50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2025

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water comes a gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to escape a former master still intent on their bondage. New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the postbellum South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return. When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June’s tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman’s journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper's daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who'll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they're owed. As Coleman and June separately navigate a perilous, parched landscape, the siblings learn quickly that freedom isn't always given—sometimes, it must be taken by force. As in his New York Times bestselling debut The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris delves into the critical years of the Civil War’s aftermath to deliver an intimate and epic tale of what freedom means in a society still determined to return its Black citizens to bondage. Populated with unforgettable characters, Amity is a vital addition to the literature of emancipation.
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A gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to finally reunite, all while escaping a former master still intent on their bondage New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they've been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the post-war South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return. When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June's tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman's journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper's daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who'll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they're owed. As Coleman and June separately navigate a perilous, parched landscape, the siblings learn quickly that freedom isn't always given--sometimes, it must be taken by force. As in his New York Times bestselling debut The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris delves into the critical years of the Civil War's aftermath to deliver an intimate and epic tale of what freedom means in a society still determined to return its Black citizens to bondage. Populated with unforgettable characters, Amity is a vital addition to the literature of emancipation.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, KIRKUS, BOOKPAGE The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
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Aurian and Jin Koch are trying, very hard, to be peaceful. They're doing a terrible job. Owning a shiny new Inn in a boring Gold Road village might be Aurian's dream, but the world has other ideas. When Aurian and Jin Koch leave Morda Bonemaker's funeral procession to attempt a peaceful life, they underestimate how difficult their singular history of violence and mayhem will make getting along with the neighbors. Will their history follow them, even into retirement? For that matter--is Evinanjin Koch, veteran hero, capable of retirement? An Aurian and Jin novelette--NOT the second book in the Sundering Trilogy.

"[A] piercing collection . . . These stories will dazzle readers." —Publishers Weekly, starred review "These nine startling stories capture the subtleties of feeling—and being made to feel—out of place . . .. Ostlund proves herself a master of the form." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Nine exquisite stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence that looms daily over women and the LGBTQ+ community. An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend’s innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher's sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America’s preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME MAGAZINE, MARIE CLAIRE, BOOK RIOT, ESQUIRE, KIRKUS, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND MORE! ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER “A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR “Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC, TIME, VOGUE, MARIE CLAIRE, ESQUIRE and ROLLING STONE BOOK TO READ IN 2025 'Slick, sharp, strange and singular . . . You’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital 'A lightning bolt of a novel' FINANCIAL TIMES 'I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today' ALEX PRESTON, Observer One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

A theater critic at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe writes a vicious one-star review of a struggling actress he has a one-night stand with in this sharply funny, feminist tinderbox. “Excellent…brilliant…a fiery reminder that we still have so far to go when it comes to men behaving poorly and getting away with it.”—LitHub "A binge-worthy novel that explores our obsessions, our inner critic, and who we think we are in person and in print. Intimate, real, and really funny. This one has teeth.” —Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Come and Get It and Such a Fun Age One of Glamour's Best Books for Book Clubs Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress. Unaware that she’s gone home with the theater critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to see his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, and she’s not sure which humiliation offends her the most. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation critiquing Alex Lyons himself—entitled son of a famous actress, serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible man. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story. A brilliant Trojan horse of a book about art, power, misogyny, and female rage, Bring the House Down is a searing, insightful, and often hilarious debut that captures the blurred line between reality and performance.
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A theater critic at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe writes a vicious one-star review of a struggling actress he has a one-night stand with in this sharply funny, feminist tinderbox. “Bring the House Down is sharp-witted, wise, and authentic—what a fierce, fantastically funny read.”—Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had and Same As It Ever Was Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave, or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress. Unaware that she’s gone home with the theater critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to see his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, and she’s not sure which humiliation offends her the most. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation critiquing Alex Lyons himself—entitled son of a famous actress, serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible man. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story. A brilliant Trojan horse of a book about art, power, misogyny, and female rage, Bring the House Down is a searing, insightful, and often hilarious debut that captures the blurred line between reality and performance.

