Yoko Ogawa, trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Pantheon, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-31608-5
In Ogawa’s captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt’s family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed ... Continue reading »
Jamie Harrison. Counterpoint, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-1-64009-632-5
Harrison’s riveting fifth adventure for Montana PI Jules Clement (after 2000’s Blue Deer Thaw) is worth the wait. In 1972, when Jules was a child, his father, the sheriff of Blue Deer, Mont., was gunned down during a traffic stop. Patrick Bell was convicted of the murder—he claimed he’d bee... Continue reading »
Ryan Graudin. Redhook, $30 (544p) ISBN 978-0-316-41869-0
1913 Paris, when the City of Light is about to be darkened by WWI, is the setting for this effervescent fantasy from Graudin (Wolf by Wolf). The Enchantresses, a found family of three young women painters running scams and nesting in the famed Pere Lachaise cemetery, butt up against the pas... Continue reading »
J’Nell Ciesielski. Thomas Nelson, $17.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-8407-2120-4
An estranged couple reunites mid-heist in this sparkling historical romance from Ciesielski (To Free the Stars). Smitten with one another in the fervor of Armistice Day, Esme Fox and Jasper Truitt impulsively marry in 1918 Paris. Esme, who has no real desire to be tied down to a virtual str... Continue reading »
Stan Mack. Fantagraphics Underground, $50 (336p) ISBN 978-1-68396-916-7
This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack’s Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim,” he claimed.) Like a crowded apartment building, the volume’s chock-full of stubborn individuality, and t... 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 »
Natalie Lampert. Ballantine, $30 (432p) ISBN 978-1-5247-9938-0
Journalist Lampert debuts with a trenchant investigation of the egg freezing industry and the commodification of women’s reproductive health. Doctors first recommended Lampert freeze her eggs when she was in her early 20s, shortly after an emergency operation on her remaining ovary (the other had be... 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 »
Maisha Oso, illus. by Candice Bradley. Orchard, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-338-84997-4
“Long before a slave ship sailed,/ we shined like bright stars—/ brilliant and beautiful.” In an insightful picture book, Oso (Buster the Bully) offers an empowering portrait of African peoples “before the ships.” Alliterative and assonant lines expound on the lives of individuals thriving ... Continue reading »