FICTION

Nana Nkweti’s debut collection Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories is also a virtuosic display of genre-bending. She draws freely from mystery and horror stories, realism, myth, and graphic novels. There are tales about a zombie outbreak in West Africa and a selfless mermaid, but also a skewering of racial prejudice and international adoption. Dominican American author Brenda Peynado’s first collection of short works, The Rock Eaters: Stories, is threaded with magic. Her tales explore issues ranging from class differences to immigration and first-generation experiences to xenophobia,…

Tiphanie Yanique’s Monster in the Middle follows Fly and Stella across decades, from the United States to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, as they deal with their families’ lore and love stories now shaping their own experience. To answer the question “Who are we meant to be with?” we must first understand who we are and how we came to be. Fiercely independent Opal, the central character in Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal &…

At his father’s funeral, Ian Daly finds out that he abandoned two other families, two wives, and several children who never knew their father. Mckenzie Cassidy’s Here Lies a Father: A Novel examines the impact of secrets on a family, and how to relearn right and wrong when every value and moral principle you’ve been taught was based on a lie. In Julia Phillips’ novel Disappearing Earth – a National Book Award in Fiction finalist – two sisters living in the far eastern Russian peninsula of Kamchatka mysteriously go missing.…

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much addresses two of our most intense longings – love and a place to call home. Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth tells the surprising and moving story of two mothers, one difficult son, and the limitations of marriage, parenthood, and love. It’s not only a candid take on queer family dynamics, but also on the delicate fabric of family,…

In James Grippando’s Twenty: A Jack Swyteck Novel, attorney Jack must defend the son of a family friend who’s just confessed to a mass school shooting. Now he must unearth the Khoury family’s secrets to expose a shocking truth and save his client. Written by Charles Lichtman, an expert in Middle East affairs and terrorism-related issues, The Sword of David: A Novel is an action-packed thriller that tells the story of an Israeli commando traveling across the globe,…

In Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s American Estrangement: Stories, characters contend with internal struggles – a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, drug addiction – while being battered by the larger, often invisible forces of economics, politics, and race. Moderated by Ariel Gonzalez, writer and professor of English and communications at Miami Dade College. To livestream this event visit MiamiBookFairOnline.com. This event requires a ticket for admission. All in-person events at MBF 2021 will require a ticket for entry.…

Myriam J. A. Chancy‘s What Storm, What Thunder: A Novel recounts the aftermath of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, delivering both a haunting record of heartbreaking trauma and a testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit. Moderated by Guerda Nicolas, Ph.D., professor at the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development. This event requires a ticket for admission. All in-person events at MBF 2021 will require a ticket for entry. Tickets will be available to Friends of the Fair October 18 and to the general public November 3.…

Vanessa Riley’s Island Queen: A Novel is based on the incredible true-life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery – she bought her freedom and that of her sister and her mother from her Irish planter father – to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. Jayne Allen’s debut fiction work, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted: A Novel, is the first installment in a three-book series about modern womanhood.…

Lauren Groff’s Matrix: A Novel follows 17-year-old Marie de France as she’s cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and into a new life as the prioress of an impoverished abbey. Steadily supplanting her desire for a family, homeland, and the passions of her youth with a growing devotion to her fellow sisters, Marie begins to chart a different course – one led by divine vision. Moderated by Mitchell Kaplan, Miami Book Fair and Books &…

The Very Nice Box: A Novel, from co-authors Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman, is an offbeat, wryly funny debut that blends workplace satire and mystery around a core theme of triumph after tragedy. As it follows the troubled relationship between the only two Black women working in a major publishing house, Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl becomes both a smart, dynamic thriller and a sly social commentary. Moderated by Dr.…

Susannah Rodriguez Drissi’s coming-of-age story Until We’re Fish: A Novel blends love and the romance, violence, mood, and ethos of the Cuban Revolution. It’s a gossamer tale of political defiance and hearts set adrift, and of two ordinary characters: childhood sweethearts Elio and Maria, people willing to sacrifice everything to be free. When Esther follows her father’s escape to Cuba as the situation for Jews worsens in Poland on the eve of WWII, she promises her sister to write to her sharing everything she experiences until they reunite.…