'Funny and tender ... Patrick Ryan has long been one of my favourite writers' ANN PATCHETT 'I love this novel with my entire heart ... Wise and heartbreaking' ANN NAPOLITANO May, 1945. As news of the Allied victory in Europe reaches the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, a woman named Margaret Salt walks into a hardware store and asks the man behind the counter, Cal Jenkins, for a radio. What happens next will change both of their lives forever. While the country reconstructs in the post-war boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie - and nothing can remain hidden in a small town. The consequences of that long-ago encounter will intertwine the fates of two families, rippling through the next generation and compelling them to re-examine who they thought they were and what the future might hold. Full of compassion, humour and charm, Buckeye is a dazzling portrait of the human spirit by way of one unforgettable community; the twisted roads we take to achieve forgiveness and redemption; and above all a universal longing for love and connection.
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'Poignant, powerful' Independent 'Omniscient, sweeping, almost defiantly sentimental' New York Times '[A] luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets' Guardian May, 1945. As news of the Allied victory in Europe reaches the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, a woman named Margaret Salt walks into a hardware store and asks the man behind the counter, Cal Jenkins, for a radio. What happens next will change both of their lives forever. While the country reconstructs in the post-war boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie - and nothing can remain hidden in a small town. The consequences of that long-ago encounter will intertwine the fates of two families, rippling through the next generation and compelling them to re-examine who they thought they were and what the future might hold. Full of compassion, humour and charm, Buckeye is a dazzling portrait of the human spirit by way of one unforgettable community; the twisted roads we take to achieve forgiveness and redemption; and above all a universal longing for love and connection.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “A cause for celebration”—an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love. “The Correspondent is this year’s breakout novel no one saw coming.”—The Wall Street Journal “I cried more than once as I witnessed this brilliant woman come to understand herself more deeply.”—Florence Knapp, author of The Names LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Elle, Christian Science Monitor, She Reads “Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?” Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime. Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness. Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.

"An irresistibly anxious book."―The Washington Post "A family drama with a shocking twist." ―The New York Times "I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!"―Oprah Winfrey When the Cassidy-Shaws' driverless minivan fatally collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat. His father, Noah, is beside him, and in the back with his younger siblings is his mother, Lorelei—a renowned AI researcher—who is lost in her work. During a weeklong retreat on the Chesapeake Bay, the Cassidy-Shaws wrestle with the moral fallout of the crash as a routine police enquiry starts to unravel. As Lorelei's increasingly odd behaviour stirs her husband's suspicions that there may be a darker truth behind the incident, the arrival of tech billionaire Daniel Monet (who has a mysterious history with Lorelei) cements them. When Charlie falls for Monet's teenage daughter, tensions among the Cassidy-Shaws reach breaking point. A psychosocial thriller and a propulsive family drama, Culpability explores a world newly shaped by non-human forces such as chatbots and autonomous cars, and forces us to examine our own relationship to artificial intelligence, and the nuanced ways in which we are all, in fact, culpable.
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When the Cassidy-Shaws' autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie's future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei's odd behavior tugs at Noah's suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident.

"G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels--the minister of propaganda in Berlin--sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels's thinly veiled order"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • NOMINATED FOR THE 2026 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • A Heather’s Pick • NPR’s Books We Love • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker • Barnes & Noble • Kirkus • Financial Times • The Washington Post • The Irish Times • The Observer A publishing event ten years in the making—a searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.
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• NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST A searing, exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin Omelogor is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. Dream Count is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s searing, unforgettable story of these four women—a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself.

"From Laila Lalami-the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a "maestra of literary fiction" (NPR)-comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman's fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are"--
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* LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025 * * A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK MARCH 2025 * Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. For his safety, she must be transferred to a retention centre, and kept under observation for twenty-one days. But as Sara arrives to be monitored alongside other dangerous dreamers, she discovers that with every deviation from the facility's strict and ever-shifting rules, their stays can be extended - and that getting home to her family is going to cost much more than just three weeks of good behaviour . . . The Dream Hotel is a gripping speculative mystery about the seductive dangers of the technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier. As terrifying as it is inventive, it explores how well we can ever truly know those around us - even with the most invasive surveillance systems in place.

WINNER OF THE 2025 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION • NOMINATED FOR THE 2026 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • Named A Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • CBC • Indigo • Publishers Weekly • The Irish Times • Good Housekeeping • The Observer • The Guardian • The Boston Globe A stunning debut novel by a writer who is “bang-on brilliant” (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction on the eve of the Russian invasion. A darkly comic novel exploring survival, love, and the impact of war. “Funny and smart. This is essential reading.” —Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Tom Lake “This novel turns corners and tables. I love works that are smarter than I am, and this is one.” —Percival Everett, author of National Book Award-winner James “Pulses with a powerful sense of urgency and relevance to our times.” —Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.

Short-listed for the Booker Prize Long-listed for the National Book Award “The first major American novel to be published this year.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “Gorgeous . . . Almost impossibly heartbreaking.” —Sam Worley, New York Magazine A Must-Read: The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The Chicago Review of Books, Forbes, Literary Hub, and Town & Country “A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Devastating.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “Ranks among her best work.” —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise. One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, Louisa and Anne, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father? Shifting perspectives across time and character and turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Flashlight chases the shock waves of one family’s catastrophe, even as they are swept up in the invisible currents of history. A monumental new novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 'Ferociously smart and full of surprises' Eleanor Catton 'Instantly bewitching' Jennifer Egan 'A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence' Financial Times The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels. 'Big, bold and surprising' Guardian ‘Engrossing... Choi is an astute, convincing writer’ Sunday Telegraph 'Susan Choi is a master of rendering relationships with utter particularity' Raven Leilani, author of Luster 'I couldn’t put it down, and once I finished, I couldn’t stop thinking about it' Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy

From the award-winning author of Denial comes a novel about a New Age writer whose life is irrevocably changed when a devastating climate disaster forces him to confront his belief in the existence of God. What if God spoke to you? Would you hear Him? Would you obey His command? Arthur Zinn, an author of high-end spiritual texts, has fallen in love with a librarian married to a newfound close friend. When an environmental disaster threatens her life, Arthur’s frantic prayers lead to a mystifying event that challenges his assumptions about the nature of the universe and the divine. In God and Sex, Oregon Book Award winner and acclaimed screenwriter Jon Raymond masterfully entwines themes of ecology, mortality, art, faith, and the tangled complexities of carnal love.

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK TIME MUST-READ BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE ‘An indictment of this moment and a timeless parable about the lengths we go to for love and self-preservation, written in exuberant prose - this is a novel that will burrow its way into your soul and remain there forever’ Tahmima Anam Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times Bestseller A Burning—longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other—a piercing and propulsive tour de force. In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, with all the treasured immigration documents within it, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe. A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation. ‘A true literary achievement… Majumdar creates a tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood… Detail is the strongest thing in A Guardian and a Thief. It conveys the nuances of not only love but also wisdom… a true joy to read.’ New York Times
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Winner of the Irish Book of the Year * A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction * Shortlisted for the Nero Novel of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them “I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise. . .” In a small town in Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the future: The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold. But an insidious menace now creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of the townspeople. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, Be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to overcome the betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, neighbors, and entire generations.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.” —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love You knew I’d write a book about you someday. Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
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"Lily King is one of our great literary treasures."--Madeline Miller From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes an intimate and sweeping new novel of love and friendship--a journey into the heart of youth and middle age, desire and loss, and the intricate bonds that shape our lives Our bright narrator is a college senior quietly dreaming of becoming a writer when she meets Sam and Yash, best friends and the golden boys of the English Department. Top-of-the-class Honors students, they live at the stately home of a favorite professor on sabbatical and can banter about Joyce and Fitzgerald like a game of rapid-fire tennis. The two nickname her Jordan and invite her into their magnetic world where her college experience is forever altered. As graduation approaches, the lines between love and friendship blur, and Jordan finds herself caught in a life-changing triangle. Decades later, her writing career is thriving, but motherhood is full of challenges. When she receives unexpected news that brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she thought she left behind. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics have come to adore, King explores a tangled lattice of friendship, love, family and uncertainty that celebrates how we love, who we love, and all the complexity a single heart can hold.

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK The New York Times ‘Best Books of the Year (So Far)' A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in a deeply moving novel of love, faith and survival, for readers of Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist and Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See ‘This made me cry on an airplane but it was worth it! A luscious, rich and moving novel, a beautiful, careful and profound book about survival and hope’ Alice Winn, bestselling author of In Memoriam ‘An extraordinary book that reads like a thriller, written with the care of the most delicate psychological and historical fiction’ Vogue ‘Best Books of 2025’ ‘A shocking story, made all the more stunning by the fact that it has its roots in true history’ Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister's Keeper In sixteenth-century France, as the heiress to an aristocratic fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of privilege. Then she is orphaned, and her enigmatic and volatile guardian squanders her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to the new French colonies of North America. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished, abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue. From a childhood dressed in gowns with laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she had never before needed… Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola tells the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

