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Audition: A novel
By Katie Kitamura. 2025
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether…
we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best
Wild Life
By Amanda Leduc. 2025
Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line…
between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal."
Wild Life
By Amanda Leduc. 2025
Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line…
between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal."
A guardian and a thief
By Megha Majumdar. 2025
In a near-future Kolkata, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city…
behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe. A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation
Lion
By Null Sonya Walger. 2025
&“A breathtaking novel, dreamlike and courageous, brimming with glamour and disastrous scarcities.&” —Susie BoytLion is the story of a father…
and a daughter. The father is the unlikeliest of fathers. He is a charismatic bon vivant, a polo player, race-car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and skydiver. He is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall. Lion moves back and forth between present-day Los Angeles, where the daughter lives and works as an actress, and the past of her peripatetic childhood in England, Argentina, and Peru. "It is hard to compete with adrenalin when you are a child," she writes, now a mother herself to young children whose settled upbringing prompts her to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos.Sonya Walger's stunning autobiographical debut is an emotionally acute palimpsest of a novel, full of drama and incident, love and tragedy. The legend of the father's life and her distinctive and imaginatively charged telling of it make for an engrossing and unforgettable family saga.
A Guardian and a Thief: A Novel
By Megha Majumdar. 2025
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZEMegha Majumdar&’s electrifying follow-up to her acclaimed New York…
Times bestseller A Burning—longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata ravaged by climate change and social disharmony, in which the lives of five characters collide and their fates become inextricably linked—a propulsive and shattering tour de force.In a dystopic Kolkata beset by flooding and blight, Ma, her two year old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma&’s husband in the home he has been building for them in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited passports and visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning, they awaken to discover that Ma&’s purse, with all the treasured documents within it, has been stolen.A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma and her family, their struggle to emigrate to America, and their devastation in the wake of the theft that changes their fate to one of implacable tragedy; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose hunger and desperation to care for his family drive him to commit a crime whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families whose destinies become inexorably entangled, wresting compassion from each narrative as the complexities of each character&’s circumstances—their helplessness in the face of poverty and corruption, and the need to stave off encroaching catastrophe—are captured with clarity and piercing empathy.A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
Hellions: Stories
By Julia Elliott. 2025
"I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories."―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties&“Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories,…
both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal. Elliott is an Angela Carter for our times.&”―Jeff VanderMeer, author of AbsolutionA TIME Best Book of the MonthFrom the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal.In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ&’s love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods.With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott&’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.
Sea, Poison
By Caren Beilin. 2025
A darkly funny, electrifying tale of polyamory, illness, health-care malfeasance, and gynecological crime mixed with Oulipian madness Cumin Baleen is…
a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison. Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari’s studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron’s bedroom—polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don’t know what to say, I’m saying I have a cracked appearance. It’s not a pity party, it’s a character sketch. Insofar as you’ll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison." Caren Beilin’s hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo’s terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.
The Edge of Water
By Olufunke Grace Bankole. 2025
Winner of the Westport Prize for LiteratureShortlisted for the 2026 Pacific Northwest Book AwardAn Oprah Daily Best Book of the…
MonthAn Apple Books Best Book of the YearA Goodreads Hottest Debut of FebruaryAlta Journal and Debutiful Best Book of FebruaryMost Anticipated Book of 2025: Goodreads, Southern California Newsgroup, Debutiful, Washington Independent Review of Books & The RepublicSet between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she&’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole&’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
Casualties of Truth: a Novel
By Lauren Francis-Sharma. 2025
A riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of…
revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa. Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enable her to dedicate her days to her autistic son, Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis's new colleagues, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course. Yet when Davis's colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence's past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, long hidden and now at risk of coming to light. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs. "An unforgiving tale of cat-and-mouse begging us to confront just how far we'd go to take control in a society hell-bent on minimizing our pain. These pages set loose the raging, wicked what-ifs we keep deeply and shamefully hidden inside our basements."--XOCHITL GONZALEZ, author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last LAUREN FRANCIS-SHARMA is the author of Book of the Little Axe, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel 'Til the Well Runs Dry. She was a MacDowell fellow and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College. She resides near Washington, D.C., with her family.
Audition: A Novel
By Katie Kitamura. 2025
NAMED A 2025 &“ESSENTIAL READ&” BY THE NEW YORKER AND A TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINE…
AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, BOOK RIOT, ESQUIRE, THE NEW REPUBLIC, KIRKUS, SHELF AWARENESS AND MORE!ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZEINSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER&“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR&“Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.&”—The Boston GlobeOne woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She&’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He&’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.