Donohue (How to Eat a Cupcake) spins a delightful tale centered on a gardener with a magical ability. As a girl many years earlier, Lucy Barnes discovered that she can sense which flower or herb will trigger a powerful memory in someone else. Her late mother warned her about the dangers of intervening in the lives of others by using her gift. Now, while restoring the historic plantings and pathways at a Northern California retirement home that was once a glorious mansion, she gets to know the residents and staff and decides to help them, defying her mother’s warning. She gives a vanilla-scented flower to one resident, a former pastry chef forced into retirement by his severe arthritis, who’s inspired to team up with another resident to open a café. Others who benefit from Lucy’s interventions include a talkative, sociable woman and her nearly mute friend who recovers her former vigor. The way the residents return to life under Lucy’s influence is uplifting without being cloying, and the plot ramps up when the residents are threatened with eviction and band together to fight back. It’s a satisfying feast for the senses. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Book Group. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Walker debuts with a frightening glimpse into a near-future London ravaged by climate change, where the government, in an effort to conserve resources, has launched a new procedure called the Merge, in which the minds of two people are joined in one body known as a Combine. Those who refuse are hit with a heavy tax and made into social pariahs. Amelia Anderson, a 23-year-old videographer, stridently opposes the Merge, but when her painter mother, Laurie, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they sign up to be the first Combine involving someone with dementia. Amelia secretly plans to abandon the Merge at the last minute, keeping her intentions even from Laurie, and she films the preparations for a planned documentary. Somehow, though, their merging is completed, and they wake up at a heavily controlled treatment center where the surgeon greets them as Laura-Amelia. From here, the novel is narrated in the first-person plural, as Laura-Amelia tries to figure out what happened. It’s an impressive swerve, and Walker effectively blends climate dystopia and body horror, especially in the novel’s chilling final twist. Readers of The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins will enjoy this. Agent: Liv Maidment, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Three children evacuate London for Sussex during WWII and make a surprising series of discoveries in this reflective novel from Mulhorn (The Release). Fourteen-year-old Katie and her younger brothers Angel, 10, and Tom, six, are on a farm belonging to their grandparents, whom they call Biddy and Codger. Their father, a soldier, is stationed in North Africa and their mother works for the Ministry of Information. In between farm chores and irregular schooling by their distractible grandmother, the children discover signs of someone bivouacking in a forested part of the property. They stake it out and meet Stanely Mobbs, a young draft dodger. Stanley becomes like an older brother, indulging the two boys’ games and winning over Angel, who initially wanted to report Stanley to Biddy and Codger. The siblings sneak him food and keep his presence a secret until Angel is attacked by knife-wielding bullies. When Stanley intervenes, he’s stabbed, prompting Angel to take him to Codger, who’s a doctor. Codger is sympathetic to Stanley’s predicament and tries to help him become a medic to avoid the front lines. Meanwhile, during a surprise visit from the children’s injured father, they learn a secret about their origins. Mulhorn effectively conveys the children’s sense of their lives being in suspension while they wait out the war. It’s an affecting family drama. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

Murphy (The Call) serves up a mordant comedy about a young U.S. Navy sailor’s coming-of-age during and after his service. David “Dead Man” Sterling is a radioman onboard a fast attack sub patrolling the waters off the coast of China. In this high-pressure environment, Dead Man is forced to deal with Doc, a lifer who has it in for him because he’s been emailing Doc’s girlfriend. Other colorful characters include the sub’s captain, a Texan whose voice reminds the crew of Matthew McConaughey’s character Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, prompting them to reply to commands with Wooderson’s catchphrase, “Alright, alright, alright”; and Tintin, whom Dead Man suspects of being a Chinese spy. Deciding not to reenlist, Dead Man returns home, enrolls in college, and majors in writing, but finds life stateside altered by Covid restrictions and Black Lives Matter protests. Nevertheless, he makes new friends at school, gets high marks for his writing, and meets a girl who seems interested in him. But a visit from a former crewmate threatens to undo all of this as he forcefully tries to convince Dead Man to reenlist. Dead Man makes for a likable hero, and the shipboard scenes are realistically salty and claustrophobic. The result is quite possibly the best novel about the peacetime Navy since Darryl Ponicsan’s The Last Detail. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/12/2025 | Details & Permalink

A 12-year-old dancer leaves her troubled family to pursue her Hollywood dreams in Tagle-Dokus’s uneven debut. Lucy Gardiner only wants to dance and not think about her depressed father, her mother’s failed dreams as a playwright, or her older brother, Joel, whose ambition to make art is complicated by a drug addiction. She wins a dance competition and lands a spot on a reality competition show, where one of the judges, a seasoned pop star named Bruise, is instantly drawn to her. Bruise writes a song for Lucy, who performs in the accompanying music video, and the song becomes a huge hit. Lucy’s parents then sign over guardianship to Bruise, and as she becomes a teen, she lands acting gigs as well as more dance roles. She also slips into an unhealthy co-dependent dynamic with her solipsistic guardian, who pulls her away from her family. When Lucy hears news of Joel’s overdose and their mother’s breast cancer, she’s torn between her new life with Bruise and reconnecting with her family. The author uses clever narrative devices to convey the dizzying effects of reality TV production on Lucy, such as presenting multiple versions of events on set, but there’s little momentum to the story or character development. Still, Tagle-Dokus crafts a canny tale of the vagaries of show business. Agent: Lauren Scovel, Laura Gross Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

