The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece.
It’s a special gift when a favorite poet writes a novel. Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s fiction debut, after poetry collections Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell. It tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet recovering from addiction who, following the deaths of his parents, has become fixated on the idea of martyrdom.
Come and Get It is a return to the uncomfortable-yet-fascinating social commentary that made Kiley Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, so engrossing (and a bestseller, too!). When a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas begins paying a resident assistant to let her listen in on the conversations of a wealthy group of students, using their gossip as writing material, everyone ends up in murky moral territory.
The stunning, evocative cover of this historical novel is reason enough to add it to your TBR: a lone woman in red walks through winter wilderness, reflected in a frozen pond as a snow-white fox. Of course, readers of The Night Tiger would be eagerly awaiting Yangsze Choo’s next book even if the cover were a paper bag. This epic adventure set in Manchuria at the very end of the Qing Dynasty promises to bring together mystery and legend to vibrant effect.
This remarkable novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, picking up with his unforgettable characters Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. Beginning in 1864 with the Sand Creek Massacre, Orange takes readers back in time to tell the stories of these characters’ ancestors, before sweeping forward to 2018 and the aftermath of the tragic shooting at the heart of There There.
Kirsten Bakis, author of Lives of the Monster Dogs, creates an atmosphere of gut-churning dread from the very first chapter of King Nyx. This is a scary good book.
Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.
Cristina Henriquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
In her satirical debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft serves up all the controversial, inherently political questions posed by translation, and warps them into a ghoulishly funny tale.
Colombian literary icon and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, after a long career of groundbreaking novels and short stories. Published for the first time this spring, his novella Until August follows a married woman who travels to a Caribbean island each August to spend one night with a new lover.
In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
Téa Obreht’s latest novel, The Morningside, soars in its depiction of an alternative world frighteningly similar to our own.
If you love Louise Kennedy (Trespasses, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac), Anna Burns (Milkman) and Claire Keegan (Small Things Like These, So Late in the Day) as much as we do, you’ll want to check out Wild Houses. Debut novelist Colin Barrett is the author of two much lauded short story collections. He writes hilarious, piercing and inventive tales often set in fictional Irish towns like Ballina, where Wild Houses’ protagonist, quiet, exceedingly tall Dev Hendrick, is dragged into the kidnapping of a drug dealer’s teenage brother.
It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from their land.
Magical and multifaceted, Julia Alvarez’s meditation on creativity, culture and aging, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is a triumph.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel A Thousand Acres, author Jane Smiley crafts literary delights, from her moving historical Last Hundred Years trilogy to her wonderful, animal-led adventure, Perestroika in Paris. Lucky features Jodie Rattler, a folk musician from St. Louis who, through some blend of fate, chance and hard work, becomes a national star.
In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club brings to life a historical moment, just after WWI, when both everything and nothing had changed for women in England—plus a summer’s worth of fresh seaside descriptions and romantic entanglements.
Long Island revisits Eilis Lacey more than 20 years after the events of Colm Toíbín’s 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which introduced readers to this self-possessed, elusive young woman.
With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound.
Like every novel from the author of Crazy Rich Asians, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes.
Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against all odds.
David Wroblewski’s second novel, Familiaris, leaps back two generations from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle to follow John Sawtelle and his wife Mary as they develop the first generations of an amazingly sensitive breed of dogs.
Wrestling with grief over the loss of his son and with the inheritance of a former plantation, the narrator of John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine embarks on a mystical, profound journey into an unraveling identity.
Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.
In Julia Phillips’ latest, sisters Sam and Elena spend their days working and caring for their dying mother on an island in the Pacific Northwest—until the arrival of a bear upends their equilibrium.
Part political thriller, part sci-fi, Mateo Askaripour’s second novel, This Great Hemisphere, revels in the dystopian details of a world where invisible citizens live under the control of the visible Dominant Population.
The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.
As good poetry often does, Forest of Noise will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?
Clare Chambers’ historical novel Shy Creatures is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.
Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
For the Lahiris, the family at the heart of Nayantara Roy’s deliciously long The Magnificent Ruins, white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness.
Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
Anyone who enjoys the careful art of the short story will find that in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, “art” is very much the key word.
Nikki May’s warm way with her characters and her sharp eye for the details of life in Lagos make This Motherless Land an engaging and thought-provoking novel about race and reinvention.
Anna Montague’s empathic debut novel, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?, follows a woman entering her 70s and coming to terms with the loss of a friend through the twists and turns of a summer road trip.
Anna Montague explores friendship, aging, grief, regret and love with both creative and contemplative depth in her noteworthy debut, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
Choose one of these buzzed-about novels for your book club and get set for a great meeting.
Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut, Blue Light Hours, is an intimate meditation on home, homesickness and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean is the story of a live-in servant who is involved in a child’s tragic death. This well-drawn character study’s sadness lingers in the mind.
Libby Lost and Found takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, in a madcap, implausible and inventive roller coaster ride about an author and her 11-year-old fan.
Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.
Daniel M. Lavery reveals the research that went into his delightful slice-of-life historical novel, Women’s Hotel, and discusses the universally torturous experience of moving house.