In this sometimes tender and often bitter outing from Korean Swiss writer Gremaud (All the World’s a Mall), a woman traces the footsteps of her “generator,” the father she never knew, from one nuclear power site to the next. The narrator, born Lee Hye-rin in Korea and going as Jennifer Ball where she now lives in Switzerland, travels to coastal Holyhead in Wales, where her father was born 82 years ago. From there, she travels to the nearby Wylfa nuclear plant, where he began his career, and on to Linkou in Taiwan, where he married a local Chinese woman and fathered two children. In Korea, she visits the site where the generator had an affair with her mother while he was there to help build the Kori I nuclear reactor. When the narrator was born in 1977, the generator’s career was at its zenith. By the late 1980s, after the Three Mile Island accident and meltdown at Chernobyl, his work dried up amid anti-nuclear sentiment. The novel offers intriguing insights into the nature of identity and one’s origins, along with pointed commentary on the generator’s achievements and the deep uncertainty left in his wake. This leaves readers with much to chew on. (Jan.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Shriver’s jumbled latest (after Mania) blends a wicked satire of bleeding-heart liberals with a disingenuous parable about the dangers of unchecked immigration. In 2023, the New York City government offers a $110 per diem to residents who provide incoming asylum seekers with food and shelter in their own homes (in real life, a similar initiative was proposed but never enacted). Gloria Bonaventura jumps at the chance, having won her massive Brooklyn Queen Anne in a recent divorce and struggling with the cost of upkeep. She agrees to house Honduran migrant Martine Salgado over the strident objections of her do-nothing son, Nico, 26, who tells Martine the U.S. should have tighter borders. He’s suspicious when Martine claims that her three children have been kidnapped in Honduras, and that she needs $30,000 for the ransom. Meanwhile Gloria scrambles to come up with the money. The situation devolves into a nightmare out of a paranoid yuppie thriller after Martine’s brother Domingo joins the household, then invites a group of his “henchmen” to crash with them, and the story reaches a violent climax as the Bonaventuras’ fear clashes with the migrants’ greed. Some of the jokes land, as when Shriver bathes Gloria’s naive liberalism in self-satisfied patriotism (“We should be flattered so many refugees would rather live here”), but even readers who appreciate anti-woke provocations will be left scratching their heads. It’s a mess. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Menon’s dynamic debut traces a woman’s attempts to move on after surviving the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand. The narrative toggles between the lead-up to that disaster and the imminent landfall of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. As Marissa, now a 24-year-old travel writer in New York City, stocks up on supplies, she’s consumed by memories of the tsunami and her best friend, Arielle, who died in the flooding. Menon then jumps back to seven-year-old Marissa’s move with her family from the U.S. to a small island off the coast of Phuket. There, she meets Arielle, whose parents own a local resort, and the pair become fast friends. They grow up together, swimming with the manta rays in the reef and going on marine biology excursions. The day before the tsunami, they argue about whether to visit their school friends on the mainland or stay for a dive. Marissa insists that they go, which puts them in greater danger and makes her feel responsible for Arielle’s death. Menon crafts vivid depictions of tropical marine life and offers a visceral depiction of survivor’s guilt, which causes Marissa to regularly see and talk to her dead friend eight years later. This is sure to pull at the reader’s heartstrings. Agent: Sebastian Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this sly and visionary 1969 novel from Bodelsen (Think of a Number), reissued with a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, a 30-something magazine editor agrees to be cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal cancer. As Mackintosh points out, Bodelsen’s book was published in a world abuzz with the possibilities of cryonics. His everyman protagonist, however, is skeptical of the experimental procedure, in part because he isn’t sure whether he has reason to live. A lonely man, Bruno fills his time ginning up ideas for his magazine’s contributors and doubts his own ability to become a writer. But after falling in love with ballet dancer Jenny, he’s filled with enough zest for life to undergo the procedure. He wakes up in 1995, in a bifurcated world where a shrinking “now-life” class of people live off payments for serving as organ donors to the “all-life” class, who are so busy working to finance their transplants that Bruno worries people will stop reading literature. As Bruno schemes to reunite with Jenny, Bodelsen offers striking existential reflections on mortality and witty insights into the social cost of eternal life. It’s a revelatory thought experiment. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

