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

Moffett 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, Moffett keenly traces the grace attained through the long arc of acceptance. Readers will be moved. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

The moving and well-rounded latest from Packer (after The Children’s Crusade) finds a terminally ill woman pushing her husband away and choosing to spend her last days with her two best friends. Eliot has stood by Claire since her breast cancer was first discovered eight years earlier. After Claire’s treatment ends and they prepare for in-home hospice care, she tells Eliot she’d like her childhood friend Holly and college roommate Michelle to stay with her, and he’s stunned to realize that she wants him to leave. Feeling stymied, he moves temporarily to Holly’s nearby house. Throughout, Packer explores the foundations of her central couple’s nearly 40-year marriage: the bonds, the inevitable ups and downs, the raising of their now grown children Josh, who’s still grappling with his music career, and Abby, a pediatrician who is married with two children. Though Eliot wants to continue being the attentive and understanding husband who accedes to his wife’s desires, he’s hurt and resentful about her decision, and feels supplanted by Holly and Michelle, who easily usurp his position as caregiver. Packer keeps the reader invested in her thought-provoking exploration of a marriage, as Eliot wonders why Claire doesn’t want him the most as the end of her life draws near. The author’s fans will relish this poignant novel. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Van de Sandt debuts with a vivid portrait of a woman’s trauma and recovery. The narrative unfolds as a therapy exercise written by Franca, a 27-year-old struggling writer from the Netherlands who has spent four years in the U.K. after abandoning her comp lit degree in Utrecht to live with her wealthy English fiancé, Andrew. Following his lucrative sale of an app, Franca has become fully dependent on Andrew, giving up on job-hunting and numbing her unhappiness with drinking and TV. She’s tasked with cooking dinner for Andrew and his colleagues to celebrate the team’s latest venture, but the evening begins with him raping her in the kitchen shortly before their guests arrive, leaving her reeling and trying to make sense of what just happened. The night takes another turn with the unexpected arrival of Franca’s former best friend Harry, whose abrupt departure from Utrecht ended their relationship years ago. As alcohol flows and tensions rise, Franca’s mental state unravels, and the narrative reaches a devastating climax. Van de Sandt weaves together Franca’s fragmented, often gruesome memories with a nuanced exploration of sexual violence within intimate relationships. This leaves readers with much to chew on. Agent: Millie Hoskins, United Agents. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Adelmann (How to Be Eaten) offers a slashing tale of academia’s exploitative gig economy and the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. Sam, an adjunct writing professor with crippling student loans, thinks she should be further along the tenure track for someone about to turn 34. During her first semester at Baltimore’s Rosedale College, she bumps into Dr. Tom Sternberg, who served as her graduate adviser a decade earlier, and who’s just been hired at Rosedale after leaving his old job for murky reasons. Putting aside her uneasiness at seeing Tom again after their intense relationship when she was a student (the details are revealed later), Sam focuses on the “low, constant hum” of her interminable to-do lists and bounces between lovers as the semester wears on. Then Tom publishes a novel titled Casualty, about a college professor who loses his family and job after having sex with one of his students, and Sam is shocked to realize he’s painted a thinly veiled and highly distorted version of their relationship. Not only has he made himself the victim, but their colleagues conflate her with the novel’s antagonist. Consequently, she undergoes a series of personal and professional reversals and fights to reclaim her narrative. Adelmann takes an unsparing and witty view of academia’s “pyramid scheme,” where “professors are living in poverty while paying back student loans” and “everyone but like ten people are getting fucked, and not in the good way.” This clever campus novel mischievously inverts John Williams’s Stoner. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Verve. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Akinmade (Everything Is Not Enough) writes in this uneven family drama about a mother’s shattered dreams and the shadows they cast over her daughter. The novel opens in 2006 Stockholm, where Tina, the biracial daughter of a Gambian woman who never knew the identity of her Swedish father, has just been chosen to represent Sweden at the Eurovision Song Contest. The narrative then rewinds to 1978, when Tina’s mother, Nancy, arrives in Sweden on a scholarship with dreams of becoming the first woman president of Gambia. Her anthropology professor, Lars, intentionally undercuts the work of her boyfriend, Malik, another student in his seminar. After Malik is deported, Nancy becomes vulnerable to the predatory Lars’s machinations. The timelines converge in 2016, as Tina comes to understand why her mother has always treated her so coolly. In alternating chapters, Akinmade teases out the parallels between Tina and Nancy, showing with nuance how they each struggle against men who jeopardize their dreams. Unfortunately, the novel is marred by ponderous pacing and repetitive clichés (men and women often “breathlessly” murmur and “softly” whisper in between cries of “I can’t fix you” and repeated assertions of “I didn’t want to fall for you”). It’s a mixed bag. Agent: Jessica Craig, Craig Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

The illuminating latest from Schatz (coauthor of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book) looks back on the impact of the sexual revolution before Roe v. Wade. In 1968, high school senior Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips is at the top of her class and expects to attend Stanford in the fall. Her plans are thrown into doubt after she meets a hippie named Wiley at a New Year’s Eve party. Baker and Wiley embark on a secret relationship that ends when she catches him kissing another girl. Shortly after their breakup, Baker realizes she’s pregnant. She initially seeks out an abortion but gets scared and doesn’t follow through. Her mother sends her to a maternity home to have the baby, where she bonds with a roommate whose partner is being shipped off to Vietnam and becomes fixated on past resident Kitty, whose unsent letter asking for help she finds under her bed. During Baker’s final trimester, she races to unravel the mystery of what happened to Kitty and grapples with whether to give her baby up for adoption. Some readers might be frustrated by the cliffhanger ending, but Schatz convincingly evokes the confusion and conflicting emotions of an unplanned pregnancy at a time when abortion was outlawed across the U.S. This resonates. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink