Greenwood debuts with a scathing satire of war journalism centered on an ambitious London freelancer who recklessly throws herself into covering the 2012 Gaza War. Fledgling writer Sara Byrne, 32, is sent to Gaza by the London Tribune to interview survivors of Israeli airstrikes with help from translator Nasser. Determined to live up to the example of her late father, a legendary reporter, she hopes to land an interview with a senior member of Hamas and presses Nasser for help. After he demurs, she turns to Fadi, the nephew of a top resistance commander, who agrees to take her inside the “terror tunnels” where much of the armored machinery and rocket ammo is kept, in exchange for $1,000. Against Nasser’s counsel yet blindly eager to prove to her critical mother back in London and her married boyfriend that she’s “conquering the bloody cradle of civilization with her understanding,” Sara pursues her quest with disastrous results. Greenwood, herself a former Jerusalem-based reporter, gives Sara just the right amount of cockiness and careless resolve to make her ambitions plausible, and despite keeping the focus on an outsider who’s at once cynical and naive, the novel provides an unflinching view of the conflict’s human toll. This striking protrait of hubris will keep readers glued to the page. Agent: Clare Conville, C&W Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this earnest if underdeveloped first novel from Downing (Saga Boy, a memoir), a girl struggles with her mixed heritage. It’s 1993 in the South Carolina settlement of Etsi, where seven-year-old Ophelia lives with her grandmother on land that was once part of a Cherokee reservation. Due to her mix of Black and Cherokee ancestry, Ophelia is mistreated by her full-blooded Cherokee neighbors. After a nearby cattle ranch pollutes the local river, Ophelia moves in with her aunt Aiyanna, who identifies as Black, in the city of Stone River. As the years pass, Ophelia is no more accepted, and Tejah, a beautiful and popular classmate at her predominantly Black high school, bullies her for her dual identity and for hanging out with fellow “nerd” Durell. She’s delighted when Lucy, a family friend close to her age, invites her to a Baptist church, but she grows disenchanted when Lucy sours on her out of jealousy over the attention she receives from the youth pastor, who celebrates her salvation in front of the whole congregation. Episodes like these are poignant, but secondary characters such as Durell, Lucy, and Tejah are frustratingly flat. Still, Downing satisfies with his portrayal of the complex Ophelia and her attempt to find herself. It’s an affecting if uneven coming-of-age tale. Agent: Chris Casuccio and John Pearce, Westwood Creative Artists. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Kane follows up Rules for Visiting with a masterful novel drawn from a journey British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) made to northern Mexico in 1952. Penelope’s husband, Desmond, is an alcoholic, their London literary journal is on the verge of bankruptcy, and she’s three months pregnant with a child they can’t afford. Things take a promising turn when she receives letters from two women claiming to be old family friends. Elderly widow Elena Delaney and her sister-in-law Anita, Irish expats living in Mexico, explain that they have a silver mining fortune but no heirs; if Penelope brings her son to meet them, they might leave him the money. Penelope doesn’t remember the women, but her finances are too precarious to refuse. She and six-year-old Valpy travel to the small town of Fonseca, arriving on the Day of the Dead. The Delaneys, both heavy drinkers, barely recall their letters, and Penelope is just one of many visitors seeking a share of their wealth. As Penelope waits, hoping she and Valpy will win their favor, her attraction to a man claiming to be a distant Delaney relation tests her loyalty to Desmond and she takes what might be her first stabs at writing fiction. Adding to the rich tension between fact and fiction are undated letters from the real Valpy and Fitzgerald’s older daughter, Tina, to an unidentified recipient concerning the 1952 trip. It amounts to a luminous exploration of a woman’s desperation and resilience. Agent: Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