⭐ SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025⭐ 'Graceful, atmospheric, enormously satisfying' SARAH JESSICA PARKER, BOOKER JUDGE 2025 'I love The Land in Winter so much... It's really, really, really, really good' GILLIAN ANDERSON 'A classic in the making' ELIZABETH DAY 'One of the best writers at work today' TELEGRAPH 'Has an uncanny beauty and depth' GUARDIAN 'Money, class, love: all of life is in there' SUNDAY TIMES DECEMBER 1962, THE WEST COUNTRY. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. WHERE DO YOU HIDE WHEN YOU CAN'T LEAVE HOME? AND WHERE, IN A FROZEN WORLD, CAN YOU RUN TO? More praise for The Land in Winter ⭐ Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 ⭐ ⭐ Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025 ⭐ 'Perfect' OBSERVER 'Delicate and devastating' I PAPER 'Incredibly satisfying' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'I loved The Land in Winter . . . There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald... A thing of rare beauty' RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 'An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience.' FRANCIS SPUFFORD, author of Golden Hill Praise for Andrew Miller 'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' HILARY MANTEL 'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' SUNDAY TIMES 'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative' THE TIMES 'A wonderful storyteller' SPECTATOR
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⭐ Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 ⭐ ⭐ Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 ⭐ ⭐ Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025 ⭐ A book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, i Newspaper, Good Housekeeping 'Has an uncanny beauty and depth... A novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind' GUARDIAN, Summer reads 'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect. A novel that hits your cells and can be felt there, without your brain really knowing what's happened to it. Superb' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital 'Delicate and devastating' I PAPER 'Incredibly satisfying' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A novel of dazzling humanity and captivating, crystalline prose' MAIL ON SUNDAY DECEMBER 1962, THE WEST COUNTRY. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He's been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that's already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can't leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to? More praise for The Land in Winter 'Perfect' OBSERVER 'Beautifully done' THE TIMES 'Psychologically acute . . . For 200 impeccable pages Miller gives us four intensely imagined inner lives... gripping' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'I loved The Land in Winter . . . There were moments I thought of Penelope Fitzgerald - that moment I have always loved in The Beginning of Spring when the birch trees seem to grow hands - those liminal moments that are kind of beyond words, or explanation, but Miller finds them anyway. It's a thing of rare beauty' RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 'An exquisite achievement, luminously written, full of wonder at the diversity and strangeness of human experience.' FRANCIS SPUFFORD, author of Golden Hill 'Disruptive and graceful beyond anything I've read' SARAH HALL, author of Helm 'Sentence after sentence, The Land in Winter is beautifully intricate, deeply moving, and utterly absorbing' CLAIRE FULLER, author of Unsettled Ground Praise for Andrew Miller 'Andrew Miller's writing is a source of wonder and delight' HILARY MANTEL 'One of our most skilful chroniclers of the human heart and mind' SUNDAY TIMES 'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative' THE TIMES 'A wonderful storyteller' SPECTATOR

BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss “A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review “A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett “Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, and more When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists. ‘I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever’ Ann Patchett Profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, [The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny] teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world’ Lauren Groff
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ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF PEOPLE’S TOP 5 BOOKS OF THE YEAR BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist, Harper’s Bazaar, The Globe and Mail, BBC, New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, Elle, Library Journal, Libby, Chicago Public Library, Lit Hub ONE OF BOOKPAGE’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss “A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post “Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe “A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett “A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros “Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini “A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books) When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

“Gorgeous, resonant, and startling.”―Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds “Glorious.”―Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies A debut collection of stories set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories. How can you love where you come from, even when home doesn’t love you back? In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate. Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present—and how our present choices will echo for years to come.

A mother and son, estranged for years, must grapple with the shared secret that drove their lives apart in this enthralling story about family, forgiveness, and how a fleeting act of violence can change a life forever, by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal) At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart. With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and the love that might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (New York Times).
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A mother and son, estranged for many years, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart in this highly anticipated novel by one of the most talented American writers of his generation Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated, spending his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional detached hook-ups. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter’s numbness, the catastrophic event that he has avoided facing for twenty years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, who runs a women’s retreat she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by her estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart. 'Subtle, symphonic and satisfying' Financial Times 'An epic family saga that packs an extraordinary emotional punch . . . this book is his best yet' Observer

Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post A riveting debut novel about a child whose literal enlightenment sets the stage for an exuberant tragicomedy of marriage, religion, and parenthood On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation. Though it appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the nimbus quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see the otherworldly glow; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging divinity school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test. At once a rollicking intellectual satire, a searing portrait of a family in crisis, and a thrilling metaphysical page-turner, The Nimbus offers a comic and profound examination of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity’s timeless search for meaning.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry's flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today - but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. As Johnny's mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry's youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next--and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever. Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.

'Casually magisterial' Guardian 'Endlessly intriguing' Observer 'A marvel of a novel' Ali Smith 'Jane Eyre by way of Patricia Highsmith' BBC Radio 4 'Puts Stevens in the class of Sarah Waters' Financial Times 'There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.' Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle's home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls. Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace's cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace's aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live. Deftly-plotted and shimmering with Nell Stevens's distinctive intelligence, style and wit, THE ORIGINAL is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original. 'What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell Stevens herself' Olivia Laing, author of THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME 'Deliciously engaging and wildly intelligent. I adored this novel about art, authenticity and desire and am a devoted fan of Nell Stevens' Aysegül Savas, author of THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS 'A delightful, playful puzzle of a novel, and a brilliant twist on the nineteenth century orphan-makes-good story. THE ORIGINAL asks whether, sometimes, faking it is the right thing to do' Claire Fuller, author of UNSETTLED GROUND 'A wonderful novel about identity, creativity, money and belonging. It's so witty and propulsive you will forget how brilliantly constructed it is, this tale that brims with the beauty of art, of how to triumph in a difficult world. I absolutely loved it' Jessie Burton, author of THE MINIATURIST

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction "A heart-wrenchingly honest, often luminescent exploration of how to find and cultivate true connections, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places . . . [Palaver is] an unshakable triumph.”—The Washington Post One of TIME's Must-Read Books of 2025 and Kirkus' Best of Fiction 2025 One of The Washington Post's Best Fiction Books of the Year Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, New York, Time, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, People, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle, and Town & Country A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington. In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. With only the son’s cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions—the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar—they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where “home” really is—and whether they can even find it in one another. Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.
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A modern literary romcom and a life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction's 2025 First Novel Prize “Deliciously observed, ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.” —Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review “With prose as strange as it is hypnotizing, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more.” —Harper’s Bazaar “Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence . . . when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world.” —The Guardian A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
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'There is no other writer like him' MAGGIE NELSON 'I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune' BEN LERNER A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He already has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he's been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his mum kicked him. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realises that his hands are objects. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas, his best friend, Ty, and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why - in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock 'n' roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out barn where their classmate Tod's charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Thrilling, cerebral and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out - named one of the New Yorker's best books of the year - earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic). “Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.
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Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.

"[A] thorough success . . . A dazzling romp." —Steven Poole, The Guardian "Historical fiction doesn’t get much better than this." —George Cochrane, The Telegraph (5/5 stars) A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025 A pulse-quickening murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence by the renowned author of HHhH. As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year’s Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade—masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos. Who could have committed these crimes: murder and lèse-majesté? Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters start to fly back and forth—between Maria and her aunt Catherine de’ Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and the scheming Piero Strozzi; and between Vasari and Michelangelo—carrying news of political plots and speculations about the identity of Pontormo’s killer. The truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot center of European art and intrigue. Bursting with characters and historical color, Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) is a whodunit like no other—a labyrinthine murder mystery that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before. This is a dark, dazzling, unforgettable read.
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Cette fois-ci, il s’agit d’un véritable roman policier avec une énigme, un lieu clos, des indices et des conjectures. Tout part d’un crime, et l’intrigue est entièrement tendue par l’enquête et la recherche de l’assassin. L’action se déroule à Florence, au XVIe siècle. Le vieux peintre maniériste Pontormo a été assassiné au pied des fresques auxquelles il travaillait depuis onze ans. Un tableau a été maquillé. Un crime de lèse-majesté a été commis. Vasari, l’homme à tout faire du Duc de Florence, accessoirement considéré comme l’inventeur de l’histoire de l’art et le premier à avoir employé le mot de « Renaissance », est chargé de l’enquête. La situation à Florence en 1557 exige doigté, discrétion, loyauté, sensibilité artistique et compréhension politique. L’Europe est une poudrière. L’Italie est le terrain où s’affrontent la France et l’Espagne, les deux grandes puissances. Le Duc de Florence, Cosimo de Médicis, doit faire face aux convoitises de la reine de France, sa cousine Catherine de Médicis, alliée à son vieil ennemi, le républicain Piero Strozzi qui écume les environs avec l’armée du Duc de Guise. La ville pullule de savonarolistes nostalgiques d’un ordre moral qui condamne les nudités de Michel-Ange et de ses disciples maniéristes. Le pape lui-même est un inquisiteur de la pire espèce, celui qui a instauré la mise à l’index des livres jugés immoraux ou dangereux. Perspective(s) est un roman épistolaire. Ce parti-pris du roman par lettres répond à une triple motivation : la volonté de donner davantage de profondeur aux personnages d’une part (creuser leurs motivations, et, selon un mot qui symbolise toute la révolution esthétique de la Renaissance, leurs perspectives), le goût de la mécanique de précision horlogère d’autre part, enfin le défi formel que constitue le croisement de deux genres a priori peu compatibles, et dont il existe peu d’exemples. Le roman se compose de 176 lettres, soit une de plus que les Liaisons dangereuses.
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Florence, New Year's Day 1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade. At his home, a hidden painting scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is the murderer? Who is behind the painting? As the city erupts in chaos, Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters fly back and forth carrying news of political plots and speculation about the killer's identity - between Maria and her aunt Catherine de' Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and her scheming agents in Florence; and between Vasari and his friend Michelangelo. Meanwhile, the Pope is banning books and branding works of art immoral. And the truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot centre of Europe. Bursting with characters and colour, Perspectives is a mystery like no other that shows us Renaissance Florence as we've never seen it before - a dazzling, hugely entertaining novel of court machinations, murder and art.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, PEOPLE, AND TOWN & COUNTRY • NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE WASHINGTON POST • GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • MULANEY READS BOOK CLUB PICK • A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut "A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review "Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.

