“ONE LEG ON EARTH”

Something is haunting the pregnant women of Lagos. Across the city, they are walking into water . . . and drowning.

Twenty-three-year-old Yosoye arrives in Lagos ready to start her life. Working for a slick architectural firm, she finds a city of adventure and opportunity. Her new world is one of fancy gallery openings, glamorous friends, and all the shiny potential of the future, encapsulated in projects like Omi City, the ultra-luxury development her company is building, a symbol of the dawn of a brighter Lagos.

But Yosoye’s idyllic vision of Lagos soon begins to seem naive, and its darker, stranger layers trouble her. Something is not right about Omi City, and as construction speeds ahead, stories of strange deaths in the city’s open waters reach a fever pitch. And then, after a chance encounter, Yosoye discovers she is pregnant . . . a revelation which puts her on a collision course with an inexplicable force that is as seductive as it is deadly. A masterwork by a writer hailed as “an astonishing talent” (Lauren Groff), “One Leg on Earth” is an ambitious novel like no other: a coming-of-age story, an uncanny exploration of motherhood, and a chilling vision of the dark side of progress.

W.W. Norton

‘Pemi Aguda is the author of “One Leg on Earth” and “Ghostroots,” a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trained as an architect in Lagos, Nigeria, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“A SPLINTERING”

In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is watching and waiting. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave her petty life in the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother.

Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not enough. She wants what the rich mothers at her children’s school have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession—one for which she’ll push her marriage and herself to the brink. When her brother comes back into her life, dragging the specter of all she’s escaped, Tara must decide if there are any lines she won’t cross to live the life she deserves.

Set against a hypnotic, oppressive backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, “A Splintering” traces the class struggle of a woman stuck between province and metropolis, between motherhood and ambition. Disquieting and utterly gripping, it is an extraordinary achievement by Dur e Aziz Amna, an exploration of a complex and unforgettable character who will risk everything to carve out a life of her own.

Dzanc Books

Dur e Aziz Amna is the author of “A Splintering” and “American Fever,” winner of the 2023 South Asian Book Award and the APALA Award for Literature. Her work appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022 and won the 2021 Salam Prize and the 2019 Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Born and raised in Pakistan, she now resides in New Jersey.

“DÈY”

“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian-American real estate agent in Miami. When she hears gunfire while at a shopping mall, she takes shelter in a nearby restaurant, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners. Once she’s safely home, Magnolia keeps this traumatic event from everyone. But given her life back, she begins to see everything clearly: her extraordinary bond with her daughter, Zoë; her nearly broken relationship with Zoë’s father; the challenges of her mentally troubled mother, whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself; and her father’s affair with a woman who has borne him a child. While struggling through the labyrinth of her past, Magnolia must also come to terms with the losses sustained that life-altering day, and nearly every day by her parents and sibling in Haiti.

Can love or family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart? Which side will prevail for Magnolia? Pulled between these questions, each of which involves a high-stakes choice—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: flitting and shimmering between different worlds.

Taking as its title a Haitian Kreyòl word for mourning, “Dèy” is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance not only of sharing grief but also of inseverable family ties. Brave and striking, “Dèy” is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with her signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).

Alfred A. Knopf

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including “Dèy”; “The Art of Death,” a National Book Critics Circle finalist; “Claire of the Sea Light,” a New York Times Notable Book; “Brother, I’m Dying,” a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; “The Dew Breaker,” a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist; “The Farming of Bones,” an American Book Award winner; “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and “Krik? Krak!,” also a National Book Award finalist. A Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.

“FAT SWIM”

With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives.

In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science-fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.

For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in “Fat Swim” dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and “Fat Swim” is her most incisive and provocative work yet.

Hogarth

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the bestselling author of the novel “Housemates,” nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, as well as the nonfiction book “The Third Rainbow Girl,” a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice and a finalist for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in such publications as Granta, Esquire, VQR, The New Republic, and The Cut, and she writes the popular Substack Frump Feelings. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. “Fat Swim” is her most recent book.

“THE DISAPPEARERS

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them.

One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely.