A grieving woman loses her tether to reality in the alluring if uneven latest from Fu (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century). Therapist Eleanor impulsively buys her first house as a kind of homage to her mother, Lele, who has recently died. Before long, the rashness of the purchase, which Eleanor could barely afford after exhausting her modest inheritance, becomes apparent. She struggles to maintain the house and keep up her obligations to clients, and a return visit to the apartment she gave up only increases her buyer’s remorse. Fu explores her protagonist’s difficulties in coping with grief via the tropes of psychological thrillers and horror novels. The narrative keeps a tight and sometimes claustrophobic focus on the increasingly disassociated Eleanor, who perceives the rain that floods her home as endless, while servicemen arrive like invaders to repair the damage. The significance of Eleanor’s devotion to her mother’s memory remains hazy, though Fu sketches a vivid portrait of mental fragility in the face of such an overwhelming situation, one that will resonate with any new homeowner. This offbeat tale has its moments. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Scodallero’s mesmerizing and challenging debut novel (after the story collection Some of Them Will Carry Me) focuses on a film screening in a near-future intentional community of women. The group members have found deep meaning from their common experiences as working-class mothers, caregivers, homemakers, and lovers, and the film depicts six of them. Told in sections labeled “the film,” “the text” and “the sound,” the scenes that make up this hybrid of fiction, essay, and verse are intimate in scale yet sociopolitically resonant: “The community is made up of predominantly black people... it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Often, passages are written like recitations of a spell. The novel has little by way of plot, but much to offer in terms of beauty. For readers willing to surrender to the sway and creep of Scodallero’s prose, it can feel much like watching an art house film, where, as one of the novel’s characters puts it, “we are lost in the potential of this scene.” The result is an arresting work by a writer unbound by constraints of the expected. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Screenwriter King debuts with the clever tale of a vengeful woman whose ex-boyfriend winds up dead after she casts a spell on him. Lillian lives in Boston, works in marketing, and spends her weekends drinking and hooking up with Henry, whom she met in a bar. Determined to convince him to settle down with her, Lillian only succeeds in pushing him away. When he breaks up with her, she gets drunk, urinates on his doorstep, and, borrowing from a witch influencer she knows from work, performs a hex to ensure he’ll never be with anyone else. That same night, Henry is stabbed to death outside a bar, and the police identify Lilian as a suspect based on a text she sent him the night before: “You’re going to get what you deserve.” Following the case online, Lillian learns Henry was in a long-term relationship with another woman, Nora. Desperate to clear her name and insert herself as the real grieving girlfriend, Lillian wages an internet war against Nora. King raises thought-provoking questions about performances of victimhood and the desire for justice, and the propulsive narrative careens through some surprising twists. It’s equal parts thrilling and chilling. Agent: Nicola Barr, Bent Agency. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

This family tragedy from bestseller Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) is captivating and distressing in equal measure. Set on a sheep station in remote Western Australia, where the MacBride family leases nearly one million acres and tends to 20,000 sheep, the novel begins in 1958 when a truck accident kills the family’s patriarch and eldest son and leaves the youngest son, 17-year-old Matt, severely injured. Saddled with cognitive issues and memory loss, he faces a long road to recovery under the care of his mother, Lorna, and 20-year-old sister, Rose. Months later, a confounding drunken incident exacerbates the tragedy, forcing Matt to cover up terrible secrets. It would spoil the novel to reveal more, beyond that during this time, Lorna’s grandson, Andy, enters the picture, brightening the MacBrides’ gloom with his youthful enthusiasm and love of geology. By 1969, new arrival Bonnie Edquist, a surveyor for a mining company, threatens to upend Matt’s safe and quiet way of life, while a nosy postmistress and a self-righteous police officer start to uncover his closely guarded secrets. Stedman conveys the staggering scale of the sheep station’s isolated sprawl, and it’s impossible to look away from the grim series of events. Readers will be transported. Agent: Susan Armstrong, Conville & Walsh. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

This delightful and dark picaresque from Kennard (The Transition) follows a mid-career English actor struggling to make ends meet. Looking for acting gigs, the unnamed narrator stumbles on an ad for a psychology experiment, which leads to steady work in which he zips himself into a black leather bag from head to groin and sits in on university lectures given by his employer, Dr. Blend. He is instructed to speak to no one in the class and not divulge that he is part of an experiment. Still, he engages in a submissive relationship with English professor Justine, in which he remains silent and zipped-up while she experiments with having sex with an “absence.” The narrator’s best friend, Claudio, an online gaming influencer with an appetite for rare hallucinogens, senses a way to monetize the experiment by creating Bag Coin NFTs and allowing online fans to track the narrator’s movements around town. Throughout, Kennard entertainingly pokes and prods at conceptions of identity, whether in sexual relationships or online personae (“We talk endlessly about sexual identity but isn’t sex more an escape from the self?” Justine argues). It’s a hoot. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink

Hochhauser’s splendid debut retells the “Cinderella” story from the stepmother’s perspective. Twice-widowed Lady Etheldreda Tremaine Bramley has a title and a manor house but virtually no money. Her daughters Mathilde and Rosamund face bleak futures if they cannot marry well, so Etheldreda sells some of her possessions and, with her daughters’ help, takes on household chores to keep up appearances. Meanwhile her shy and sanctimonious stepdaughter, Elin, who has never taken to her father’s second wife, stays aloof. When the queen hosts a ball for her only son, Etheldreda asks the three girls to sew themselves suitable gowns and earn extra money for their adornments, such as feathers. Elin, who neither sews nor sells the household ashes for lye-making as requested, stays home until the fateful night, when she borrows a dress, makes a late appearance, outshines her stepsisters, and wins a proposal from the prince. Though royal connections will be advantageous, Etheldreda grows alarmed by the haste and secrecy of the prince’s wedding plans, the reason for which she uncovers with the help of a trusted court adviser. Hochhauser grounds her tale with a convincing depiction of the medieval setting and offers a stirring exploration of maternal instinct and female strength. It’s a winner. Agent: Alyssa Reuben, WME. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink