Aria Aber’s Good Girl: A Novel is a story of art, family, love, and survival. In Berlin’s underground of raves, art, and drugs, teenage Nila – born to Afghan parents and raised in graffiti-stained public housing – searches for her voice. Drawn into the orbit of Marlowe, a fading American writer, she tastes freedom but risks losing herself. As racial tensions rise, Nila must decide who she wants to be. In Darrow Farr’s The Bombshell: A Novel,…

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness: A Novel is the story of five Black women navigating two decades of friendship, from young adulthood into midlife. Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia move through love, family, ambition, and upheaval amid the increasing volatility of modern American life in an exploration of the profound connections of friendship over a lifetime. Set in the 1960s before Roe, Laney Katz Becker’s In the Family Way: A Novel follows a group of suburban housewives as they navigate marriages,…

In Kristen Arnett’s  Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: A Novel, Cherry is a down-on-her-luck professional clown who juggles gigs, side jobs, and family drama. Enter Margot the Magnificent, an alluring magician whose mentorship – and attraction – push Cherry to risk it all. Facing some big questions, she’ll have to decide what kind of clown she wants to be underneath her suit. Jade Chang’s What a Time to Be Alive: A Novel follows Lola,…

In Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother. Drawing on various languages and geographies from South Korea to Peru to the American heartland, Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work – in, and on,…

In The Words of Dr. L: & Other Stories, Karen E. Bender explores the nuclear family through adolescence, motherhood, the empty nest, and aging parents. A woman seeks magical words to end a pregnancy, a mother finds a forgotten child, a couple orbits Earth apart from their son, and society flees to Mars. These stories reveal hidden truths of freedom, power, and parent-child bonds. In Allison King’s The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel, a hidden magic – the ability to reforge pencils and revive the memories they contain – binds college recluse Monica to her fading grandmother,…

Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s False War: A Novel, translated by Natasha Wimmer, portrays ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country. Álvarez links extraordinary stories of ordinary people from Havana to Berlin – barbers and dissidents, thieves and chess players – each immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion. In Robert  Busby’s Bodock: Stories, an ice storm hits the fictional titular Mississippi town, leaving lives and landscapes fractured. From two siblings surveying their family’s damaged orchard and a cop mourning his son to a divorced slacker aiding in his former father-in-law’s lung transplant surgery,…

Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook: A Novel begins in the late 1990s with Harvard student Anna, who falls for Christoph, a visiting German student, and follows him to his home country. Their romance unfolds amid family legacies – including those of Anna’s grandfather, an American GI, and Christoph’s, a Nazi soldier. Traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism haunt them, reverberating through to the present. In Maggie Stiefvater’s The Listeners: A Novel, it’s January 1942 and the aristocratic owners of the elegant Avallon Hotel &…

In Javier Fuentes’ Countries of Origin: A Novel, pastry chef Demetrio returns to Spain as an undocumented immigrant, leaving behind his beloved uncle in New York. On the flight, he meets the sensitive, aristocratic Jacobo, sparking a subtle electricity. Amid Madrid’s bars and coastal beaches, they form an intense relationship, navigating identity, class, and intimacy, until a family tragedy forces them to confront their true feelings. In Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories,…