her head around the ultimately lonely nature of existence. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Newman (The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies) serves up a collection of artful if rambling novellas set in the 20th-century American West. The sinuous title entry takes place in 1964 Reno, Nev., where ambitious college student Julie’s dreams of becoming a school principal are dashed after she picks up hitchhiker Howi, a young Sioux man, and they begin a romance. Julie unexpectedly gets pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, Nia, who has no hands. The rest of the narrative traces the family’s adjustment to Nia’s disability, her coming-of-age, and the aftermath of a family tragedy after she leaves for college in Boise. In “City of Angels,” an unlikely friendship forms between an art student and a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vet, who meet and hang out at the Los Angeles Library in 1986, and whose lives are changed by the famous fire there. Another fire figures into “Saints of Death Valley,” about an orphan raised by an eccentric family in Death Valley, where their house is consumed by a deadly blaze. Though the stories are baggy, Newman has a gift for jumping gracefully from one point of view to another and revealing the connections between multiple characters. Patient readers will enjoy these intriguing byways. Agent: Kathryn Green, Kathryn Green Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

A gay Korean American man wakes up from a coma and reckons with unresolved family issues in this perceptive story of arrested development from Chong (Flux). Jack Jr., the 30-year-old narrator, has no recollection of the car accident that put him in the hospital two years earlier, and his family is silent about the whereabouts of his fiancé, Ren. Told that he’s lost his copywriting job along with his Manhattan apartment, he reluctantly moves back in with his parents in Fort Lee, N.J., the hometown he fled at 18 after refusing to take over the family sushi restaurant. Now, with nothing else to do and heartbroken to learn Ren has married someone else, he starts pitching in at the restaurant. His parents remain reticent, however, preferring to act like he’d never left. Just as he begins to settle back into his old life, he starts a new romance. Torn once again between forging a new path and meeting his family’s expectations, he realizes he’s never really matured. Chong expertly captures the family’s complicated dynamics and ratchets up the tension as they finally break the silence about the past. It’s a satisfying drama. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hunter follows her bestseller We Were the Lucky Ones with a stirring novel of bravery and sacrifice in WWII Italy. Esti and Lili, two 20-something Jewish women, resist fascism and anti-Semitism by forging IDs and helping to shelter orphaned refugee children. When Esti is badly beaten by a pro-Mussolini gang, she urges Lili to take Esti’s three-year-old son, Theo, and run. Avoiding trains, where they would risk arrest, Lili and Theo trek mostly on foot across Italy. In Rome, she meets Thomas, an escaped American POW disguised in a German uniform, and helps him search for his regiment. Thomas and Theo take to each other immediately, and Lili slowly realizes she’s in love with the American. All along, she writes letters to Esti and to her own father, Massimo, who has fled to Switzerland. Lili and Massimo reunite, but she never hears back from Esti, who is rumored to have been sent to Auschwitz. Hunter movingly depicts the bond between Lili and the precocious Theo, and ends the novel on a hopeful note without flinching from the war’s horrors. Fans of Hunter’s previous book and the miniseries based on it will be pleased. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

This brilliant erotic romp from Donoso (The Obscene Bird of Night) follows a young Nicaraguan woman’s disastrous entry into Madrid high society after WWI. Blanca Arias, the teen daughter of a diplomat, is left alone in the Spanish capital after the Nicaraguan regime falls and her parents return home. She enjoys five months of marriage to Paquito, an “opulent but inept” marquess who is heir to the “substantial” fortune of the House of Loria. When Paquito dies suddenly, Blanca, now the Marquise of Loria, inherits the family fortune thanks to her husband’s effort to keep the money away from his “vulture” of a mother, Casilda. As a 19-year-old widow, Blanca then undertakes a series of exquisitely detailed sexual adventures with the elderly family notary, the count who lives off Blanca’s inheritancee, a handsome painter she meets in a park, and others. Meanwhile, Casilda plots to seize the fortune, and the painter’s dog assumes an increasingly sinister role in Blanca’s life. Translator McDowell handily preserves Donoso’s delectable prose style (one of Blanca’s lovers “tuned her body like an exquisitely sensitive instrument, transforming it into a sumptuous object of the softest silk”). The result is a pitch-perfect tale of sex and intrigue. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Originally published in 2013, this impressionistic if baffling story of three childhood friends by Tsushima (Territory of Light), who died in 2016, spans from Japan’s post-WWII occupation by the Allies to the Fukushima nuclear accident. Mitch and Kazu were adopted together from an orphanage for the mixed-race children of American GIs. When they’re eight, they and their playmate Yonko witness the drowning death of another girl from the orphanage, but their memories of exactly what they saw, and whether a neighborhood boy named Tabo pushed the girl into the water, are blurry. As they grow up, Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko forge their own paths, but they reunite decades later after learning of a series of unsolved murders. Since the victims were all wearing orange, the same color worn by the girl who drowned when they were children, the trio suspect Tabo is the killer, and the novel climaxes with their visit to Tabo’s mother. Along the way, Tsushima jumps through time to jarring effect, as when she flashes forward to Kazu’s death from a fall. Composed of awkwardly fitting parts and puzzling tangents, such as Mitch’s vision of radioactive jelly after the Fukushima disaster, the narrative fails to cohere into a unified whole. Readers will have a tough time with this one. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

The superb first novel from British and Irish poet Hewitt (after the collection Rapture’s Road) is a wistful account of a gay teen’s unrequited first love. In 2002, sensitive James is attracted to Luke, a troubled young man temporarily staying with his aunt and uncle in rural Thornmere, England (“He must need someone, and didn’t I need someone, too?” James wonders). His desire for Luke is as strong as his fear of rejection, and he cherishes the time they spend together, exploring a nearby cave, drinking brandy from Luke’s flask, and going to a school disco party, where Luke attracts attention from several girls. Luke’s cocky and confident demeanor rubs off on James, prompting him to give Luke a porn magazine, and he’s thrilled to watch Luke gaze at the pictures of naked women (“I knew that the imagination was more pliable, more open to change, than real life”). But after James sees Luke with one of the girls from the party, he’s filled with a “cold panic” at his failure to keep Luke to himself. James potently expresses the charge he feels around Luke (“Being with him was the one point in my life when I remembered feeling electrically alive”), and Hewitt manages to convey both the allure and the peril of that spark (“I wanted to be lost in him,” James thinks, “and the hope was a torture to me”). Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kohnstamm (Lake City) serves up a splendid, centuries-spanning tale of Indigenous and colonial history in the Pacific Northwest. In 1856, Duwamish chief Si’sia vows to protect sacred land near Seattle from violent white settlers, some of whom are named Stevenson and Stalworth. In 1971, Si’sia’s descendant Larry Dugdale works as a machinist on the prototype of a supersonic jet. Larry is in love with Ruth Hasegawa, whose immigrant ancestors once worked, and then owned, Si’sia’s land. Ruth’s mother, Masako, a Japanese internment camp survivor who established the music program at Stevenson Elementary School, controls Ruth’s every move in an ill-fated attempt to arrange a better life for her. Kohnstamm alternates Larry’s narrative with that of Ruth’s daughter, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth, who in 2014 spearheads a push to rename the elementary school after her mother, only to be told that the school may have to close. The interconnectedness of the cast creates an addictive narrative tension, and Kohnstamm’s character work is top notch, particularly with the tragic Larry, whose earnest and increasingly drastic actions follow one misfortune after another. Readers shouldn’t miss Kohnstamm’s heartbreaking saga. Agent: Jennie Dunham, Dunham Literary. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/17/2025 | Details & Permalink