Ainslie Hogarth’s Strange Harm combines a missing-child mystery with folk horror, satire and a multigenerational story about girls whose suffering is repeatedly transformed into legend, entertainment or public identity. The central mystery concerns Janie Yearling, who vanished from the town of Gold River fifteen years earlier. Her mother, Annette, turned herself into an admired symbol […]
Jerry Falade’s debut novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, was sold to Minotaur in a seven-figure deal, but the contract was canceled after it was alleged that the author had used AI to write the book. This book is a crime thriller narrated by Femi Johnson, a twenty-six-year-old Nigerian chemist whose extraordinary understanding of […]
Alma Katsu’s Incarnate is a supernatural technology thriller about Dorothy Wagner, a gifted but profoundly isolated visual-effects artist who creates a flawless virtual influencer and then begins physically transforming into her. What initially appears to be a story about artificial intelligence, deepfakes and online celebrity gradually becomes a Faustian horror narrative in which attention itself […]
Side Streams is an intergenerational family novel set principally in Northern California, with significant sections in Bahrain and Lahore. It follows Filipino American, Pakistani American and queer families whose lives become entangled through friendship, marriage, adultery, migration and the preservation of an unfinished mural. At its centre are Isobel and Claudia, childhood friends whose relationship […]
The novel takes place over the course of a single night in Stockholm, though its narrative repeatedly moves backwards through the lives of its central couple. Magnus is a forty-one-year-old Swedish political journalist; Meredith is his thirty-four-year-old American girlfriend, a beauty influencer who came to Sweden almost accidentally and remained because she fell in love […]
Dear Charlie is narrated by an unnamed woman in her mid-thirties whose obsessive pursuit of a wealthy, elusive amateur poet develops alongside her mother’s cancer treatment and her own escalating psychiatric crisis. The book initially resembles a darkly comic account of modern dating and literary ambition, but gradually reveals itself as the retrospective reconstruction of […]
Harold Rogers’s Humpty Dumpty is a sprawling, metafictional novel about a high-school sexual assault, the football culture that attempts to conceal it and the families whose private failures make the public catastrophe possible. Set primarily in Steubenville, Ohio, during the 2014–15 school year, it combines an omniscient third-person narrative with diaries, oral histories, memoir extracts, […]
London Fever is narrated by Paul Lenkowicz, a young Argentine who recounts his childhood in Buenos Aires and his disastrous attempt to reinvent himself as an English intellectual. Paul announces immediately that he has always regarded deception as the surest route to pleasure, independence and social advancement. He traces this philosophy back to a childhood […]
The novel is narrated by Helen, a sixty-one-year-old nonfiction professor who is being pushed into early retirement after more than thirty years at a New York university. The novel unfolds largely over the final night Helen spends clearing out her office, but her discovery of an old book causes the narrative to move repeatedly into […]
Famous Men is narrated by Wilhelmina “Will” Miles, a working-class woman from northern Michigan whose desire to become a writer draws her into a long, exploitative relationship with Nathaniel Fellow, a celebrated novelist and poet more than forty years her senior. The novel opens near the end of the chronology. Will is temporarily teaching creative […]