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.
In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the summer.
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.
Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.
In Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s brilliant and fun debut novel, Catalina, an adventurous free spirit and undocumented student at Harvard finds college to be a more dystopian experience than the typical American envisioning.
Poet Sian Hughes brings vibrant language and a droll sensibility to her debut novel, Pearl, which explores a woman’s grief after losing her mother at 8 years old, set against the gentle landscape of English village life.
Like the women of Sex and the City, Humor Me’s protagonist Presley Fry breezes through connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals and career-enhancing forays in NYC, but the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step.
Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut, Hombrecito, is a queer coming-of-age following a boy’s life from Colombia to Miami to New York. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.
Swift River is a mesmerizing account of inherited trauma in a “sundown town,” propelled by the insightful and often-humorous narration of 16-year-old Diamond Newberry, the town’s only Black resident.
With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.
Blessings offers a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy, but worth living in.
Kittentits, Holly Wilson’s debut novel, is a fast-paced, filthy-mouthed adventure—led by an exuberant 10-year-old narrator.
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