Bestseller Hamilton (The Excellent Lombards) serves up a charming story of a rebellious teen’s life-changing summer before college in 1974. Phoebe Hudson’s well-meaning adoptive mother, Greta, insists she meet her birth parents, the Dahlgreens, so she can see they’re “regular, real people” and let go of any “fantasy” she has about them. Horrified to learn the Dahlgreens have a big family she was excluded from, Phoebe feels betrayed by Greta, whom Hamilton portrays as partly driven by self-interest. Phoebe then runs away, with help from her best friend, Luna, and crashes in their friend Patrick O’Connor’s basement. After Patrick gives Phoebe a pixie cut, his 21-year-old brother, Miles, suddenly notices her stunning looks. The pair fall in love and she gets accidentally pregnant, forcing her to make a difficult series of decisions, all while facing the limit of Luna’s loyalty. Hamilton displays a natural touch in her characterizations, especially Greta’s struggle to find the right way to be open with Phoebe about Phoebe’s birth family and Luna’s competitiveness with boys, which add dimension to the entertaining tale. The author has another winner on her hands. Agent: Emily Foreman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Novelist and writing instructor Burroway (Writing Fiction) offers a well-crafted tale of a war orphan’s decades-spanning journey of self-discovery. Simone Lerrante arrives in England during WWII, unable to remember anything about her parents or her previous life in Belgium. Directly after the war, the 16-year-old finds work as a servant to an upper-crust family, but is sent away after being caught having sex with their 13-year-old daughter, Darla. She makes her way to New York City in 1957, and her marriage to a college professor ends in divorce after she terminates a pregnancy. She then lands a teaching job at a small college in Missouri, but the past pulls strongly on her, especially after she sees a documentary about the war and recognizes the woman who took her to England; later, she reconnects with Darla by mail. Burroway alternates Simone’s narration with evocative snippets from other characters’ points of view, such as Simone’s unnamed rescuer, who remembers the smell of war as “a sourness like fireworks,” and Darla, who thinks back on how Simone photographed her and raved about one day becoming a movie star. Burroway gets plenty of mileage from her rootless protagonist’s life. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary Management. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

This extraordinary posthumous collection from Chicana poet and theorist Anzaldúa (Borderlands) offers a window into a woman’s marginalized yet magical life on the Texas plains. At a young age, Prieta discovers her queer sexuality and her close connection with animals. “Out of the Corner of the Eye / De reojo” portrays her terrifying and mysterious encounters with a “huge yellowish animal,” which her grandmother suggests is her nagual, or spirit guide. In “Mita’ y mita,” Prieta worries that when her mother says she’s “mita’ y mita,” or half and half, it means she’s “one of those were-people, half-human, half-jaguar,” until her mother explains she sees Prieta as half man, half woman. Other entries explore how Prieta finds liberation in her cultural and sexual identities as a young woman, such as in “La Werejaguar in the Woods of the Dream,” where she tells her cousin Teté, “You and I, queer freaks like us, know the cracks between the worlds and are able to see both sides of the crack.” Anzaldúa plays wonderfully on the theme of hybridity throughout, blending realism and fantasy, fiction and memoir, and human and animal. This radiates with joy. Agent: Stuart Bernstein, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man’s reunion with his estranged mother. At the outset, the unnamed protagonist, known only as “the son,” gets an unexpected visit from his mother in Tokyo, where he’s spent the past 12 years teaching English. She’s curious to know more about his life, but they struggle to connect beyond small talk, and the son remains embittered at her failure to support him when he came out as gay many years earlier. Meanwhile, the son grapples with his feelings for the married man he’s been seeing and another man he’s recently met, who might be a better match. During a sightseeing trip with his mother, the pair finally put it all on the table, but struggle to find resolution: she misses him and wants him to come back to Texas with her, but he insists Japan is his home now, as he’s built a tight circle of friends in Tokyo. The situation is rather straightforward, but Washington’s nuanced portrait of the gulf between mother and son and their difficulties bridging it offers keen insights into human relationships, showing “how people change through others” as they “try to figure out what works for us.” The author’s fans will love this. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Turpeinen’s fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. In 1741, naturalist George Steller finds a previously undocumented species of sea cow (a relative of the manatee) while sailing with a Russian expedition charting the Arctic coast. After their vessel founders, he and his shipmates take shelter on an uninhabited island, where they butcher the sea cows for food. Steller, fascinated by the huge and peaceful creatures, preserves a 25-foot-long skeleton for future study, but he’s forced to leave it behind while making his way back to civilization. Over the next three decades, the species is killed off, leaving knowledge of it scant until Aleutian hunters find a nearly complete skeleton in the mid-19th century. As Finnish zoologist Alexander von Nordmann assembles the bones, he tries to convince his fellow scientists that man, not nature, is causing mass extinction, and bucks convention by hiring a female artist, Hilda Olson, to document the skeleton in perfectly scaled, precisely rendered drawings. A century later, meticulous conservator John Grönvall prepares the skeleton for public display at the Finnish Museum of Zoology. Turpeinen matches the heights of Andrea Barrett with her detailed descriptions of the natural world and intimate character portraits, offering a vast sweep of evolutionary history shot through with impressionistic scenes, whether of Steller watching a sea cow play like a boisterous child or Olson mourning her tubercular father. This tour de force of science and storytelling is not to be missed. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