An engrossing and original story about a woman who moves from Taiwan to California and builds an unexpected life there, for readers of Olive Kitteridge and Hello Beautiful.Joan Liang's life is a series of surprising developments: she never thought she would leave Taiwan for California, nor did she expect her first marriage to implode--especially as quickly and spectacularly as it did. She definitely did not expect to fall in love with an older, wealthy American and become his fourth wife and mother to his youngest children. Through all this she wrestles with one persistent question: Will she ever truly feel satisfied? As Joan and her children grow older and their circumstances evolve, she makes a drastic change: she opens the Satisfaction Café, a place where people can visit for a bit of conversation and to be heard and understood. Through this radical yet pragmatic business, Joan constructs a lasting legacy. Vivid, comic, and intensely moving, The Satisfaction Café is a novel about found family, the joy and loneliness that come with age, and how we can give ourselves permission to seek satisfaction and connection at any stage of life.

A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. “A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph “Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post “Late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.” —The Los Angeles Times Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

A vivid historical novel about Jane Austen that explores a question that has fascinated Janeites for years—Austen wrote some of the greatest love stories in existence, but did she ever fall in love? When Jane Austen hears the news that her family is to leave their beloved country home for the city of Bath, she faints with surprise and horror. But there is one compensation: the promise of a six-week holiday by the sea while their new lodgings are being prepared. She relishes the bracing air and beautiful surroundings, takes pleasure in sea bathing, and shares laughter with her sister Cassandra and best friend Martha Lloyd. To her joy, brother Frank arrives, fresh from naval exploits in the war against Napoleon. His friend Captain Parker seems to be making a play for Jane’s affections, but her sharp emotional intelligence tells her that something is not quite right. Meanwhile, she assists the eccentric Reverend Swete in finding a home for his bi-racial granddaughter who has arrived from the West Indies. Jane initially takes against another visitor to the seaside resort of Sidmouth, the lawyer Samuel Rose, but as she gets to know him, a wholly different feeling begins to blossom. . . . Written with a same wit and style that echos Austen herself, Paula Byrne expertly interweaves her deep knowledge of Austen and her world to imagine and give voice to the most romantic summer of the beloved author’s short life.
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'No one is better qualified than Byrne to imagine and expand upon Austen’s true romance. Her treasure chest of Austen knowledge and her ability to spiritually inhabit historical figures are displayed to fine advantage' WASHINGTON POST Summer 1801. Sidmouth, England.

NAMED ONE OF OPRAH DAILY'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025" ONE OF PEOPLE'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025" From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised. “Incredibly moving." – Ann Patchett “Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan “Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humor . . . exhilarating.” —Xochitl Gonzalez Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away. Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone. Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, SLEEP is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.

AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK “Profound and moving and real.”—Andrew Sean Greer “Some Bright Nowhere is a novel that draws you in deeply and holds you there. Wonderful.”—Meg Wolitzer The bestselling, beloved author returns with her first novel in over a decade, an intimate and profoundly moving look at a long marriage and the ways in which a startling request can change a couple’s understanding of who they are, together and apart. Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They’ve raised two children in their sleepy Connecticut town and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long life spent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it's time to gather loved ones and prepare for the inevitable. Over the years of Claire’s illness, Eliot has willingly—lovingly—shifted into the role of caregiver, appreciating the intimacy and tenderness that comes with a role even more layered and complex than the one he performed as a devoted husband. But as he focuses on settling into what will be their last days and weeks together, Claire makes an unexpected request that leaves him reeling. In a moment, his carefully constructed world is shattered. What if your partner’s dying wish broke your heart? How well do we know the deepest desires of those we love dearly? As Eliot is confronted with this profound turning point in his marriage and his life, he grapples with the man and husband he’s been, and with the great unknowns of Claire’s last days. Ann Packer makes a triumphant return with this powerful novel that is tender and raw, visceral and unexpected. Emotionally vibrant and complex, Some Bright Nowhere explores the profound gifts and unexpected costs of truly loving someone, and the fears and desires we experience as the end of life draws near.

"When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they've inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Jay's father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm's manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members begin to confront their own secrets and regrets. Jack is a professor at a struggling local college whose failures might have begun when he married his student, Sui Ching. Sui Ching does her best to keep the family together, though she too wonders what her life could have been. And Fong, the manager, refuses to look at what is: at Chuan, at the land, at the global forces that threaten to render his whole life obsolete." --
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'Shimmeringly intelligent and elegiacally intimate' YIYUN LI 'A mesmerising tale. Both heartbreaking and joyful' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer--about family, desire, and what we inherit--from celebrated author Tash Aw.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “This inventive, boundary-pushing follow-up to Detransition, Baby . . . [takes] on gender, transness and lives on the margins in all of their gorgeously complicated glory.”—People “Hot, heartbreaking, and thrillingly victorious.”—Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author of All Fours NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.
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**The irresistible follow-up to the hit debut novel Detransition, Baby** A BOOK TO WATCH IN 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN, IRISH TIMES, ROLLING STONES AND THE BBC 'As innovative, insightful, funny, and confronting as we've come to expect from Peters' work' Independent, Best Books to Look Out for in 2025 'A shining talent' Stylist Best Books of 2025 'Hot, heartbreaking and thrillingly victorious' MIRANDA JULY 'Potent and surprising and takes no prisoners' CARMEN MARIA MACHADO 'Spellbinding. With pathos and wit, Peters explores characters on the brink of self-discovery' BRIT BENNETT Deep in the forest, a group of restless lumberjacks working an illegal logging outfit plan a winter dance that some will volunteer to attend as women; the broadest, strongest axeman finds himself caught in a rivalry with a pretty, young jack that culminates in jealousy, betrayal and an astonishing spectacle of transition. Meanwhile, in other times and places, the gender apocalypse is brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend; an illicit boarding-school romance surfaces intrigue and cruelty; and a Las Vegas party weekend turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between a thrilling mystery man or a veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. In this quartet of tales, Torrey Peters' keen eye for the rough edges of desire reveals fresh possibilities. Acidly funny, boldly inventive and breathtaking in scope, Stag Dance provokes and unsettles, inspires and delights.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “This inventive, boundary-pushing follow-up to Detransition, Baby . . . [takes] on gender, transness and lives on the margins in all of their gorgeously complicated glory.”—People “Hot, heartbreaking, and thrillingly victorious.”—Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author of All Fours NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • ONE OF VULTURE'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Elle, Electric Lit, them, Chicago Public Library In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood. Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

" I am the nameless crew member who died on January 27, 1597." So reports the Dutch narrator of Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost from his icy grave on the Arctic archipelago Novaya Zemyla, separating what is known today as the Barents and Kara Seas in Russia. But when this expedition set out to find a " northeast passage" from Europe to China, the landmasses blocking such a route were unknown. While the expedition failed, the narrator becomes a sentient part of the landscape, privy to centuries of change. Meditating on the realities of human hubris that led to his early demise, unpacking his childhood in and around Amsterdam, and commenting on the dramatic technological and climactic changes he endures, history and fiction clash with tectonic force. From real-life figures like cartographer Petrus Plancius to Arctic foxes and transcendent shaman, and peppered with references to countless historical events-- ranging from the Reformation to Stalin' s labor camps and atomic weapons testing-- this boldly imaginative, profoundly beautiful novel argues that the unchanging characteristics of human behavior are unquestionably why the natural world has changed in so many ways.

A poignant coming-of-age story with the sensitivity and haunting power of What Belongs to You and Swimming in the Dark, about a young boy wrestling with his sexuality as war breaks out in modern Ukraine. In many ways, twelve-year-old Artem's life in Chernihiv, Ukraine, is normal. He spends his days helping on his grandfather's sunflower farm, drawing in his sketchbook--a treasured gift from his father, who works in America--and swimming in the river with his little brother, Yuri. In secret, Artem has begun wrestling with romantic feelings for his best friend, Viktor. In a country where love between two boys is unthinkable, Artem has begun to worry that growing up, his life will never be normal. Then, on a February night, Artem and Yuri are woken by explosions--the beginning of a war that will tear their life in two. The invading Russians destroy their home, killing their mother and grandfather, and leaving young Artem and Yuri to fend for themselves. Fleeing in hopes of somehow reuniting with their father, the brothers traverse the country their ancestors once fought and died for, with nothing but their backpacks and each other. Surrounded by death and destruction, Artem is certain of one thing--that whatever may come, he must keep himself and his brother alive. A harrowing and gorgeous tale of love, identity, lost innocence, and survival set in a time of devastating war, The Sunflower Boys is a powerful, heartrending exploration of young queer love, the Ukrainian spirit, and a family's struggle to survive.

From the author of Hollow Kingdom, a fantastically funny story featuring a cast of colorful characters in a dying Italian village and a giant truffle that changes their fate forever in this “deliciously absurd tale....I savored every page of this book.” (Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures) After nearly losing the election to a geriatric donkey, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives. Little do the villagers know that local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. A truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen. Written with the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures, Tartufo is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.

