ChadGPT by Samuel Miller follows sixteen-year-old Eliot Williams, a brilliant but deeply isolated high school junior who has recently been forced to move from Palo Alto, California, to Gideon, Kansas, after the collapse of his parents’ marriage and technology company. Eliot despises Gideon almost immediately. He regards most of the students as “NPCs,” people who […]
Delicate Creatures opens in 2005 in the small West Virginia town of Blue Hollow, where reporter Britt Mackenzie receives an alarming call from her mother, Linda, the local school principal. Twelve-year-old Sammy King has missed two days of school, and his mother, Desiree “Des” King, is not answering anyone. Britt is Des’s closest friend, so […]
The novel centers on Linda Daczinski, a middle-aged mother, wife, graduate student, and daughter who is simultaneously confronting a marital crisis, the return of an old lover, severe perimenopause, financial danger, the pandemic, and the question of whether the life she built is actually the life she wanted. The story begins in early 2020 when […]
The Offer follows Nikita “Nikki” Roy, a twenty-five-year-old Indian American woman who arrives in Chicago determined to become somebody new after serving three months in jail. Nikki is broke, drowning in approximately $130,000 of student loans and credit-card debt, psychologically unstable, and compulsively attracted to wealth. One of the first things she does in Chicago […]
The Letters opens with a fifty-year-old university professor in San Antonio receiving a stream of letters from his eighty-four-year-old mother in California. She writes them to people who mattered to her and emails them to her son for proofreading. Gradually, he realizes they are really goodbye letters: attempts to settle old emotional accounts before age […]
The novel begins by taking the real-world concept of Japanese yonige-ya, companies that help desperate people vanish and begin new lives, and turning it into a supernatural business. Haruto, a twenty-eight-year-old man with long silver-white hair, operates an elegant little stationery shop in Tokyo during the day. At night, however, the shop becomes the headquarters […]
The novel begins with a deliberately disorienting scene. Sarah Remlinger wakes bound hand-and-foot in the dark trunk of a moving car, soaked in an enormous amount of blood that she gradually realizes is not hers. Even stranger, she knows what is going to happen before it happens. She knows there will be a boy at […]
The book begins with thirty-year-old Margaret Ingraham deciding that her coworker Patrick McMahon needs to die. Margaret is an executive assistant at the marketing firm Kline, Martin, and Frankel in Silver Lake, Arkansas, and she lives an extraordinarily controlled life shaped by her late mother, an agoraphobic and obsessive woman who taught Margaret to fear […]
The novel begins with the death of Mordechai “Mordy” Horowitz, an elderly, deeply religious man in the Orthodox Jewish community of Newstead Hills. One snowy December morning, his regular synagogue carpool friends—Sam Hirsch, Shlomo Tannenbaum, Max Rosen, and Irving Eisenberg—arrive at his house and become worried when he does not answer. Shlomo enters with a […]
The novel follows three sisters, Tess, Kate, and Leah Fox, whose lives are permanently altered when Tess is seven and Kate is five. While staying with their sick grandmother in upstate New York, Tess looks into a fire and sees their parents’ car hit black ice before anyone knows the accident has happened; Kate, whose […]