A giant tortoise pursues an interest in people and human creativity over the course of a century in Coulter’s charming debut. Captured as a hatchling, the tortoise, who narrates, is sold to the wealthy owner of a massive Southern California estate, where she joins a menagerie that over time includes a monkey, a peacock, and a donkey-zebra hybrid. After keeping to herself for many years, the tortoise is drawn to the family who owns the estate by the entrancing sounds of jazz during a party in the 1950s. She befriends Lucy, the young niece of the estate’s owner, who names her “Magic.” While sitting in on Lucy and her brother’s lessons with their tutor, Mr. Williams, Magic learns about geography. She longs to be able to speak like Lucy does, while Lucy is disappointed when Mr. Williams is unable to say where in the world Magic came from. As the decades pass, Lucy remains Magic’s dearest friend. Meanwhile, the estate’s next owner allows his gay lover to transform it into a retreat for famous musicians such as Nina Simone. Throughout, Coulter evokes the creature’s wonder and curiosity, as the tortoise falls in love with music and gets to know how people tick (“You can learn a lot about people by considering what stories they want to tell”). Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Chris Bucci, Aevitas Creative Management. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

The 16 stories in Johnson’s finely tuned debut probe his characters’ reactions to awkward and sometimes unsettling situations. The narrator of “The Knack” reflects on his time working for a PR firm in Las Vegas, when a coworker captivated people at launch parties with her ability to identify where they were from. The story takes an offbeat turn when the coworker tells the narrator, who is gay, about his own origins in intimate and surreal terms (“You’re from the high heels your mother had.... Your father’s cuff links, the way he never wore them.... The princess movies you loved as a child”). Johnson also explores burgeoning sexuality in the title entry, about a teenage boy’s family trip to Chile, where his first sexual encounter is interrupted by his parents. “In Case I Don’t Call” concerns a woman who weighs her brother’s request that she provide security for him during his sex work. In “The So-Called Jacob,” a man arrives at his son’s daycare for pickup and is given another boy who resembles his son. Instead of concluding on tragic or otherwise dramatic notes, Johnson’s tales fade out into memorable snapshots of ordinary life. These delightfully strange stories hold the reader’s attention. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the ingenious third installment of Balle’s septology, Danish rare book dealer Tara Selter is still trapped in the 18th of November. However, she now finds that she’s not the only one stuck in time. At a lecture on Roman grain and rye in Dusseldorf, she encounters Henry Dale, a Norwegian sociologist who, finding that his time seems infinite, has devoted himself to learning. Tara and Henry promptly spend the next 200 days together, comparing notes on their shared experience (“We talk about the unreliability of things, the nightly transition, our bewilderment, and the little battles fought against the phenomena of the eighteenth of November”). Encouraged that “there’s a future out there somewhere,” Tara returns to her husband, Thomas, and tries to adjust to the fact that each morning, he has no memory of their time together the day before. But she’s thrust back into the mysteries of November 18 when a manic 17-year-old girl named Olga Periti approaches her to say that she, too, is stuck, and she needs Tara’s help finding her missing companion, Ralf Kern, who’s also stuck in November 18. As Tara, Henry, and Olga search for Ralf, each tries to come to terms with the knowledge that if nothing can ever get better, they’re “heading toward death in a world that has come to a standstill.” Endlessly fascinating, supple, and tenderly human, Balle’s masterpiece reaches new heights. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 09/05/2025 | Details & Permalink

Van Alst’s vivid debut chronicles a momentous day in the life of a Chicago gang in 1979. The narrative follows the Simon City Royals’ crosstown trek to a meeting where they plan to strike a treaty with rival gangs. Teddy, a Native teen and warlord for the Royals, guides the gang from their usual haunts to the meeting at Roosevelt High School on the El train, advising them to scatter if they see the cops and claim to live at a local address if they’re stopped. After getting off the train, they encounter a few members of a rival gang, but the Royals’ number advantage makes the fight an easy win for them. They meet up with the Central Park and Wilson crew and hang out with them before the big meeting, reveling in both the similarities and differences of their gangs from opposite ends of Chicago. Meanwhile, one of Teddy’s fellow gang members secretly angles to wrest control from him. The author conjures a gritty and colorful view of late-1970s Chicago with realistic dialogue and well-rounded characters. Readers looking for slow-burn action will devour this. Agent: Ron Eckel, CookeMcDermid. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wiseman (The Lost Girls of Willowbrook) draws on the history of the eugenics movement in America for this harrowing story. Upon arriving at Ellis Island in 1928, the German Conti family is torn apart when immigration officials deem teenager Enzo unfit for work, forcing him and his mother to return to Germany. Left alone in the U.S. are Enzo’s unmarried sister, Lena, and her young daughter, Ella. Silas Wolfe, the distant relative and widower who paid Enzo’s and his mother’s passage so they could work at his home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, reluctantly agrees to take on Lena and Ella instead. Lena’s hope for a better life soars until she learns from Silas that government officials and eugenicists are seeking to declare him and his children feeble-minded, as part of a scheme to take his land. The eugenicists also target Lena, accusing her of promiscuity, leading her to make life-altering choices to protect her daughter. The fast-paced plot gains momentum as Lena grapples with her sense of powerlessness. It’s a clear-eyed and resonant portrait of an ignominious era. Agent: Michael Carr, Veritas Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink