In this inviting debut, Melanson reconstructs Renaissance Florence through intersecting stories of artist Leonardo da Vinci, banker Lorenzo de’ Medici, and priest Francesco Salviati. The reader meets Leonardo in 1471 when he’s an apprentice, lacking the confidence to pursue his own commissions. Lorenzo, meanwhile, has inherited his family’s failing banking business, and he follows his mother’s counsel as he tries to hold onto their power and influence. Francesco, a cousin of a rival family, is an impoverished priest at a small Roman parish. The ascension of Pope Sisto IV opens new possibilities for Francesco and Lorenzo in their moments of doubt. Francesco angles for a promotion to archbishop, while Lorenzo is eager to fund the pope’s endless building campaigns. Meanwhile, Leonardo works on his first commission, for Lorenzo’s brother’s mistress. He quells his insecurity by spending nights with sex worker Iac, who’s saving up for his goldsmith registration. As the plot unfolds, Lorenzo opposes Francesco’s promotion out of competition with the Salviatis, and Leonardo and Iac are charged with sodomy. What makes the narrative so approachable is the way it captures these historical figures before their glory, when they’re dogged by the universal and timeless fear that they were born too late and won’t be remembered. Melanson’s immersive tale is worth a look. Agent: Chad Luibi, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Comprising two novellas from Nobel winner Pontoppidan (Lucky Per), who died in 1943, this volume offers a vivid and comedic view of late 19th-century Denmark. In “The White Bear,” Lutheran priest Thorkild Müller embarks on a mission to Christianize the Indigenous people of Greenland, where he quickly becomes more interested in learning to hunt caribou than evangelizing and is adopted into the fabric of Inuit society. He marries Seqineq, an Inuit woman, but after she dies, he impulsively requests to be transferred back to Denmark, where he’s now at odds with the church. His popularity with his new parish sets off a battle of wills between him and the local bishop who wants to drive him out. “The Rearguard” likewise depicts a conflict of belief: it begins with firebrand Socialist realist painter Jørgen Hallager marrying Ursula Branth, the daughter of a conservative politician. On their honeymoon in Rome, they attempt—with little success—to reconcile their diverging views on propriety, poverty, and family ties. Pontoppidan’s humanism and belief in the value of compromise permeate his portrayal of the couple’s doomed marriage and Hallager’s tragically unwavering views. These tales of universal struggles teem with keen insights. (June)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Doten (Trump Sky Alpha) delivers an uncompromising satire of contemporary white supremacy in this bold collection. The opener, “Even Elon on Human Meat,” narrated by an emotionally detached and supercilious Elon Musk, takes place in the aftermath of a disastrous rocket launch, which he views as a “success” for the lessons it offers. Trampling over a gravely injured woman, whose face he never sees, Musk enjoys a transgressive thrill, especially once he imagines that she’s Black. In “A Fence Is Not Walls,” a liberal U.S. senator answers questions from reporters in Orwellian doublespeak about the White House’s draconian immigration policies, which he supports in the interest of consensus (“We must act with compassion while also upholding the laws of our country”). The anti-vaxxer at the center of “Every Soul Ever” claws her eyes out in a pique of frustration with the man she’s been hooking up with, then goes viral after claiming she did it because of side effects from the Covid-19 vaccine. “Fifty Thousand Gringos” follows an expat in Mexico City who, out of a twisted sense of concern over his privilege, tips poorly at restaurants so waiters will be less likely to favor gringos. Every character is painfully convincing in their anger, condescension, or meekness. It’s a wild and caustic ride. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Samuels’s impressive debut, an artist reckons with illness and loss while pursuing her career in early 1900s Sicily and New York City. In 1905, Mimi Inglese’s talent as a painter has made her likely to become the first woman ever admitted to the Palermo Academy of Fine Arts. Mimi views the program as an opportunity to forge a life on her own terms, and hopes to emulate the mythological Persephone, who became the master of her fate after having been tricked into entering the underworld. That myth turns out to mirror Mimi’s story when she and her middle sister Rosalia contract tuberculosis, scuttling her plans to attend the academy. After Rosalia dies and her youngest sister, Caterina, gets engaged to a man living in New York, Mimi and her parents move there with Caterina. Mimi looks up her godfather, Zio, who’d promised to be her patron, but instead he tricks her into joining his counterfeit currency scheme. She goes along with it, hoping that the earnings will secure her independence. Samuels makes Mimi a sympathetic figure even as she compromises her morals in pursuit of her interests, and the plot takes surprising turns. Readers will be satisfied by this nuanced character portrait. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Silber’s alluring 10th novel (after Secrets of Happiness) tenuously connects three generations of New Yorkers. It begins in 1973, when friends Ivan and Eddie return from bumming across Europe to grungy Alphabet City. After Eddie overdoses on heroin, Ivan leaves him in the waiting room of the hospital’s emergency room, convinced he’s dead. From there, Ivan goes on to deal drugs, and he eventually kicks his heroin habit but not the torment caused by abandoning his friend. Meanwhile, Eddie’s onetime girlfriend Ginger finds success as an actor in Los Angeles. A parallel narrative follows Cara, beginning in 1974 when she’s 10 and falls from the roof of her building. Her friend Nina, who witnesses the fall, initially thinks she’s died. Each chapter stands alone, but Silber threads them together with common themes of abandonment, betrayal, unrequited love, and the pull of the past: Eddie leaves Ginger after she gets pregnant by another man, Cara runs away at 16 with her boyfriend who leaves her penniless in Arizona, and Nina is deserted by her own boyfriend when she goes to California for graduate school. In the present, Cara’s daughter, Isabel, now 26, copes with her baggage by working for an NGO fighting destructive global development. With this subtle exploration of relationships, Silber sheds light on how people are shaped by where they come from and who they know. Agent: Amy Berkower, Writers House. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cummins’s impressive debut novel (after the collection If the Body Allows It) follows two lifelong friends who bonded while struggling with their torn-apart families. Gertie and Cindy, both 31, grew up in Michigan, where they both carried the secret of their fathers’ opioid addictions. As Cummins reveals in flashbacks, 16-year-old Gertie also keeps a secret from Cindy: that she slept with Cindy’s boyfriend at a party. Gertie’s plan to confess to Cindy later that year is cut short when Gertie causes an accident with a bonfire. As punishment, Gertie’s mom makes her spend the summer with her newly rehabilitated father in Sioux Falls. When she discovers her father is still using, she escapes from the pain by writing a fantasy book. In chapters set during the present day, Gertie attempts to write a novel about that summer, and when Cindy suggests Gertie use her apartment as a retreat while she’s away, Gertie’s time there adds another dimension to her already intriguing reflections on the past (“People tend to choose: I became who I am despite the past or because of it, which aggravates me since it is so clearly both”). This works equally well as a gritty coming-of-age drama and an insightful story about the nature of writing. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