The spirited conclusion to Pearce’s Emmy Lake Chronicles (after Mrs. Porter Calling) finds the journalist and her colleagues facing triumphs and tragedies near the end of WWII. In 1944, Emmy and the rest of the staff at Woman’s Friend magazine move their operations from London to the countryside for safety, where they stay for the summer at a home belonging to the grandmother of Emmy’s best friend. Meanwhile, Emmy’s husband, Charles, an army major, fights in Europe. Even as she worries about Charles’s fate, Emmy’s career blossoms, and she becomes a war correspondent in Belgium, focusing on the plight of British prisoners of war. Emmy also continues offering advice to readers in her Yours Cheerfully column, in which she encourages women to keep children born out of wedlock, a controversial issue that hits home when one of the magazine’s staffers is unexpectedly pregnant. The fast-paced plot is driven by unrelenting news of casualties on the Western Front, but what hits hardest is the sense of camaraderie among the women. It’s a satisfying finale. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Flagg follows The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop with a charming collection full of characters transformed by unexpected changes of circumstance. “Special Agent William Frawley” follows the eponymous alien agent, who’s sent to Earth to study human life. When he stops in an Indiana Baskin-Robbins, he charms the woman working there with his enthusiasm for every little detail. In “Don’t Forget to Write,” Helen, 64, is stunned when her husband leaves her for the younger Cassandra. She continues to dote on him, however, and even delivers his laundry to Cassandra’s house. Then Cassandra threatens to get a restraining order, at which point Helen’s interventions take a dark turn. An elderly woman in “The Dreaded D Word” is aghast when her money manager advises her to sell her lavish Alabama home, prompting her to take desperate measures to avoid the indignity of an estate sale. “Two Different Worlds,” one of several linked stories about the Vanderhoff family, traces the generational divide between Kansas farmer Velma Vanderhoff and her granddaughter Cathy, a yoga instructor in California, while “City of Lost Dreams” tells the sad story of Cathy’s late mother. In these homespun tales, Flagg channels her characters’ fear of change and offers a genuine sense of hope. The author’s fans will love this. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

The sparkling latest from Morrey (The Love Story of Missy Carmichael) follows a woman with boundary issues and too much time on her hands as she searches for a long-lost friend. After spending a weekend in the country with friends from school, Gwen, 53, becomes obsessed with tracking down her former bestie Isabella, who fell out of touch with their friend group 15 years earlier. She visits Isabella’s reserved parents, and their cryptic comments (Isabella “values her privacy.... After everything that happened”), coupled with the espionage podcast she’s been listening to, convince her that Isabella is a spy. Consumed by the case and annoyed with her neglectful husband, she follows a lead to Rome. As she gets closer to the truth, she learns as much about her own weaknesses and preconceptions as she does about Isabella, and she begins to find her way toward a life of “color and vibrancy and dynamism and excitement.” With its wild goose chase plot and quirky cast of characters, including Isabella’s “modest, restrained, and faintly apologetic” parents and Gwen’s mother-in-law, “a gold-plated, X-rated, permanently aerated March Hare,” the novel moves briskly along, and there’s plenty of wisdom about long-term friendship and midlife crises beneath the fizzy surface. It’s a rewarding tale of second chances. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

Berman (The Comeback) evokes Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, and the glamour of the 1960s California literary scene in this exciting tale of a friendship and its dissolution. Magazine writer Lane Warren, who brings to mind Didion, moves from New York City to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s to work on her first novel. At a party, she meets the Babitz-like Gala Margolis, an aspiring writer who leads a free-spirited and sexually promiscuous life in Laurel Canyon. Lane and Gala keep bumping into one another at parties and eventually become friends of a sort. After Lane’s first novel hits the bestseller list, she encourages Gala to take her writing more seriously. Eventually, Gala gets hired to write a monthly column for Vogue. Later, the friendship turns sour, their breakup fueled by petty jealousies and mutual sabotage, which Berman gradually reveals in a parallel narrative set in 1975, when Lane is working on a thinly disguised novel about her former friend until she learns Gala has disappeared. Berman casts Lane and Gala as vivacious frenemies, and their drag-out fights generate real sparks. Readers will surely fall for these two ladies of the canyon. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/27/2025 | Details & Permalink

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