In this spellbinding novel, Marlon James has written a propulsive crime story that is also a deeply human account of connection and acceptance. Full of fascinating characters, biting humor, and unapologetic sex, “The Disappearers” is both a thrilling page-turner and a finely etched portrait of queer life.

Riverhead Books

Marlon James is the author of “The Disappearers” as well as the Booker Prize–winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” the National Book Award finalist “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” the New York Times–bestselling “Moon Witch, Spider King,” “The Book of Night Women,” and “John Crow’s Devil.” In addition to the Booker Prize, his novels have won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Jamaica, James lives in New York City.

“KIN”

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

Alfred A. Knopf

Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, most recently “Kin.” Her novel “An American Marriage” was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.

“AMERICAN HAGWON”

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in “American Hagwon” struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In “American Hagwon,” Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.

Cardinal

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels “American Hagwon,” “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko,” a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times 100 Best Books of the Century. She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.

“GOOD PEOPLE”

The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Prosperous, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.

When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?

Like a literary game of ping-pong, “Good People” compels the reader to reconsider what might have happened even on the previous page. It’s a riveting, provocative story of family—sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and the communities that claim us as family in difficult times.

Crown

Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul, Afghanistan a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When she was a month old, her family fled the conflict and became refugees in Pakistan, joining the millions of other Afghans that had sought refuge there. They later moved to the United States and she grew up in Virginia. She currently lives in Toronto.

“I’LL TAKE THE FIRE”

Mia Daoud yearns to be free. Growing up in socially conservative Morocco, her imagination fired by her banker father’s charisma and political idealism, her doctor mother’s feminist example and social conscience, and the boundless possibilities suggested by her favorite authors, she learns to go after what she wants, even if it means jumping through fire to get it. Determined to be true to her sexuality and to differentiate herself from her adoring younger sister, she sets out in search of her place in the world, from Casablanca to Paris to London, and against the backdrop of era-defining events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, guided by a preternatural sense of justice and an unerring instinct for what makes her feel most alive. Combining vigorous poetry and unflinching bravery, Leila Slimani’s autobiographical novel is a rousing ode to living a life of purpose and consequence.

Penguin Books

Leila Slimani is the bestselling author of “The Perfect Nanny,” one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018, for which she became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt. Her other books include “Adèle, Sex and Lies,” and the #1 international bestsellers “In the Country of Others” and “Watch Us Dance.” Slimani was French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture, and was the chair of the jury for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She was ranked #2 on Vanity Fair France’s annual list of the Fifty Most Influential French People in the World. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she divides her time between France and Portugal. “I’ll Take the Fire” is her most recent book.

“SHOULD THE WATERS TAKE US”

“THE CALAMITY CLUB”

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.

Abandoned by her mother on Christmas Eve, 11-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed.

Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies.

Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan for them to take control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.

“The Calamity Club” will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to underestimated women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

Spiegel and Grau

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. Her first novel, “The Help,” has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. She lives in Mississippi and New York City. “The Calamity Club” is her most recent book.

“JOHN OF JOHN”

From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo” comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother.

Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn’t the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.

“John of John” is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart’s reputation as one of our greatest novelists working today.

Grove Press

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times bestselling debut novel “Shuggie Bain” won prizes including the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/ Hemingway Award, and was named one of the 25 Best Books of the 21st Century by the Sunday Times (UK). His second novel, “Young Mungo,” was a national bestseller, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and a finalist for the British Book Award, and one of the most highly acclaimed books of the year. His stories have been published in the New Yorker and his essays have featured on Literary Hub. He lives in New York City. “John of John” is his most recent book.

“A PRIVATE MAN”

A debut novel inspired by the true story of the author’s grandparents, tracing the slow-burn love story between a Catholic priest and a progressive theology teacher across Rome and England during the twentieth century.

It’s the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he’s ever known, and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David’s diocese.

Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret’s unlikely union play out across generations. A first novel from an award-winning poet, “A Private Man” traces the exquisite love of two brilliant characters caught between passion and piety as they seek to usher the church they cherish into a more progressive era.

Grove Press

Stephanie Sy-Quia was born in California in 1995 and is based in London. Her writing and criticism have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, The Boston Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection “Amnion,” published in the UK by Granta Poetry in 2021, received a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation; was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio and RSL Ondaatje Prizes; and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and is a fourth-generation teacher. “A Private Man” is her debut novel. 

“ETNA”

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

Scribner

Paul Yoon is the author of six works of fiction: “Etna;” “Once the Shore,” a New York Times Notable Book; “Snow Hunters,” winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; “The Mountain,” an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run Me to Earth, a Time Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and “The Hive and the Honey,” winner of the 20th Annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates prize. Paul Yoon is the author of six works of fiction: “Etna;” “Once the Shore,” a New York Times Notable Book; “Snow Hunters,” winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; “The Mountain,” an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run Me to Earth, a Time Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and “The Hive and the Honey,” winner of the 20th Annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates prize.

“THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (AND HIS MOTHER)”

In a tiny Beirut apartment, 63-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned. 

When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget. 

Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)” is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love. 

Grove Press 

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother),” “The Wrong End of the Telescope;” “Angel of History;” “An Unnecessary Woman;” “The Hakawati;” “I, the Divine;” “Koolaids;” the story collection, “The Perv;” and one work of nonfiction, “Comforting Myths.” He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and twice a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the Dos Passos Prize in 2019, a Lannan Award in 2021, and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025.

“INTEMPERANCE”

In this follow-up to the critically acclaimed “The Laughter”—winner of the Washington State Book Award—a middle-aged woman starts a firestorm when she holds a contest, based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections. 

A woman who has left two husbands announces she will celebrate her 55th birthday by holding a swayamvar. Drawn from an ancient custom in her Indian culture, this is an event in which suitors line up to compete in a feat of wills and strength to win a beautiful princess’s hand in marriage. The woman, a renowned and respected intellectual in an American town who had once declared she was “past such petty matters as love,” knows she is now setting herself up for widespread societal ridicule, but her self-esteem and sexual libido are off the charts even as her body withers from disability, fading beauty and her appetite for cake. 

To her surprise, a cast of characters shows up to support her call—a wedding planner looking for the next enchanting thing, a disability rights activist making a documentary film, and even, begrudgingly, her own young adult son. The Men’s Rights Movement protests her project, angry at her objectification of men. She is waylaid by visitations from goddesses and princesses past, who either try to slap sense into her or cheer her on. She must also reckon with a brutal love story in her ancestry that was endangered by the caste system—a story that placed a generational curse on those in the family who show an intemperance of spirit. As her whole plan spirals into a spectacle, the woman embarks on a journey to decide what feat her suitor must perform to be worthy of her wrinkling hand. What feat will define a newer, better masculinity? What feat will it take for her to trust in the tenderness of love? 

HarperVia 

Sonora Jha is the author of the novels “Intemperance: A Novel,” “The Laughter” and “Foreign: A Novel” and the memoir ”How to Raise a Feminist Son.” After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics and culture in India and Singapore, she moved to the United States to earn a PhD in media and public affairs. Sonora and her work have been featured in The New York Times and literary anthologies, on the BBC, and elsewhere. Formerly a journalist in India and Singapore, she is now a Loyola Endowed Professor at Seattle University and lives in Seattle. 

“WILD DARK SHORE”

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon. 

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. 

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again. 

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together. 

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, “Wild Dark Shore” is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears. 

Flatiron Books 

Charlotte McConaghy is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels “Wild Dark Shore,” “Once There Were Wolves,” and “Migrations,” which are being translated into more than 20 languages. She is based in Sydney, Australia. 

“ENDLING”

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity. 

Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. 

Together they embark across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, “Endling brilliantly” balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? 

Doubleday 

Maria Reva is the author of the novel “Endling.” She was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada and holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist. 

“SO FAR GONE”

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. 

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia? 

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. “So Far Gone” is a rollicking, razor-sharp and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer). 

Harper 

Jess Walter is the author, most recently, of “So Far Gone,” and seven previous novels, including the bestsellers “The Cold Millions” and “Beautiful Ruins,” the National Book Award Finalist “The Zero,” and “Citizen Vince,” winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in “The Angel of Rome” and “We Live in Water,” has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.