In the delightful latest from Skye (The Hundred Lives of Juliet), two childhood sweethearts find each other again after a forced separation years earlier. Growing up in Lawrence, Kans., Chloe Hanako Quinn seems to have a perfect childhood. Her loving parents own a popular ice cream shop and her sunny disposition allows her to see the best in everyone. But when her best friend Oliver Jones and his family disappear the day after Oliver and Chloe’s first kiss, she’s crushed and not sure what to believe. Years later, both Oliver and Chloe—unbeknownst to either—are living in New York City, Oliver as a banker and Chloe as a high school counselor. After Chloe is laid off, she takes to making origami flowers, into which she places positive notes like “chin up, buttercup.” She scatters the flowers around town and they coincidentally reach the right people at just the right time. When cynical Oliver receives one of the flowers, he dismisses its message as meaningless fluff—until it manages to draw him back to Chloe, a reunion that gives them a chance to shed light on the past. Skye ties it all together with perfect pacing and the characters’ undeniable chemistry. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: Thao Le, Sandra Dijkstra Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wade (Hollow Out the Dark) delivers a rewarding tale of a boy’s quest to find his father in 1932 East Texas. William Carter, 15, has it bad: his mother is dying, the family cotton crop is blighted, the farm is about to be foreclosed on, and his father, Thomas, has disappeared. With the help of his friend Ollie Leek, a mortician’s apprentice, William goes in search of his dad. On the way to the town where Thomas was last seen, they stop to take in Dr. Downtain’s Mount Zaphon Medicine Show. They rescue an escapee from the show, a young woman named Lena Forester, whose mother sold her to the doctor. The three travel on together, following a trail of clues to Thomas’s current whereabouts that takes them through wild territory known as the Thicket, where they come between feuding families and encounter legendary bank robber Clyde Barrow. All the while, they are pursued by Downtain, who wants Lena back, and Wade builds tension as the trio desperately try to locate William’s father before Downtain finds them. The adventures are reminiscent of Davis Grubb’s classic Southern gothic The Night of the Hunter, with its stark evocation of good versus evil. This odyssey of the West is tough to shake. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

This lush narrative from Bajani (If You Kept a Record of Sins) tells the story of a man’s life through a succession of northern Italian homes. The novel begins in 1976 when the protagonist, named I, is a baby crawling across the carpet of his parents’ basement apartment, which he calls the Underground Home. As I grows up, he spends time in such formative places as the Home Beneath the Mountain, the condo in the Alps that he moves into at eight; the Home of Sex, the family apartment of the girl he loses his virginity to in 1991; and the Home of the Tumor, the hospital room where his mother is treated for breast cancer in 2007. The nonlinear narrative also finds him living in such transient settings as his car, the homes of relatives, and a college dorm, before he rents his first apartment in 1998. Much more atmospheric than plot driven, Bajani’s novel plays with language and structure in inventive ways, from impressions of the Underground Home, where “shadows slip off the objects entirely, dive onto the floor, subdue every square centimeter,” to his home on wheels, a “Fiat Panda, white, with a flirtatious flurry of stickers.” It’s a memorable tale of a man shaped by the walls around him. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink

Higgins (A Good Happy Girl) shines in this sharp-witted novel of women behaving badly. Rebecca, recently separated from her wife—a doctoral student also named Rebecca—is a part-time cashier at a local organic food market in Washington, D.C. Even though she’s broke, she just changed her status on a sugar mama dating app from “seeker to provider.” Fellow app user Charlotte, who happens to be the sugar mama of doctoral student Rebecca, has heard about cashier Rebecca and is curious to meet her, so she reaches out on the app, pretending to be a seeker. Thus begins a tangled love triangle between three women figuring out who they are to each other and themselves, especially as the Rebeccas attend parenting classes together to support doctoral student Rebecca’s desire to become a foster parent. Higgins’s characters might be a bit of a mess, but their thoughts are rendered with precision, whether in cashier Rebecca’s reflections on her unfulfilling work (“I don’t believe I’ve ever impacted a person, not even and especially not myself”) or Charlotte’s motivations for wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly (“Charlotte makes magic happen in her mind—an understanding moves through the women, relative strangers, that her belly does make her a good person, a sweet person.... A person who deserves just a little grace”). The question of parenthood haunts the three women, like a destination without a map, and the final reveal is a knockout. Readers will have a blast. Agent: Katie Grimm, Curtis Brown. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/20/2025 | Details & Permalink