In The Stranger in the Lifeboat: A Novel, Mitch Albom asks what would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? It’s a question that must be contemplated by a group of shipwrecked passengers, adrift in a raft after a ship explosion and struggling to survive. But when they pull a strange man from the water claiming to be “the Lord,” he tells them that salvation may be theirs – if they all believe in him.…

In María Amparo Escandón‘s L.A Weather: A Novel, Los Angeles is parched and dry as a bone. And all Oscar – the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family – wants, desperately, is a little rain. But he also has a secret. His wife, Keila, tired of too little intimacy and too much Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. And it’s a choice that pushes Oscar, Keila, and their three daughters to question everything they know.…

IMPORTANT: Please note that we have changed the location of this event. The event will now take place in the Auditorium (Building 1, 2nd Floor, Room 1261). Set in the cities and suburbs of Florida, the 11 short works in Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut collection, Milk Blood Heat: Stories, delve into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These stories explore human connection,…

Linda Rui Feng’s Swimming Back to Trout River: A Novel is set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1980s. It follows a father’s quest to return from America and fulfill a promise to retrieve his daughter by her 12th birthday and reunite his family, even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light. Moderated by author Weike Wang.…

The House of Rust: A Novel by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and Hadrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. It tells the story of Aisha as she takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton’s bones to rescue her missing fisherman father. There are talking cats and sea monsters – and then things get strange. Moderated by author Helon Habila.…

In her fiction debut, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers follows Ailey Pearl Garfield as she embarks on a journey through her family’s past – from centuries of colonial slave trade and the Civil War to our present conflicted era – to come to terms with her identity. Moderated by Leigh Haber, books editor for O, The Oprah Magazine.…

In Talk to Me: A Novel by T.C. Boyle, an animal behaviorist teaches Sam, his young chimp, to speak in sign language. But in time, this raises more questions: What if it were possible to talk to members of another species and exchange ideas, and have a meeting of minds? Moderated by author Brad Thor.…

Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel follows 13-year-old Benny Oh, who, a year after his father’s death, begins to hear voices. They belong to random objects scattered within his home – a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce – but in time, also a book, one that narrates his life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. Moderated by Neda Ulaby, NPR arts desk reporter.…

The Butterfly Lampshade: A Novel is Aimee Bender’s poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the continuously shifting barrier between the mind and the world. Moderated by Mitzi Rapkin, host of the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing.…

In Bryan Christy’s thriller In the Company of Killers: A Novel, Tom Klay is an investigative reporter leading a double life as a CIA spy. But when his closest friend is murdered, his carefully constructed double life unravels – and the deeper he digs the more he realizes that everything he thought he knew about his work may have been a lie. Moderated by author Philip Mudd, CNN counterterrorism analyst.…

The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel by Elif Shafak tells a story of young love, war, and the trees of a place, rooted on the ground beneath and inextricably entwined within our histories. Moderated by Ellen Book, Miami-Dade Public Library System.…

In Victoria Mas’ The Mad Women’s Ball: A Novel, the dazzling displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad and cast from society in 1885 Paris’ Salpêtrière Asylum hide a wicked truth – these women are not sick, just inconvenient. Among them is 19-year-old protagonist Eugenie, who is determined to escape from the asylum and the bonds of her gender. In Virginia Feito’s Mrs. March: A Novel – part Hitchcockian psychological thriller, part social satire – the title character is the proper,…

In telling the story of the Echota family, Brandon Hobson‘s The Removed: A Novel also offers a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level. Moderated by author Kelli Jo Ford.…

In The Sweetness of Water: A Novel, Nathan Harris shares the story of brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in the waning days of the Civil War and seeking refuge – and the means to make their way north to reunite with the mother who was sold away when they were boys. Moderated by author Luis Alberto Urrea.…

The changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of We Run the Tides: A Novel are a mirror to the story of pre-tech boom San Francisco. Vendela Vida’s book is a portrait of a place on the brink of radical transformation. Moderated by essayist and critic Maris Kreizman, host of The Maris Review podcast on LitHub Radio.…

Naima Coster’s What’s Mine and Yours: A Novel tells the story of two families, one Black, the other white Latino, unexpectedly coming together. Her tale moves between the years and from North Carolina to Paris, exploring the unique organism that is each family, what breaks them apart, and how they come back together. Moderated by author and Today co-host Jenna Bush Hager.…

In O Beautiful: A Novel, Jung Yun tells the story of Elinor Hanson, a fortysomething former model struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer, returns on assignment to the town in North Dakota where she spent her unhappy childhood. It’s decades later, yet Elinor finds her past intertwining with the story she’s trying to tell – and the revelations will forever change her and the way she looks at the world. Moderated by Kendra Winchester,…

In New York, My Village: A Novel by Uwem Akpan, Nigerian editor Ekong Udousoro is in New York City to learn at the center of the publishing industry. He finds ruthlessness, racism, and a shared hostility toward the “other.” And yet, there is hope in sharing our stories – even as tribalism defines our lives, no matter the size of our village. Moderated by author Lauren Groff.    …

Kaitlyn Greenidge‘s Libertie: A Novel follows the coming of age of Libertie Sampson in a free Black community in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, as she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman. The story, rich with historical detail, is inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States. From Maggie Shipstead comes Great Circle: A Novel, an epic story of two captivating women 100 years apart – Marian,…

Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness: A Novel chronicles one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood, set against a darkly funny confrontation with a past that’s suddenly demanding her attention. Moderated by writer Molly Tolsky, founder of HeyAlma.com.…

In Ha Jin‘s A Song Everlasting: A Novel, famous Chinese singer Yao Tian, in the U.S. on a state-supported tour, takes a private gig in New York to pick up extra cash for his daughter’s tuition fund. There’s nothing to it – until the government finds that supporters of Taiwan’s secession sponsored the event, placing Tian’s artistic and personal freedom at risk. Moderated by writers Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan, co-hosts of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on LitHub Radio.…

Courttia Newland‘s A River Called Time: A Novel is set at the Ark, a massive structure in the center of Dinium – an alternative London – that promised a utopian existence for those invited. Markriss Denny is one of the chosen – but once inside, he uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself, and the people he once thought he knew. In Benjamin Percy’s The Ninth Metal, a meteor shower brings to Earth a new metal – one that possesses world-changing properties as an energy source and a weapon – to Northfall,…

In A Line to Kill: A Novel, former Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival. They never expected to find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation there – or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer. Moderated by author and editor Otto Penzler.…

The life of the title character in Joshua Ferris’ A Calling for Charlie Barnes is not going well. He wants out and into the American dream. As his hopes dwindle, something goes right, and he’s granted a second act. But it calls for a sacrifice that redounds with selflessness and love. Moderated by writers Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan, co-hosts of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on LitHub Radio.…

In 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, the work of co-authors Elliot Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, two seemingly unconnected events – one on the edge of Iranian airspace, the other in the South China Sea – leaves America’s military preeminence in tatters, and renders U.S. ships and planes defenseless.…

Paras, short for “Perestroika,” is a racehorse at a track west of Paris. When she finds the door of her stall open, she wanders off all the way to the great city, finding adventure and an unlikely cast of characters with which to share it. From Jane Smiley, Perestroika in Paris: A Novel celebrates curiosity, ingenuity, and the desire of all creatures for true love and freedom. Moderated by authors Julie Sternberg and Eve Yohalem.…

In Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo by Sandra Cisneros, Corina finds a letter written by a friend from her days in Paris, where she once escaped to be a writer. They have lost touch since, but Corina’s intense friendships with Martita and Paola is what gives that time a certain glow. Now the letter has brought those days back with breathtaking immediacy. Moderated by Cisneros’ friend and fellow author Jan Beatty. La reconocida autora Sandra Cisneros presenta Martita,…

Denise Hamilton commissioned the 14 stories (including one of her own) that comprise Speculative Los Angeles. Each is set in a different neighborhood of the city and filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor – but each also reimagines the metropolis in very different ways. Joining her are contributing writers Alex Espinoza and S. Qiouyi Lu.…

Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories is a collection written by Hilma Wolitzer. Most of these stories were originally published in the 1960s and ’70s in such magazines as Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post, with a new work bringing Wolitzer’s early characters – the author is now in her 90s – into the present. Moderated by author Roxana Robinson.…

Inspired by true events, Heather Morris’ Three Sisters: A Novel tells the story of Livia, Magda, and Cibi. After surviving Auschwitz, the sisters learn that to find true peace and happiness they must face the ghosts of their past, including the secrets they have kept from each other. Based on letters from Lauren Fox’s own family, Send for Me: A Novel is a work of historical fiction that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin.…

In The Joy and Light Bus Company, the latest installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi must move on two fronts at once, protecting Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni while solving an inheritance case. Moderated by Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels.…

The Jealousy Man and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short works by Jo Nesbø, serves as a showcase for his dexterity in exploring the dark corners of the human heart. These tales take us on a journey of twisted minds and vengeful souls. Moderated by Marilyn Stasio, former longtime crime columnist for The New York Times.…

Erik Larson’s No One Goes Alone: A Novel (Random House Audio) is a ghost story grounded in history. It’s 1905, and psychologist William James leads an expedition to a remote isle in search of answers after a family inexplicably vanishes. Were there paranormal forces at work? Soon, the investigators are unsure whether they can trust their own eyes, their instincts, one another – or even themselves. Moderated by author Benjamin Percy.…

Robert Olen Butler‘s Late City: A Novel centers around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die. The conversation between the dying man and a surprising God covers much of the early 20th century. And as it unfolds, Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself. Moderated by Marrie Stone, co-host of the weekly KUCI radio show Writers on Writing.…

In Larry Baker’s novel Wyman and the Florida Knights, Peter Wyman, the most famous portrait painter in America, just wants to go into hiding and disappear. Then a cashier in St. Augustine tells him about Knightville. “Ex-boyfriend of mine came from there and told me it was full of crazies,” she said. Which sounds just about perfect to Peter. Moderated by author Lynne Barrett, founding editor of the Florida Book Review and professor of creative writing at Florida International University.…

Avni Doshi‘s Burnt Sugar: A Novel is a story of love and betrayal between a mother and her daughter, who now confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. It’s a journey into shifting memories and the subjective nature of truth. In Shruti Swamy’s The Archer, a young Indian woman discovers kathak, a centuries-old dance form requiring utmost discipline and focus. Soon, pursuing artistic transcendence through kathak becomes the organizing principle of her life.…

In Dream Girl: A Novel, Laura Lippman shares the story of writer Gerry Andersen, injured in a freak fall and confined to a hospital bed in his high-rise apartment. Then late one night, the phone rings – and the caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the title character from Andersen’s most successful novel, Dream Girl. But there is no “real” Aubrey, and her corporeal claimant is threatening to visit and suggesting he owes her something. In Michael Connelly’s The Dark Hours – the fourth installment in the Ballard and Bosch series – a killer strikes on New Year’s Eve and LAPD detective Renée Ballard and detective Harry Bosch join forces to find justice for the victim,…

Polly, the protagonist of Senator Elizabeth Warren and illustrator Charlene Chua’s Pinkie Promises, knows she’s strong and capable. But whenever she offers to help her uncle or brother or neighbor, they tell her: “That’s not what girls do.” Then Polly goes to a rally to meet a woman running for president, and they make a pinkie promise to remember all the things that girls do.…