Randall debuts with an uplifting road novel about a terminally ill woman attempting to make amends. Eleanor, 61, has been betrayed and ignored for years by her husband, Walt, a Republican U.S. senator who’s now having an affair with an intern. After Eleanor is diagnosed with ALS, she leaves Walt and their home in Dayton, Ohio, in her pickup truck, hoping to reconcile with their only child, Jillian, a lesbian, and her younger sister, Isabel. Both women live in Colorado, and as Eleanor drives toward them across Kansas, she reflects on the causes of their estrangement. She was young when she married Walt, and left Isabel to deal with their mother’s dementia. When Walt spoke out publicly against gay rights, she neglected to support Jillian. Interspersed throughout are monologues from the perspective of such objects as the mixtape playing in her truck (“Don’t get me wrong, I hate making Eleanor cry, but I think it just might be my job to crack the old girl open every once in a while”). It’s a clever device that adds a welcome levity to the somber material, even as Eleanor vows later in the narrative to “get back to the business of dying after I’ve found a life.” This strikes just the right chord. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin’s disappearance during the government’s conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Soon after moving to Madrid in January 2020, Nina is shocked to encounter a woman who’s the spitting image of her cousin, Bárbara Varas, whom she hasn’t seen in 40 years. The woman introduces herself as Berna and declares that Bárbara is dead without offering any explanation as to how she knows this. Afterward, Nina fixates on the past, recalling how when she was 11 in 1980, 17-year-old Bárbara moved in with Nina’s family to attend university. Nina also remembers the closely guarded letters Bárbara received from a mysterious suitor before leaving in 1982 for a rural teaching post in Hatun Umara. As Nina dives down an online rabbit hole trying to identify the suitor, she reflects on how Bárbara became radicalized at school and suspects she might have joined the far-left guerilla group Shining Path. Pacheco Medrano effectively suffuses her detective plot with a polyphonic mix of voices, including Bárbara’s and her grandmother’s. After Nina travels back to Peru in the narrative’s second half, a series of harrowing revelations explain the encounter in Madrid. It’s a powerful meditation on the irrevocable toll of political violence. Agent: Paula Canal, Indent Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

An embittered former English professor tries to make a fresh start in this bold outing from Goodman (The Shame). Separated from his wife, the unnamed narrator visits a country house for sale after being forced out of his job. The details of his disgrace come out gradually through his litany of grievances (“The fact was that war had been declared against me. On one side there was me, and on the other a faction of women”). At the property, the chatty listing agent tells him about the former owner, Helen, who lived off the land and turned the site into a type of commune. Here, the novel shifts into a surreal theatrical dialogue, as the realtor, now in a trance, soothes the professor’s troubled soul (“Your ego is trying to make you small. But, baby, you know how to write, you know what to do.... You need to love”) and, like one of the ghosts from “A Christmas Carol,” shows the narrator the error of his ways, pointing out how he’s overlooked his wife’s professional sacrifices and tried to control her. Some readers will be frustrated by Goodman’s formal experiments, which take precedence over resolving the problems set up for her characters, but her feminist refashioning of the Dickens story leads to a few satisfying moments of comeuppance for the narrator. It’s a clever exercise in exploring the shifting nature of power. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Portuguese novelist de Carvalho (Empty Wardrobes) sketches a spare and subtly complex portrait of a man reckoning with his past. The narrator, Mateus Silva, begrudgingly returns to his childhood home to sell it to his old neighbor Osório. His terminally ill girlfriend, Alberta, has a dying wish to visit the Acropolis, and he vows to use the money to fund her trip, despite being unsure whether he really loves her. After the sale, Osório invites Mateus to dinner with his wife, Graça, whose beauty captivated Mateus as a child. Years ago, Mateus’s father had an affair with Graça, which broke up his parents’ marriage. The weight of that history hangs heavy on Mateus, especially because they’re joined at dinner by Graça and Osório’s daughter, Natália, who was born after the affair and is unsure who her father is. De Carvalho complicates the seemingly straightforward tale of homecoming and family secrets with elliptical dialogue, mirroring the characters’ uncertainty about their own motivations and others’ (“I don’t quite understand,” Alberta says, after Silva tries to explain Natália’s own affair with a married man, to which he responds, “Neither does she. Neither do I”). Readers will find plenty to admire. Agent: Ella Sher, Ella Sher Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Surya debuts with an incendiary chronicle of two Indian American siblings who go to drastic lengths to improve their lives. Kashmira, a teen girl growing up in a South Jersey suburb, can’t stand looking in the mirror because of her resemblance to her verbally abusive father. At a house party, she runs into her friend Roshni, who’s now stunningly beautiful after using NuLook cream, with lighter skin, higher cheekbones, and a sharper nose. Unbeknownst to Kashmira, her estranged older brother, Nikhil, works for the cream’s maker, Evolvoir. In a parallel narrative, Nikhil, a recent college graduate, takes the job out of a misguided sense of altruism, hoping to help people conform to America’s seemingly unattainable beauty standards. Meanwhile, Roshni helps Kashmira get a supply of a new product called ReNuLook. The treatment works—so well that even as Roshni experiences troubling gastrointestinal side effects, Kashmira denies her own similar issues. Back at Evolvoir, Nikhil is unsettled by health concerns raised to him by a prominent influencer who’s using ReNuLook, prompting him to take action. Surya blends her stirring whistleblower plot with a heartrending depiction of Kashmira’s self-delusion, as when she forces herself, despite a severe stomachache, to leave the house and get her crush to notice her “second face” (“She wants to know how his pupils, dark and observant, will track the changes in her”). This one hits hard. Agents: Stephanie Delman and Dana Murphy, Trellis Literary Management. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