A European magician starts a new life in mid-19th-century Argentina in this rich philosophical novel from Saer (Scars), first published in English in 1995. Bianco’s run of fraudulent telepathy and telekinesis performances in Paris ends in public humiliation, prompting him to flee to Sicily. There, he meets a diplomat from Argentina who convinces him to promote immigration to the South American nation. His prize for doing so: a parcel of land in the pampas. Bianco settles on a horse ranch with his teen wife Gina, devotes himself to an import scheme with his business partner, Garay López, and attempts to revive his career as a magician. One day, Bianco unexpectedly finds Gina and Garay sitting together, prompting intense sexual jealousy and paranoia. When Gina discovers she’s pregnant, Bianco becomes convinced that Garay is the child’s father and obsesses over revealing this “secret.” Saer sustains the breakneck pace of a picaresque, and his long, twining sentences provide a perfect vehicle for both the psychological drama inside Bianco’s head and his difficult adjustment to the “immense, unknown” landscape of the pampas, whose stark intensity challenges his core belief that “thought governs matter.” Readers will be grateful for this rediscovered gem. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Carleton’s breezy debut, an adrift young woman rekindles her sense of purpose after learning about a once-famous bartender who was written out of the history books. When Cinnamon Scott was a college student, her parents both died in a plane crash on the way to visit her. Reeling from grief and guilt, she slipped into a new life as a New York City party girl. Now, her older sister, Rosemary, pleads for her help dealing with a difficult pregnancy in London. Cinnamon agrees, and she finds refuge during her stay at the Savoy Hotel in its famed American Bar, where a bartender regales her with stories about the little-known Ada Coleman, the establishment’s first female head bartender. To Cinnamon’s surprise, a fellow patron and historian has never heard of Ada, which prompts Cinnamon to begin writing a novel about her. The plot feels a bit contrived, and Carleton leans on the supporting characters to drive the action. Better is the depiction of the sisters’ reunion and complex bond: after greeting Cinnamon with “Look what the cat regurgitated,” Rosemary eventually instills in her the confidence she needs to write her novel. This may not belong on the top shelf, but it satisfies nonetheless. Agent: Rebecca Scherer, Jane Rostrosen Agency. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

Miller (The Slowworm’s Song) offers a stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease. The story opens in 1962, when London transplant Irene Parry, the dissatisfied wife of country doctor Eric, befriends her neighbor Rita Simmons. Rita is married to Bill, who is attempting to distance himself from his father, a Polish immigrant turned London slumlord whose shady dealings made the family wealthy. As the year progresses, Miller lays out the dilemmas both couples are facing, including Eric’s guilt over a patient’s death and his affair with a local woman, Bill’s need for money to expand his farm and unwillingness to ask his father for a loan, and the two women’s unexpected pregnancies. When a blizzard hits the region in the new year, the novel’s pacing shifts from languid to rapid-fire, as Irene discovers a note from Eric’s lover and tries to leave for London but gets stuck in the snow. Meanwhile, Bill is away, having finally gone to London to beg his father for money, and Rita, whose own father was committed to an asylum, has a mental breakdown while alone in the house. A spectacularly vivid sense of gloom pervades the narrative, whether in recurring references to the obliterating London smog, Rita’s unsettling memories of her father’s stories about liberating Aushwitz, or Bill’s reflections on his war-profiteering father. Even keener are the author’s crystalline depictions of his characters’ interior lives. This has the feel of an instant classic. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/19/2025 | Details & Permalink

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