Jessica Anthony. Little, Brown, $25 (144p) ISBN 978-0-316-57637-6
Anthony (Enter the Aardvark) examines a fraying marriage in her sensational latest. Kathleen Beckett, a former college tennis champion, lives with her husband, Virgil, and two children in the suburbs of 1950s Newark, Del. One Sunday, Kathleen tells Virgil to take the children to church with... Continue reading »
Mindy Mejia. Atlantic Monthly, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6311-0
For the nerve-shredding sequel to To Catch a Storm, Mejia shifts her focus from psychic PI Jonah Kendrick to his college friend, Iowa City cop Max Summerlin, and Kara Johnson, the lover of Kendrick’s late niece, Celina. Summerlin is eager to get back in the field after recovering from gunsh... Continue reading »
Mary McMyne. Redhook, $19.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-316-39351-5
McMyne (The Book of Gothel) brings rich creativity, feminist sensibility, and a meticulous grounding in history to her captivating imagining of the life of the Dark Lady, the illusive inspiration for Shakespeare’s later sonnets. Hedonist Rose Rushe is more interested in becoming a court mus... Continue reading »
Ingrid Pierce. Alcove, $18.99 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-63910-813-8
Pierce’s top-notch debut puts a dishy spin on the second-chance romance and forced proximity tropes. Wedding dress designer Andie Dresser is on the precipice of a career breakthrough when a client cancels an important order. She’d been banking on using that money to fund her debut show at Atlanta Fa... Continue reading »
John Lees and Adam Cahoon. Vault, $19.99 trade paper (200p) ISBN 978-1-63849-209-2
This rollicking dark comedy from Lees (the Mountainhead series) and Cahoon brings Britain’s 1980s “video nasty” moral panic into the spotlight in a delightfully updated way. Shy Scottish teen Graeme “Thumper” Connell loves B-movie horror films so much that he seemingly conjures his favorite star, a ... Continue reading »
Imane Boukaila. Milkweed, $16 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-63955-078-4
Boukaila’s boundary-pushing debut explores truth, reluctance, and an unrestrained mind. Boukaila, a nonspeaking autistic poet, celebrates neurodivergent modes of thinking that trespass norms and linear expectations through associative logic: “Plotting optimizes thinking/ forcing the motioned streams... Continue reading »
Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »
Sara Imari Walker. Riverhead, $29 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-19189-7
What is life and how does one recognize it? asks Walker, an astrobiology professor at Arizona State University, in her bold debut. Defining life is a deceptively tricky endeavor, she argues, noting that the claim popular in scientific circles that “life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable o... Continue reading »
Fadi Kattan. Hardie Grant, $40 (240p) ISBN 978-1-958417-28-7
“A desire to show the real Bethlehem, and to celebrate it, is what led me to food and hospitality so many years ago,” writes Kattan, the owner and chef behind London’s Akub and Bethlehem’s Fawda restaurants, in his sincere and beautiful debut. Inviting readers to “share in the memories and flavours ... Continue reading »
Eliza Griswold. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-60168-3
Pulitzer winner Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) delivers a riveting chronicle of the fracturing of a progressive Christian church during a period of social and political turmoil. In 1996, “hippie church planters” Rod and Gwen White founded the Circle of Hope church in Philadelphia as an alt... Continue reading »
Drew Beckmeyer. Atheneum, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-6659-4042-9
A classroom’s first week launches a dynamic change in this inventive picture book. Monday reveals a clique of sports buffs (“They call themselves the SPORT KINGS, but nobody else does”), an artist worried about showing their work, an inventor frustrated with a malfunctioning satellite, a teacher buz... Continue reading »