The woes of a lowly call center operator at a London travel agency shape this acerbic narrative from Volckmer (The Appointment). The story unfolds over the course of a single day, as Jimmie fields complaints from luxury hotel guests, including a woman upset that she can’t book a “Romantic Spa Break” for one; neurotic questions about shark attacks in the Mediterranean; and other annoyances. Adding to his indignities, Jimmie lives with his widowed mother, whom he resents for being “forever in love with her own sadness,” and whose lipstick he wears at work for kicks. Meanwhile, Jimmie recalls happier times—specifically, when he played the role of a mourning relative or friend at “poorly attended” funerals, a more fulfilling job than his current role because he dealt with “people with real problems.” Looming over his day is a scheduled meeting with his boss, Simon, the call center’s “sinister master,” which could mean the end to his tenure at the company. (His responses to customer queries are often absurdly unhelpful: “Do you reckon your blood has the same color as my lipstick?” he asks the caller who’s afraid of sharks). Volckmer’s novel is a bit meandering and light on plot, but consistently hilarious and surprising in its weirdness. This irreverent comedy will resonate with anyone who’s toiled in a dead-end job. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Huang (The Emperor and the Endless Palace) channels Succession with this delectable drama of a billionaire Chinese American family and their Machiavellian matriarch’s search for an heir. Roses Sun became CEO of Sunfang Global after the death of her father, Big Boss Sun, who cofounded the construction and logging conglomerate with the powerful Fang family before screwing them over. Roses’s father stipulated in his will that the company must pass to a male descendant, but with her younger brother deemed incompetent, there’s no apparent heir. Her fortune teller claims that if her family fails to produce an heir, they’ll become “hungry ghosts” in the afterlife, prompting Roses to scheme with her gay nephew, Wayward. She makes him president and promises that if his son, if he has one, will take ownership of the company trust. The board members recoil, not only because they’re homophobic but because they loathe Wayward’s plan to transition the company to green building practices. The scheme also upsets Roses’s daughter, April, who fell out of favor with her mom after she left the company to care for her daughter. The delightfully over-the-top plot is rife with shifting alliances, manipulations, and intergenerational tensions. Readers will eat this up. Agent: Dan Milaschewski, UTA. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Thomas, cocreator of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, debuts with a heartfelt dramedy of marriage and the film business. Screenwriter Rob McConnell is married to Paige, who years ago gave up her journalism career to care for their son, Emmett, who has Down syndrome. As the couple’s younger daughter, Darcy, begins her last year of high school, Paige writes a memoir detailing her experience raising Emmett, now an adult living in a group home. The book, which also describes her advocacy for people with disabilities, becomes a bestseller when it’s touted on social media by middle-aged movie star Merritt Berkshire, who buys the film rights and gives herself the starring role. Rob is hired as the screenwriter, and the McConnells fight over their differing views on how to tell the story. Things come to a head when the mostly male production team convinces Rob to cut the material on Emmett’s early childhood, prompting Paige to ruminate on how her “very female book stumbled her way into such a raging sausage party.” Thomas alternates between the family members’ perspectives, laying bare Rob’s resentment at his wife’s success and Darcy’s frustration at always having to fight for attention. This well-rounded narrative crackles with life. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Sycamore (Touching the Art) spins a shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic. The reader first meets Terry, a young “coked up” trans woman new to New York City, in the early 1990s, when she’s dancing at the Limelight. That night, she joins a group of club kids on a trek to the Hudson River, to spread the ashes of their friend who died of AIDS. Several years later, Terry wanders into an art gallery high on ecstasy and dressed all in pink. The gallery owner, Sabine Roth, has been looking for an assistant with a connection to the nightlife scene, and she hires Terry on the spot. What follows is a whirlwind of parties and exhibitions set against the continuous loss of friends and lovers from AIDS. By the time Terry is middle-aged and back in her hometown of Seattle, a new pandemic has begun, and she joins in the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches. With Terry, Sycamore has crafted an arresting voice, equal parts youthful energy and hard-won wisdom, that swerves from offhanded aphorisms to lyrical images: “Yes, the best way to dance is with a broken heart. A dead leaf flying through the air like a butterfly.” It’s indelible. Agent: Rebecca Friedman, Rebecca Friedman Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Suggested in the Stars author Tawada concludes her trilogy following Japanese expat Hiruko with an endlessly playful and deeply moving tale of language and the meaning it offers. Having settled in Denmark years earlier, Hiruko was recently shocked to find that her home country no longer appears on maps and no one seems to remember it. Accompanied by five friends, she voyages into the Baltic Sea on a Wes Anderson–esque mail boat, hoping to see for herself whether Japan is still out there or if it’s sunk into the ocean. The ship’s “private UN” gathers at mealtimes in the dining room to converse in English and their respective native languages (Danish, German, and Japanese), along with Hiruko’s invented Scandinavian-inflected language of Panska, with which she coins her own aphorisms to explain her motives for the journey (“no return, no risk”). Tawada casts her merry band in relief against forces of oppression, such as transphobia (Akash, a sari- and makeup-wearing Indian man, is afraid to get off the boat for sightseeing in a Russian province) and the obnoxiousness of cultural chauvinism (Akash challenges an English passenger who drones on about the supremacy of his nation’s literature). Rather than a simplistic story of resilience, though, this shows in its moving conclusion how Hiruko and her friends find a way forward through dialogue and storytelling. It’s a marvel. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink