The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece.
It’s a special gift when a favorite poet writes a novel. Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, after poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell. It tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet recovering from addiction who, following the deaths of his parents, has become fixated on the idea of martyrdom.
Come and Get It is a return to the uncomfortable-yet-fascinating social commentary that made Kiley Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, so engrossing (and a bestseller, too!). When a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas begins paying a resident assistant to let her listen in on the conversations of a wealthy group of students, using their gossip as writing material, everyone ends up in murky moral territory.
The stunning, evocative cover of this historical novel is reason enough to add it to your TBR: a lone woman in red walks through winter wilderness, reflected in a frozen pond as a snow-white fox. Of course, readers of The Night Tiger would be eagerly awaiting Yangsze Choo’s next book even if the cover were a paper bag. This epic adventure set in Manchuria at the very end of the Qing Dynasty promises to bring together mystery and legend to vibrant effect.
This remarkable novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, picking up with his unforgettable characters Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. Beginning in 1864 with the Sand Creek Massacre, Orange takes readers back in time to tell the stories of these characters’ ancestors, before sweeping forward to 2018 and the aftermath of the tragic shooting at the heart of There There.
Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
Xochitl Gonzalez is back with a campus novel entwining the stories of two women: an artist, Anita de Monte, who died mysteriously in 1985, and an art history student, Raquel, who is determined to uncover what happened to Anita and bring new attention to her art. Like she did in her bestselling, award-winning debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, Gonzalez turns a sharp, thoughtful eye to the costs of success, this time in the elitist, and often racist and sexist, worlds of art and academia.
Cristina Henriquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
If you’ve read Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Booker Prize-winning Flights or The Books of Jacob in English, then you’ve also read the work of Jennifer Croft, her accomplished translator. The Extinction of Irena Rey is Croft’s first novel, and it has a delightfully clever metafictional premise: Irena Rey, an enigmatic and brilliant author, has vanished after bringing eight translators to her home in the heart of an ancient Polish forest, ostensibly to begin translating her latest masterwork. The scramble to solve the mystery of Irena’s disappearance is heightened by Croft’s conceit that The Extinction of Irena Rey was written and translated by two of the translator characters. As you follow them through the woods hunting for clues, you’ll wonder how this account could have been skewed or altered by its layers of linguistic permutations.
Colombian literary icon and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, after a long career of groundbreaking novels and short stories. Published for the first time this spring, his novella Until August follows a married woman who travels to a Caribbean island each August to spend one night with a new lover.
In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
If you love Louise Kennedy (Trespasses, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac), Anna Burns (Milkman) and Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These, So Late in the Day) as much as we do, you’ll want to check out Wild Houses. Debut novelist Colin Barrett is the author of two much lauded short story collections. He writes hilarious, piercing and inventive tales often set in fictional Irish towns like Ballina, where Wild Houses’ protagonist, quiet, exceedingly tall Dev Hendrick, is dragged into the kidnapping of a drug dealer’s teenage brother.
It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from their land.
Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel A Thousand Acres, author Jane Smiley crafts literary delights, from her moving historical Last Hundred Years trilogy to her wonderful, animal-led adventure, Perestroika in Paris. Lucky features Jodie Rattler, a folk musician from St. Louis who, through some blend of fate, chance and hard work, becomes a national star.
In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment, just after WWI, when both everything and nothing had changed for women in England—plus a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions and romantic entanglements.
Long Island revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of Colm Toíbín’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman.
With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound.
Like every novel from the author of Crazy Rich Asians, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes.
Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds.
David Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, leaps back two generations from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to follow John Sawtelle and his wife Mary as they develop the first generations of an amazingly sensitive breed of dogs.
Wrestling with grief over the loss of his son and with the inheritance of a former plantation, the narrator of John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine embarks on a mystical, profound journey into an unraveling identity.
Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.
In Julia Phillips’ latest, sisters Sam and Elena spend their days working and caring for their dying mother on an island in the Pacific Northwest—until the arrival of a bear upends their equilibrium.
Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.
The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.
In her clever debut novel, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in a tradition of blurring the boundary between art and artist.
In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina Ituralde, an adventurous free spirit and an undocumented student at Harvard, finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.
Inspired by true events from the year 1087, Nicked is a thrilling and fast-moving adventure in which a naive monk accompanies a relic hunter on a quest to steal the corpse of St. Nicholas.
An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.
Alisa Alering paints the mountains, hollows, moss and quartz of the Appalachian landscape in all their full aliveness in Smothermoss, their gothic debut.
Ruby Todd’s dazzling debut, Bright Objects, is a riveting literary thriller of obsession, vengeance and astronomy, but its most poignant gift may be its depiction of trying to make sense of life after tragedy.
These terrifying short stories starring Black girl protagonists are anything but predictable, stretching the limits of the horror genre towards sci-fi, gothic, comedy and more.
Praveen Herat’s prizewinning debut thriller, Between This World and the Next, paints a vivid, knowledgeable portrait of a threatening political netherworld, including breakaway states like Transnistria.
Like the women of Sex and the City, Humor Me’s protagonist Presley Fry breezes through connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals and career-enhancing forays in NYC, but the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step.
Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.
A Thousand Times Before is a riveting magical family saga examining the indelible yet complicated bonds between mothers and daughters while transporting readers through major moments in 20th-century Indian history.
In Ethan Joella’s gentle third novel, Jack Schmidt must weigh a lucrative offer to purchase the family business, a popular restaurant on the beachfront of Rehoboth Beach, against his uncertainty about the future and his loyalty to his staff.
Prepare to lose yourself in Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran, a historical drama that evokes the sights and sounds of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar while artfully exploring the labyrinthian complexities of deep friendship.
Set in the summer of 1975 at a sleepaway camp in upstate New York, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a devilishly clever work full of nerve-shredding suspense.
This cleverly plotted story unravels in a series of flashbacks as our protagonist, Teddy, tries to set the record straight to Italian detectives in the aftermath of an embassy party gone wrong.
