by Maggie Su

Outside a bar, Vi Liu discovers a strange blob—a small creature with beady black eyes. She takes it home. No ordinary pet, the blob begins to grow, shift shape, and obey Vi’s commands. Vi is struck with a daring idea: She’ll mold the creature into her ideal partner. Feeding it a stream of sweet breakfast cereals and American pop culture, the creature grows into a movie-star handsome white man. But when Vi’s desire to be loved unconditionally spirals out of control, she enters a journey of self-discovery that teaches her it’s impossible to control those you love.

Buy at Bookshop

by Stephen Graham Jones

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor, is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.

Buy at Bookshop

by Nancy Kricorian

Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

Buy at Bookshop

by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Twins Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with an upper-class couple, and Dempsey with an unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: This version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.

Buy at Bookshop

by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin

To escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, G.W. Pabst fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When his elderly mother falls ill, he finds himself back in Austria. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels sees the potential for using the European film icon and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order.

Buy at Bookshop

by Maria Reva

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is maverick scientist, trying to breed rare snails and funding her work by entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while searching for their missing mother. Together they embark across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades.

Buy at Bookshop

by David Szalay

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.

Buy at Bookshop

by R. F. Kuang

Alice has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality, all to work with Professor Jacob Grimes, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams.

Buy at Bookshop

by Lincoln Michel

Written by Michael Lincoln’s best friend and his misfit science fiction writing group, the Orb 4, The Star Rot Chronicles follow Captain Baldwin and his crew on their adventures across the Metallic Realms. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now. But behind the greatest universe ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the fun house reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge.

Buy at Bookshop

by Vijay Khurana

Two teenagers leave their small town on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness, with little more than canned food, second-hand camping gear, and the rifle they buy for reasons neither can articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents and peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the less their actions—and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play—are bound by the usual constraints. When one decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the encounter leads them down a road from which there’s no coming back.

Buy at Bookshop

by Erin Somers

When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is undeniable. Both are happily married young parents with two kids, and neither sees themselves as the type to engage in an affair. Yet their connection grows stronger, and as their lives continue to intertwine, the romantic tension between them becomes all-consuming—until their worlds unravel into two parallel timelines. In one, they pursue their feelings. In the other, they resist.

Buy at Bookshop

by Betty Shamieh

Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic—that might garner international attention—in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster.

Buy at Bookshop

by Quan Barry

Striker isn’t entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition. But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group’s secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker’s past that could irrevocably shatter her world.

Buy at Bookshop

by Ian McEwan

Just over 100 years in the future, much of the Western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the waterlogged south of what used to be England, scholar and researcher Thomas Metcalfe longs for the early 21st century as he chases the ghost of one poem, “A Corona for Vivien.” When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime.

Buy at Bookshop

by Angela Flournoy

Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

Buy at Bookshop

by Hannah Pittard

One day, Hana learns an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently in her ex-husband’s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news—she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains—but the morning after baking mac ’n’ cheese for her nephew’s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she’s long enjoyed is gone. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean’s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana’s autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.

Buy at Bookshop

by Fredrik deBoer

In a dorm room at her safety school, surrounded by corn-fed boys and contemptuous girls, Alice is losing her mind. Her first semester is spent clinging to middling grades between drunken hookups and roommate fights. The next brings sleepless nights, extreme weight loss, and effortless, compulsive energy, paused only by an unexpected summoning from the RA for evaluation. Thus begins an endless march of lithium, antidepressants, and Klonopin; doctors and therapists—when health insurance allows—along with overwhelmed parents and well-intentioned friends; all helpless bystanders as Alice descends deeper into chaos.

Buy at Bookshop

by Mona Awad

Sam has just published her first novel to critical acclaim. But at a New England stop on her book tour, her one-time frenemies, furious at the way they’ve been portrayed, kidnap her. Now a captive audience, it’s her (and our) turn to hear the Bunnies’ side of the story. One by one, they take turns holding the axe, and recount the birth throes of their unholy alliance, their discovery of their unusual creative powers—and the phantasmagoric adventure of conjuring their first creation.

Buy at Bookshop