The vibrant debut by Irish writer O’Hare follows three women bound by their lifelong friendship and a recent tragedy. Former schoolmates Maggie, Harley, and Róise, each 29, are mourning the death of their friend and housemate Lydia in a car crash one year earlier. They’re also each dealing with their own issues while continuing to live together, leaving Lydia’s room as a shrine. Maggie, a lesbian, struggles to move on from another friend who led her on for a year. Harley, who is bisexual and recovering from an abortion, repeatedly hits on their landlord, Frankie, who sells her the cocaine to which she is becoming addicted. Róise, meanwhile, harbors a mix of guilt and rage, given that she never forgave Lydia for causing her breakup with a toxic ex. As each friend celebrates her 30th birthday and new scandals roil their social circle, they wonder if they’ve outgrown each other and the house they shared with Lydia. O’Hare keeps the laugh track running on the trio’s bittersweet “sitcom” arrangement, as when Maggie vents about her love life: “Everyone’s one lesbian friend turns out to be either some weird lass with gills and a passion for taxidermy, or someone I’ve already gone out with. Or both.” This is one to cherish. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

A literature scholar and novelist reflects on the loves of his life in the elegant latest from Plante (the Francoeur Trilogy). As a young man in 1960s Boston, the unnamed narrator meets William, a “beautiful” blue-eyed man who has just returned home from an English university where he studied the classics. The pair embark on a torrid affair, which they keep secret due to the upper-crust William’s apprehension. As their dalliances grow infrequent, William introduces the narrator to an English poet named Cecil, with whom the narrator falls in love and follows to London. There, Cecil introduces the narrator to the Bloomsbury circle, including an elderly E.M. Forster. The group dazzles the narrator, but their engagements occupy too much of Cecil’s attention for the narrator’s relationship with him to go any further. The narrator carries memories of his love for William and Cecil as the decades pass. He finds stability in his professional life as don at Kings College, even as he weathers passionate heights and crestfallen disappointments with subsequent lovers. In his account, he manages to suffuse immense heart and soul into every simmering encounter. Plante’s novel beautifully explores unquenchable and bittersweet queer desire, and a uniquely felt “passion for a world that was a world of men.” It’s a gem. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

An obstinate artist in a remote corner of New Mexico falls for a mild-mannered widow in Foley’s evocative debut, which is based loosely on the life of painter Agnes Martin. It begins in 1971, after 60-something Agatha Smithson has spent the past two years living and working in an adobe house she built on rented land at Mesa Portales. One day, she comes upon her recently widowed landlord, Alice Johnson, who’s of a similar age, chasing after some chickens near her home, a short drive from the mesa. Agatha helps corral them, and Alice invites her in. Alice doesn’t remember that her late husband leased the land to Agatha, but she feels comfortable around the artist and invites her to visit her most sacred site, the backyard grave of her daughter, Lorna, who, according to Alice, was killed by an abusive lover. Agatha and Alice soon begin a secret love affair, and Alice’s son, Frank Jr., becomes suspicious of their bond. When Alice develops dementia, Agatha invites her to move in at Mesa Portales, but she doesn’t want to leave Lorna’s grave. Meanwhile Frank Jr. schemes to put Alice in assisted living and deems Agatha’s lease invalid. Undeterred, Agatha plots a drastic action, until a startling reversal changes her plans. Many of the late plot developments strain credulity, but Foley crafts a colorful portrait of a headstrong artist. For readers intrigued by the lives of bohemian women, this is worth a look. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Goncourt Prize winner Le Tellier (The Anomaly) blends autobiography, biography, and fiction in this intriguing story of a French Resistance fighter. In March 2020, Le Tellier retreats from Paris for the small Provencal town of La Paillette, where he recently bought a house with the intention to “invent some roots for myself.” After noticing the name André Chaix carved into the facade, he finds the same name, with the dates 1924–1944, on a war monument in the village square. From there, the narrative comprises Le Tellier’s reconstruction of André’s brief life. With the help of a small box of André’s belongings, given to him by local historians, the author pieces together what André might have been like. The portrait that emerges includes André’s sweet love letters to his fiancée, Simone Reynier, and historical data concerning the Resistance group he joined. Le Tellier also speculates about films André and Simone might have seen, and muses about the insidious political collaboration with the Nazis that stained daily life in that part of Vichy France. Le Tellier crafts a lifelike world around his central character, complete with striking photographs of André with his brother and with Simone, alongside scans of André’s ID card and letters. It’s an arresting testament to courage and humanity in the face of unspeakable evil. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Zucker (The Eisenhower Chronicles) offers a comprehensive if occasionally stilted biographical novel of John Quincy Adams’s tenure as secretary of state. Spanning from 1817 through Adams’s inauguration as president in 1825, the story covers the consequential episodes he navigated, including the annexation of Florida, the Missouri Compromise, and the meddling of European empires in the Western Hemisphere that pushed him to create the Monroe Doctrine. Zucker conveys the competing demands of decision makers, including Andrew Jackson, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and various European diplomats, while providing context for the era’s political debates. Interspersed among the political machinations are more modestly revealing insights into Adams’s home life, including his tense relationship with his wife, who feels undervalued, and his sons, whose lack of ambition causes him to bristle. The long conversations between Adams and others lack flavor, but the first-person narration credibly evokes the pressures and strain he felt, especially given his disgust with slavery and the bargains he made that allowed it to expand. Readers interested in early American history will appreciate the depth of detail. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