One of Esquire's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 A family saga following four generations on a time-bending journey from coastal Scotland to a colony on Mars. Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a visitor from the future, a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah’s help. Laboring in the warmth of a Scottish summer, Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong. Joe Mungo Reed’s intricately crafted novel expands from this extraordinary event, drawing together the stories of four lives reckoning with what it means to take fate into their own hands, moving from the last days of civilization on Earth through the birth of another on Mars. Roban lives in the Colony, one of the first generation born to this sterile new outpost, where he is consumed by longing for the lost wonders of a home planet he never knew. Between Hannah and Roban, two generations, a father and a daughter, face an uncertain future in a world that is falling apart. Andrew is a politician running to be Scotland’s First Minister. Andrew believes there is still time for the human spirit to triumph, if only he can persuade people to band together. For his starkly rationalist daughter Kenzie, this idealism doesn’t offer the hard tools needed to keep the rising floods at bay. And so, she signs on to work for a company that would abandon Earth for the promise of a world beyond—in contravention of all Andrew stands for. In considering which concerns should guide us in a time of crisis—social, technological, or familial—and reckoning with the question of whether there is meaning to be found in the pursuit of salvation beyond success itself, Joe Mungo Reed has written a novel of elegiac wonder and beauty.

The new novel from the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature - 'a maestro' (Guardian). A captivating story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial East Africa Selected as a book to look out for in 2025 by the Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and BBC _________________________________________________________ What are we given, and what do we have to take for ourselves? It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people - Karim, Fauzia and Badar - are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed. Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life - and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. Even when a shattering false accusation sees Badar sent away, Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend. But as the three of them take their first steps in love, infatuation, work and parenthood, their bond is tested - and Karim is tempted into a betrayal that will change all of their lives forever.

WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025 'The most thrilling fiction of the year ... an absolute triumph' Catherine Taylor, Financial Times 'A genre-busting inquiry into life and art, youth and Virginia Woolf' Guardian, Books to Look Forward to 2025 'I loved Theory & Practice ... raw, funny, truthful, youthful' Tessa Hadley 'Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book' Ali Smith It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on 'the Woolfmother' into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
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WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Theory & Practice is a thrillingly original hybrid work that seeks truthful answers to the most difficult questions of the day—questions about the nature of love, art, and desire, about the thorny cultural legacy of colonialism and the unappeasable human yearning for connection." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables A new novel of startling intelligence from prizewinning Australian author Michelle de Kretser, following a writer looking back on her young adulthood and grappling with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art It’s 1986, and “beautiful, radical ideas” are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” They become lovers, and the narrator’s feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf’s diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray. What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? Michelle de Kretser’s new novel offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of House of Leaves comes a magisterial novel about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter. “This is an amazing work of fiction. I absolutely loved it. At the heart you’ll find a blood-drenched story of pursuit and two brave and resourceful children. But there’s so much more. I immersed myself. Have never read anything like it.” —Stephen King Hard to figure how so much awful horror could've started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named... While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines. For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow. As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

From the author of Once More We Saw Stars comes a gripping novel about four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy. Set in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur, the story challenges our understanding of consciousness and humanity. Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the body of Cathy, a self-destructive ex-addict turned AI professor and upload-rights activist. With UnWorld, Jayson Greene envisions a grim but eerily familiar near-future where all lines have blurred—between visceral and digital, human and machine, real and unreal. As Anna, Cathy, Sam, and Aviva’s stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of UnWorld reveal themselves with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?

A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends “A novel you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever.”—Karen Russell “Very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful.”—Elif Batuman “A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, AV Club The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world. Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • New York Times • The New Yorker • The Washington Post • NPR • Barnes & Noble • Kirkus • Audible From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known. 2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery. 2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
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'One of the finest writers alive' Sunday Times 2014- A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119- The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately. A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost. 'A true master' Daily Telegraph 'McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose' New York Times

The acclaimed author of Red Clocks returns with a biting, lyrical novel about an intergenerational group home run by an ex-musician determined to make a place for those without one On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It’s not a family, exactly, but it’s got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship. When two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up on The House’s back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House’s finances are teetering on the edge. Zumas’s long-anticipated third novel wrestles with America’s crisis of care in a taut, aching, polyphonic tale that moves as fast as the crackling comebacks that fly between The House’s residents over breakfast. As the rules of the outside world start to press in on this safe haven, readers will find themselves asking, what would the world look like if everyone had a place to belong?

A couple’s new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain’s most celebrated writers. A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, the man revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calmness, meticulously planning the details of their future. Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can’t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings? A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, Your Steps on the Stairs explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.