A heartbroken woman turns to helping others move on from their own failed or lost relationships in Kawashiro’s simplistic debut. After Momoko Yuuki is dumped by her boyfriend, Kyohei, she gets drunk and wakes up in a restaurant. She requests that the owner, Iori, prepare her ex’s favorite curry for herself and fellow customer Hozumi to share, as a means to move on from Kyohei. Iori then convinces her to launch a weekly event at the restaurant where women can come in and symbolically bury their past relationships over a meal. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to encounters with customers followed by recipes for the meals described, among them a woman who vows to leave the lothario singer she’s been bankrolling, who is served Red Flags Megastone Hamburger Steak. Momoko also helps customers with grief, such as a widower who requests the onigiri that his late wife used to make for him. It’s pleasant to read, but there’s little character development and the story feels a bit formulaic, with each episode designed to show Momoko’s gradual progress in letting go of Kyohei. This doesn’t quite stand out from the glut of healing fiction on offer. Agent: Neil Gudovtiz, Gudovitz & Company Literary Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

House of Leaves author Danielewski returns with an exciting if long-winded western set in 1982 Orvop, Utah. Terminally ill teen Tom Gatestone bonds with new kid Kalin March over their love for a pair of horses owned by wealthy meat processing plant owner Orwin “Old” Porch. Before Tom dies, he pleads with Kalin to save the horses from being rendered for meat. Kalin follows through on his promise, stealing the horses and taking them through the state’s canyons and mountains with a plan to set them free at a place called Tom’s Crossing. On the way, he’s tailed by Old Porch’s teen son Russel, who’s sporting his father’s pistol; Tom’s ghost, with whom only Kalin can communicate; and Tom’s younger adopted sister, Landry, who hopes to protect Kalin on his mission. Landry confronts Russel and takes away the gun, and after Russel returns without it, Old Porch flies into a rage and kills him. Old Porch then pins the blame for the killing on Kalin and Landry, launching a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse that culminates in a well-foreshadowed bloody shoot-out. Some of the passages verge on pretentiousness, like the pages-long lists of the town’s dead, which echo Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but the novel is buoyed by its characterizations (Old Porch is an effectively menacing villain). Adventurous readers will enjoy this wild ride. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

Beilin’s exhilarating second novel (after Revenge of the Scapegoat) portrays a writer’s struggle to progress with her work after eye surgery. Philadelphian Cumin Baleen, seeking a prescription for hydroxychloroquine to treat her autoimmune condition, is first required to get an eye test, where the ophthalmologist warns her that she’s in danger of sudden blindness if she doesn’t get laser surgery. After the procedure, Cumin’s life spirals: her boyfriend breaks up with her and she experiences cognitive issues, including an inability to write sentences with “more than one clause,” which causes her to stall on her novel in progress about gynecological malpractice. As Cumin attempts personal and artistic recovery, Beilin employs a host of narrative tricks to reflect her unsettled state, including sudden time shifts, a dose of metafiction, and Ouilpian constraints such as Cumin’s rewriting of a passage from Shusaku Endo’s novel The Sea and Poison without using any of the letters from the word uterus. Above all its tricks, this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing (the moon is described as “bright as a hexed white plate”; the toilet in Cumin’s new apartment is “a little bad. Its flush was a show flush, everything spun in an unswallowing circle”). It’s impossible not to be swept up in Beilin’s wake. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