A married couple struggles to connect while on vacation in Broker’s offbeat and emotive debut. Jack, a lapsed playwright, hopes that a trip to the Oregon coast will help lift the spirits of his husband, Randy, whose mother recently died. After arriving at their friends’ house, Jack distracts himself by sexting with strangers and has unusual encounters with the locals. One, a method actor, tells a sob story but breaks character when Jack shares why he stopped writing plays. When the couple get invited to a party hosted by one of Jack’s sexting partners, their strained relationship is put to the test. While the absurdist elements, including an insistent baggage clerk doggedly attempting to return luggage the couple never lost and a teenager who convinces Randy that asking questions into a tape recorder will allow him to hear his mother’s voice in the static of the playback, don’t add up to much, Broker packs a wallop in his depiction of Jack’s hamfisted attempts to fix things, and he threads clever dialogue throughout, as when Jack describes sexting with strangers to cope with Randy’s gloom as a habit that could “bore boredom.” Readers will expect good things from Broker to come. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pin’s introspective sophomore effort (after Wandering Souls) follows a British astronaut’s 10-year-long expedition to one of the moons of Jupiter. Socially awkward Ollie Ines, commander of the privately funded trip, begins his narration with the events of his life leading up to the voyage. Born in a small English village on the day of the Challenger disaster in 1986, Ollie earns a degree in engineering and spends years in the British Navy before accepting the mission and leaving his wife and young son at home. Pin handles the scientific details with a light touch, devoting much of the narrative to themes of memory and regret. Early on, one of Ollie’s professors points out that he has a certain ruthlessness, “the—rather regrettable—ability to go forward in life, no matter the cost.” While Ollie’s ever-supportive family, friends, and lovers come across as too good to be true, Pin adds more depth to Ollie’s moral quandaries on the voyage, during which he pushes the crew through one disaster after another and considers the consequences of reaching a point of no return (“There’s nothing left for you down there, is there?” an inner voice asks him. “Why don’t you stay here?”). It’s a chilling portrait of the cost of ambition. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

In the inspired latest from Booker winner Martel (Life of Pi), a literature scholar discovers an alternate account of the Trojan War. Harlow Donne, a Canadian PhD student, has left behind his failing marriage and his young daughter, Helen, for a year’s scholarship at Oxford. There, his dissertation on Homer’s Iliad is sidelined by his discovery of a long-lost work titled The Psoad, whose hero is not highborn like Homer’s Achilles but a Greek commoner: Psoas of Midea, son of nobody. In passages of The Psoad translated by Donne, the reader learns of Psoas’s feats and trials, including his battle with Prince Mestor of Troy, to whom Psoas declares, “I am no less of a man than you are.” Like The Iliad, The Psoad is in dactylic hexameter, but Donne opts to render it in a more accessible style, which he describes as “an unfettered, bare-boned attempt at Greek folk dance.” In Donne’s own story, which unfurls in footnotes to the translation, the scholar muses on the line between fact and fiction, human nature and sorrow, and the power of Homer’s Iliad compared to the Gospels. Some may find Martel’s grand motifs a bit overdrawn, but his hero’s devotion for ancient poetry is contagious (“The authority of the Gospels relies on its claim to truth, while that of The Iliad relies on its power to captivate”). It’s an appealing labor of love. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

In these vivid linked vignettes, Brownlee (Hard Skin) chronicles the challenges and dreams of Native Hawaiians. In “The Black Box She’s Only Seen on TV,” a child is acutely aware of her poverty even from a young age, marking the difference between her home life and the relative affluence of her cousin. Later, in “Oceans Under Threat Like Never Before,” the girl considers how climate change will affect her family, and if they’ll be able to keep the house they built with government subsidies. Older girls, like Kim, a townie, and Jen, a university student, amuse themselves by flirting with local boys in “Another Night on da Kona Pier,” while another student, Kahea, comes home from the mainland in disgrace, “the scholarships she had worked so hard to get not enough to cover everything.” One of the more heartbreaking entries, “The Cannibalistic Sea Slug,” features an abusive mother who burns her daughter’s scalp with bleach, and intersperses the horror with scientific facts about sea slugs, who eat their own kind. Like photographs in a family album, the vignettes surface memories that are happy and painful in equal measure. This accomplished collection is worth a look. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Moffet writes about fatherhood and the bittersweet passage of time in his quietly beautiful debut novel (after the story collection Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events). After the unnamed narrator loses his dad at the age of nine, his paternal grandmother hauls away his father’s possessions. Like the marks left on the carpet by his dad’s now absent recliner, the boy’s memories of his father fade over time. A desultory childhood in a 1980s Florida suburb follows, during which the narrator watches so much TV that “it feels like a punishment.” He attends karate classes, where he sits through lectures from a sensei who sees himself as a role model for at-risk boys. The only real kindness he remembers comes from a neighborhood boy who had lost his father to prison. From there, the novel jumps forward 25 years. The narrator has become a writing professor outside of Los Angeles and father to a son. He feels just as rudderless as a parent as he did as a fatherless son. “I wish I’d inherited some traditions from my father,” he thinks. “I’m mostly trying to be present... and known.” He ruefully notes how his son transforms from a boy who runs to his parents with all his questions and fears into a sullen teenager, now impenetrable behind his earbuds. Along the way, Moffet keenly traces the grace attained through the long arc of acceptance. Readers will be moved. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink