by S.A. Cosby

After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fistfights, and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires Titus to run for sheriff. He wins and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever it leads. But no one expected he would unearth a serial killer hiding in plain sight.

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by Tim O’Brien

Boyd Halverson, star journalist turned online disinformation troll turned JC Penney manager—and now a bank robber—is on the run with his hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: Settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.

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by Julia Langbein

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be?

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by Jimin Han

In South Korea, a 105-year-old woman receives a letter. Ten days later, she has been thrust into the afterlife, fighting to head off a curse that will otherwise devastate generations to come. Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the burden of upholding the family name. When she sent her daughter-in-law to America to cover up an illegitimate birth, she was simply doing what was needed to preserve the reputations of her loved ones. How could she have known that decades later, this decision would return to haunt her?

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by Tom Piazza

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation.

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by Jessica Johns

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone. Traveling north to her family in rural Alberta, they welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams.

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by Paul Murray

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And 12-year-old PJ is putting the final touches on his grand plan to run away from home.

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by David Diop

Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram. The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant.

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by Jen Beagin

Greta lives in a Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, NY, spending her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she calls Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship.

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by Catherine Lacey

When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X’s biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM’s quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

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by Eleanor Catton

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But an enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: He has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, who intrigues him. But can Birnam trust him?

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by Laurent Mauvignier, translated by Daniel Levin Becker

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm, his wife, their daughter, and their neighbor. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s 40th birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers unleash a nightmarish chain of events.

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by Justin Torres

A young man tends to a dying soul, Juan Gay, who has a project to pass along, one built around a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains early-20th-century accounts from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose work was then co-opted, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page.

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by Mattie Lubchansky

Sammie is invited to a bachelor weekend, but though they have not identified as a man for over a year, Sammie’s college buddies haven’t quite gotten the message. Arriving at the hotel, Sammie immediately questions their decision to come. Bad enough they have to suffer through a torrent of passive-aggressive comments from the groom’s pals, they also seem to be the only one who’s noticed the mysterious cult that’s also staying at the hotel, and is ritually dismembering guests and demanding fealty to their bloodthirsty god.

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by Alison Rumfitt

When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya. The two hit it off immediately, but as their relationship intensifies, so too does Frankie’s feeling that Vanya is hiding something from her. When Vanya’s secrets threaten to tear them apart, Frankie starts digging, and unearths a sinister, depraved conspiracy, the roots of which go deeper than she ever imagined.

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by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Loretta and Hamara are the stars of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a popular, controversial, profit-raising program in America’s private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. As her final matches approach, Thurwar considers how she might help her fellow prisoners, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in her path have devastating consequences.

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by Tom Rob Smith

The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet. There are no negotiations. All they have is a message: humanity has 30 days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist—Antarctica. We follow the perilous journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus. As they cling to life on the ice, they must also confront the urgent challenge: Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold?

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by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

A woman spends her time during the pandemic sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville, becoming increasingly obsessed by what Melville’s devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

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by Ben Fountain

Haiti, 1991. Amid a violent coup d’état—and desperate for money—American expat Matt and his friend Alix set their sights on shipwrecks rumored to contain priceless treasures. Their ambition comes with a cascade of ill-fated incidents—including one involving an arms-trafficking ring and a rookie CIA officer who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined.

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by Zadie Smith

It is 1873. Eliza Touchet is the housekeeper of a once-famous novelist. Andrew Bogle grew up enslaved in Jamaica. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a butcher claimed he was the rightful heir of a sizable estate—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task.

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by Naomi Alderman

Martha Einkorn works for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. In a Singapore mall, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the end of civilization.

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by Emma Cline

A misstep at a party on the East End of Long Island, and the man Alex has been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, Alex stays around and drifts through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

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by Angie Kim

Mia has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

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by James McBride

When a skeleton is found at the bottom of a well, who it was and how it got there were secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, a rundown neighborhood in Pottstown, Pa. Two of those residents were Moshe and Chona Ludlow. When the state came looking for a deaf boy, Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater, kept the boy safe. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, it’s clear that even in dark times, it is love and community that sustain us.

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by Ann Napolitano

William grew up in a house where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. Landing a scholarship at a college far from his childhood home, he meets Julia, who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family, who fold her new boyfriend into their loving household. Then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing Julia’s future with Michael and her family’s loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations.

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by James Frankie Thomas

Idlewild is an artsy high school in lower Manhattan. One morning, an airplane hits the Twin Towers. For two Idlewild outcasts, Fay and Nell, it becomes the first day of an intense friendship, where they spend their days giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then they notice two sexually ambiguous boys, and the pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.

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by Martin Cruz Smith

It’s June 2021, and Detective Arkaday Renko knows Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. He is, however, preoccupied. His longtime lover, Tatiana Petrovna, has deserted him for her work as a reporter. And a visit to his doctor reveals he has symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Then an acquaintance asks him to find his daughter, an anti-Putin activist who has disappeared. In the course of the investigation, Arkady falls for Karina’s roommate, Elena. The search leads them to Kyiv, where rumblings of a conflict grow louder.

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by Sandra Newman

Julia Worthing is a mechanic who works in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. All her life, she’s known only Oceania, and, until she meets Winston Smith, she has never imagined anything else. She is an ideal citizen: cheerfully cynical, always ready with a bribe, piously repeating every political slogan while believing in nothing. She routinely breaks the rules, but also collaborates with the regime when necessary. Everyone likes Julia.

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by C. Pam Zhang

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a city to take a job at a mountaintop colony. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

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by Jesmyn Ward

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri. Sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, Annis struggles through the miles-long march, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take.

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by Patrick deWitt

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in Portland, Ore. One morning he encounters an elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

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by Victor LaValle

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Forced to flee her hometown of Redondo, Calif., she drags the trunk with her at every stop, becoming one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can cultivate it—except that Adelaide isn't alone.

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by Debra Magpie Earling

Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold. When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer the world she loves.

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by Julia Watts

In a small Kentucky college town in 1953, colleagues and neighbors of Samuel and Boots are more than willing to accept their married status, even though Samuel “dresses like a boy” and the pair’s relationship is one of convenience that will never be consummated. But when Samuel meets a new professor’s wife, Frances, at a faculty party, she soon falls in love, and learns the difficulty of discretion in a small town—with tragic consequences.

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by Nicola Griffith

In seventh-century Britain, Hild—now 18 and married to her forbidden childhood love—is no longer a bright child who charms and dazzles the court with seemingly supernatural insight. But she remains one of the king’s most trusted advisers, both seer and warrior, which makes her formidable in a volatile court, and also subject to His Majesty’s most dangerous whims. She has never been stronger or more vulnerable.

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by Lydia Kiesling

The year is 1998, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes, we watch global interests flock to her backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age as her own ambitions lead her to a career in the oil industry, eventually returning to the scene of her youth, where slippery figures from the past reappear.

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by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased 11-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

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by James Reich

Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime.

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by Jess Row

The Wilcoxes once seemed like a typical white Upper West Side Jewish clan. But in the early 2000s, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was Black. Then college-age daughter Bering left to become a peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper. Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more.

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by Henry Hoke

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing obnoxious hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. “I have so much language in my brain,” our lion says, “and nowhere to put it.”

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by Ariel Djanikian

It’s 1898 and Alice Bush, the daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, is accustomed to feeling destitute. But when her brother-in-law strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice seizes control of her destiny and joins a wave of white settlers to the Klondike. One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.

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by Caroline O’Donoghue

When Rachel meets James, it’s love at first sight. James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate, and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at a bookstore with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s well-connected, bourgeois wife.

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by Kevin Maloney

Growing up in the suburbs, Kevin mainlined high fructose corn syrup and The Golden Girls. Thus begins a journey of hard-earned insights and sexual awakening that takes Kevin from Beaverton, Ore., to the beaches of San Diego, to an organic lettuce farm. Everything changes when Kevin falls in love with Wendy. After a chance tarot reading lands them on the coast of Maine, their lives are unsettled by the birth of their daughter, whose presence is oftentimes terrifying, frequently disturbing, and yet—miraculously—always wondrous.

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by Mona Awad

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience.

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by Ed Park

March, 1919. Far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the North-South split that remains today. But what if the KPG still existed now, today—working toward a unified Korea, secretly harnessing the might of a giant tech company to further its aims?

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by Paz Pardo

It’s 2009, and the US has been a second-rate power for a quarter-century, ever since Argentina’s victory in the Falkland’s War thanks to their development of “psychopigments.” Created as weapons, these chemicals can produce human emotions upon contact, and have been embraced for pharmacological and recreational purposes. Just outside the ruins of San Francisco, Psychopigment Enforcement Agent Kay Curtida works a beat chasing down smalltime crooks. When an old friend shows up with a tantalizing lead on a big case, little does she know where it will lead.

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by Ivy Pochoda

Florence “Florida” Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women’s prison—or so her ex-cellmate, Diosmary Sandoval, keeps insinuating. Dios knows the truth about Florida’s crimes, understands the truth that Florence hides even from herself. When an unexpected reprieve gives both women their freedom, Dios’s fixation on Florida turns into a dangerous obsession, and a deadly cat-and-mouse chase ensues from Arizona to the desolate streets of Los Angeles.

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by Elizabeth Hay

An actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario. The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. She decides she is through with drama, but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her.

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by James Hynes

In a brothel on the Spanish coast during the waning years of the Roman Empire, a young enslaved boy of unknown parentage is growing up. His world is a kitchen, then an herb-scented garden, followed by a loud and dangerous tavern, and finally, the mysterious upstairs where his mothers and his sisters, his guides in a rough life, do their business. But a hard fate awaits Sparrow, one that involves suffering, murder, mayhem, and the scattering of the little community that has been his whole world.

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by Sarah Bernstein

A young woman moves to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs—collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies “just beyond the garden gate.”

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by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

A series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that blend reportage and imagination. These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them—and even empathize—despite our wish to simply label them monsters.

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by Paul Harding

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his wife discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and neighbors are desperately poor, but protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland.

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by Edan Lepucki

Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son and his pregnant lover to flee and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy.

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by Dan Kois

It’s 1991. Em moved to New York City for adventure and possibility. Working as a literary agent’s assistant, she’s made two close friends: Emily and Lucy. It’s 2004. Em is now a successful book editor, her old friend Lucy wrote a posthumous work that needs a publisher, and her ex-friend Emily is eager to reconnect. As they did once before, these two women—one dead, one alive—force Em to reckon with what kind of creative life she wants to lead.

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by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Nona Fernández accompanies her elderly mother to the doctor to seek an explanation for her frequent falls and inability to remember what preceded them. Weaving together the story of her mother’s illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this brief but intensely imagined autobiographical essay.

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by Nathan Hill

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the ’90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward 20 years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine.

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by Michiko Aoyama

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose.

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by Kelly Link, illustrated by Shaun Tan

Seven reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences. Among them: An aging billionaire sends his sons on a series of errands to decide which will become his heir. A professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference. A young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey.

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