The astute and revelatory latest from Jen (The Resisters) recounts the author’s tumultuous relationship with her Shanghai-born mother, Loo Shu-Hsin, and offers a fictionalized version of Loo’s early life. Loo, born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family, was met with disappointment by her mother, who wished for a son. Intellectually gifted, Loo convinces her parents to let her immigrate to a graduate program in Chicago in 1947 amid the Chinese civil war. She flounders in Chicago before moving to New York City, where she enrolls in Columbia University and meets future husband Jen Chao-Pei, a fluid mechanics engineer. The two forge a life together, settling first in Queens and finally Scarsdale, where Loo abandons her PhD studies in psychology for motherhood, planting the seeds of her anger, resentment, and depression. Second-born Lillian (the author’s given name) lives in the shadow of her older brother, Reuben, whom Loo adores, while Loo incessantly berates Lillian as a “bad, bad girl” for asking too many questions. Jen cannily portrays the struggles facing Chinese immigrants (a neighbor points out that Loo’s “soul is still in China”), as well as the family’s repeated patterns, showing how Loo consistently invalidates her daughter’s wit, curiosity, and intellect in the same way that she was invalidated as a young woman. Throughout, the author blends sharp-witted autofiction with powerful images, such as Loo’s mother throwing her placenta in the Huangpu River where it floats away, prefiguring the sense of drifting that Loo would later experience. This is striking. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/08/2025 | Details & Permalink

An English writer and his secretive bride make a fateful visit to Italy in Banville’s eerie latest (after The Drowned). By the time Evelyn Dolman meets American heiress Laura Rensselaer in 1899, he has abandoned his dreams of becoming a “lord of language,” and instead made a career writing cheap travel guides. After he proposes to Evelyn, they have sex and she proves to be “no stranger to the night-world where Eros reigns.” Her oil baron father, Willard, dies shortly after the wedding, and Laura, refusing to explain why he left her little of his fortune, insists on a belated winter honeymoon in Venice. Dolman, who speaks no Italian, is miserable from the cold and from Laura’s refusal to have sex with him since their first and only time. She urges him to visit a café popular with tourists, where he meets a stranger named Freddie FitzHerbert, who claims to be his former schoolmate, and Freddie’s alluring sister, Francesca. Dolman returns home drunk and rapes Laura, then wakes to find that she’s vanished. As the Italian police organize a search, Dolman, unworried for Laura’s safety, begins an affair with Francesca. Banville sustains a sinister atmosphere in the strange and subtle narrative, and he keeps the reader guessing as to what degree Evelyn is the victim of others’ machinations. This ambiguous tale will linger in readers’ minds. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Somers (Stay Up with Hugo Best) offers a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity. Cora and Eliot live in the Hudson Valley with their two small children. Having moved there from New York City, Cora confronts the malaise of small-town married life, and when she meets the also-married Sam, a fellow transplant, at a group for parents and their babies, her interest is piqued. Cora and Sam go out for drinks and wind up kissing, after which Cora begins fantasizing about meeting Sam at a hotel in a neighboring town to have sex. In this imaginary parallel life, Cora gets pregnant by Sam and has an abortion. Though the fantasy makes an affair appear untenable in her real life, she continues allowing herself to be tempted. She befriends Sam’s wife, Jules, and the families vacation together in Cape Cod. There, Jules gives Sam the business for skinny-dipping with Cora, and Cora and Sam cool it for a while. Her fantasies become increasingly wild as she envisions Sam and her engaging in a threesome with a Frenchman they meet in Paris, once again setting up the potential for a full-blown affair and causing fantasy and reality to blur. Somers offers a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery (“Passion was what went on in the other world... between two people with unwholesome fixations on each other, determined to do something stupid”). Readers will find this hard to put down. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Díaz’s textured debut novel (after the memoir Ordinary Girls) finds a mother and daughter struggling to live on their own terms in Puerto Rico. In the prologue, set in 1993, a dead body is discovered in the island’s cane fields after a devastating fire. Díaz then rewinds to tell the story of protagonist Maricarmen, whose family was forced to move into a public housing project called el Caserío. At 16 in 1975, she spends her summer cleaning houses and babysitting. One of her clients, Doña Iris, is dying of cancer and asks Maricarmen to help care for her baby, Tito. Through this connection, Maricarmen gets to know Doña Iris’s older son, known as Rey el Cantante, a gifted singer and petty thief beloved by el Caserío’s residents and reviled by the police for sharing his bounty with his neighbors. Maricarmen and Rey fall in love, but because Rey’s skin is darker, Maricarmen’s mother kicks her out. She then drops out of school and marries Rey, who’s often high on drugs, and they have a daughter, Nena. As the story unfolds, revealing the identity of the victim from the fire and chronicling Nena’s difficult coming-of-age as a young queer woman, Díaz offers a complex view of el Caserío and the residents’ shifting allegiances. It’s a moving family drama. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

This delightfully offbeat collection from Geek Love author Dunn (1945–2016) mixes tales of surprising encounters with those of unsettling dislocations. It begins with a series of flash fictions including “The Flautist,” an evocative two-pager about a woman charmed by her flute-playing taxi driver on the way home from a classical concert. Darker tones imbue the longer stories. Thelma, the protagonist of the title entry, plans to celebrate her 42nd birthday by having sex with one of the four life-size robots she keeps in her closet. Angry and anxious over an upcoming business trip, she chooses a robot named the Wimp, built to withstand abuse (“she had saved the Wimp’s purchase price several times over in repair bills”). Gilly, the protagonist of “The Well,” is similarly wound tight, plagued by fear in the isolated new home she shares with her husband in Northern California, especially when he’s away at work. Towered over by sequoias, Gilly feels like she’s living at “the bottom of a well.” Though some readers will grow weary of the recurring themes of anxiety and displacement, Dunn vividly captures her protagonists’ attempts to cope with the turbulence of their lives. There are plenty of treasures on offer, even if the whole is less than the sum of its parts. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

Majumdar (A Burning) spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata. It revolves around a mother known only as Ma, who manages a shelter between caring for her aging father and two-year-old daughter, Mishti. The three of them have obtained highly coveted “climate visas” and are preparing to join Mishti’s father in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he’s spent the past six months working as a medical researcher. All is hopeful until the household is visited by a young thief named Boomba, who followed Ma home from the shelter suspecting (correctly) that she is siphoning food from her workplace. The plot thickens when Boomba makes off with the family’s passports, causing further complications for all involved. Majumdar conjures a city at once deteriorating and resilient, where markets sell seaweed and synthetic fish, and the city’s “remaining benevolent billionaire” lives on a heavily guarded man-made island in a widening river. As Ma and her family struggle to reclaim the passports, Majumdar unspools Boomba’s backstory, crafting a complex antagonist who gradually gains the reader’s sympathy. There’s no clear-cut villain here, just people attempting to survive and protect their own. This proves once again that Majumdar is a master of the moral dilemma. Eric Simonoff, WME. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink

The holiday season fails to provide the necessary sparkle in Lavery’s underdeveloped companion to Women’s Hotel. As Christmas 1964 approaches, the residents of New York’s Biedermeier Hotel for Women land much needed seasonal work and manage to cover their back rent, but not without facing new challenges. Among the cast are Pauline Carter, who has a gig looking after lost children at the World’s Fair, and strives to break fellow Biedermeier resident Josephine Marbury of her pickpocketing habit, which Josephine has taken to out of desperation. There’s also Katherine Heap, 10 years sober, who faces a moral dilemma while attempting to reconnect with her younger sister, and Lucianne Caruso, who starts a dating service for young ladies and strictly enforces her rules, chief among them that “the evening ends at her front door.” Meanwhile, tenants Carol Lipscomb and Patricia De Boer have been acting secretive, and hotel manager Mrs. Mossler worries it may be connected to the recent jewel theft at the American Museum of Natural History. The character sketches are appealing but the narrative never finds its footing, as promising story lines such as the one involving the World’s Fair fail to materialize and others are left unresolved. Admirers of the last novel might appreciate the extended view into the women’s lives, but others can take a pass. Agent: Kate McKean, Morhaim Literary. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/01/2025 | Details & Permalink