by Hal Ebbott

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s 52nd birthday. This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt into an unspeakable act, the ramifications of which are enormous. Accusations, denials, and shattered illusions follow, driving wedges between friends, spouses, children and parents, and exposing the treacherous fault lines on which these families have dwelt.

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by Amy Shearn

Leaning on her best friend to show her the ropes, recent divorcée Rachel Bloomstein dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs? Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, an AI chatbot. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy.

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by Karen Russell

A historic dust storm is ravaging the town of Uz, Neb. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. Here we meet a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer with a time-traveling camera.

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by Katie Kitamura

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her—and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.

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by Daniel Wallace

In this collection of flash fictions, lives are altered in what appear to be minor moments: an unlatched lock, an old photo, a light left on too long. Details that constellate into something mysterious and magical. The drifter who is mistaken for a movie star, an old woman who sits on the roof of her house to smoke her secret cigarette, a man building a coffin for his wife—the men and women in these stories, hungry for connection, often find that everything hangs on a gust of wind or a single word.

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by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

A beheaded body interrupts a quinceañera. An obsession with her father’s bizarre video game shifts a lonely girl’s reality. A sentient tail sprouts from a hospital worker’s backside, throwing her romantic life into peril. And in the novella “Community Hole,” a recently cancelled musician flees New York and finds herself in a haunted punk house in Boston. This collection, at once playful, grisly, and tender, presents a tapestry of women ailing for something to believe in—even if it hurts them.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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by Virginia Evans

Most mornings, around half past 10, Sybil Van Antwerp sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books. Because at 73, Sybil has used her letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. But as Sybil expects her life to go on as it always has, letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life.

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by Oyinkan Braithwaite

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin, there is no denying the resemblance between the child and the dead woman. There is also the matter of the family curse, which has caused three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof. When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all?

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by Nnedi Okorafor

Zelu’s life is upended when she loses her job and her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed, she decides to write something just for herself—nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she embarks on a life-altering journey—one that catapults her into literary stardom, and perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be.

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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.

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by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

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by Laila Lalami

Sara has just landed at LAX when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined she is at risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence. Months pass, then one day a new resident arrives, leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

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by Ocean Vuong

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Conn., 19-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. The unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

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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.

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by Susan Choi

Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

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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.

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by Jessica Francis Kane

Winter 1952. When Penelope Fitzgerald receives a letter from two elderly sisters named Delaney, distant relations with a silver mine, who dangle the possibility of an inheritance, she recognizes it as a creative and practical lifeline. She and her six-year-old, Valpy, travel all the way to Fonseca. But when they arrive, nothing goes to plan. There are others vying for the Delaney money, and Penelope must navigate a quixotic household and guide her impressionable son. More and more people frequent the house: an ambitious American couple, local entrepreneurs and artists, and finally a handsome stranger who claims he is a Delaney.

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by Chris Kraus

In northern Minnesota, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance. On the fringes of the so-called “meth community,” the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between the art world and Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, Catt turns away from her own life and toward the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession.

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by Nick Newman

In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother. When a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their grounds, their once-solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted. Who is he? Where did he come from? And most importantly, what does he want?

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by Ali Smith

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavor to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.

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by Charmaine Wilkerson

When 10-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot and saw her brother on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, her life shattered as well. The crime went unsolved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a well-to-do enclave of New England, the case had a voyeuristic pull. Years later, after her high-profile romance ends, Ebby flees to France. She begins to think about that jar, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. It held more than her family’s history—it might also hold the key to her future.

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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.

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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.

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by Hannah Deitch

A scholarship kid with straight As and big dreams, Evie Gordon always thought she was special, that she’d be someone. But after graduating from an elite university, she finds herself drowning in debt and working as an SAT tutor for the super-rich of Los Angeles. Everything changes one Sunday, when she arrives for her weekly lesson at the Victors’ Beverly Hills estate and, in lieu of a bored teenager, finds the bloody remains of the parents strewn through their beautiful back garden, and a woman crying for help within a closet.

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by Sonya Walger

This is the story of a father and a daughter. The father is the unlikeliest of fathers. He is a charismatic bon vivant, a polo player, race-car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and skydiver. He is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall. In the present day, the daughter, now a mother to young children, looks back to consider her unconventional youth and the source of its chaos.

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by Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them. Sonia, an aspiring novelist, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

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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.

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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.

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by Brandon Taylor

Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the Manhattan art scene. Working part time for an art restorer, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block and finds it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make—in art and in life.

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by Catherine Lacey

Adrift after a sudden breakup, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence.

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by Adam Haslett

Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter’s numbness, the event that he has avoided for 20 years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, long ago put behind her the decision that estranged her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

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by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: Every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins.

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by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Tara’s Nov. 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay. That yesterday doesn’t mean the 17th of November, that tomorrow means the 18th, and that the 19th is a day we may never see.”

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by Bryan Washington

In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, 10 years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

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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.

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by Annie Hartnett

Lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Mass., if it weren’t for the sudden death of his daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle, is single again. PJ decides to drive across the country and win her back. Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes, leaving PJ the guardian of his brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town.

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by Kevin Wilson

Ever since her dad left them 20 years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom. While it’s a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad 30 years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable.

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by Ron Currie Jr.

Babs Dionne, doting grandmother and vicious crime matriarch, rules Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her daughter Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction. When a drug kingpin discovers his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs’s youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing. In 24 hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath.

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by Emily Adrian

Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department: renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. According to everyone on campus, their marriage is perfect. That is, until Ethan sleeps with the department administrative assistant, Abigail. While Ethan’s away for the summer, Simone grows inordinately close with her advisee, Roberta, who fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis, painting a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail, and even herself.

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by Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee 1932. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out to locate and bring back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer.

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by Elliot Ackerman

Skwerl, once an elite member of the CIA’s paramilitary unit, was cast out after a raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz, a former Afghan pilot of legendary skill, now works the graveyard shift at a gas station. Recruited into a shadowy network of “sheepdogs,” they embark on a mission to repossess a multi-million-dollar private jet. But as they wind through a labyrinth of lies and hidden agendas, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Their contact vanishes, their handler’s motives are suspect, and the true source of their payday remains a mystery.

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by Olivia Laing

It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, who is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret, and his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy’s Years of Lead, he sets in motion a tragedy he doesn’t intend.

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by Kate Folk

Linda’s life might seem drab. But every month, she indulges her true passion: taking a round-trip flight to a regional hub. Linda’s secret is she’s sexually attracted to planes. She believes her destiny is to someday “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite Linda with her soulmate. Linda is used to hiding her true nature, but when her coworker invites her to a quarterly Vision Board Brunch, Linda sees a chance to get closer to her work friend, and to nudge the universe on behalf of her destiny.

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by Lucas Schaefer

Austin, Texas: There’s a new face at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering ex-fighter, he begins to come into his own. Then one night Nathaniel vanishes. Across the city, Charles is undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body. More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance.

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by Jess Walter

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth and fled for a cabin in the woods. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

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by Natalia Theodoridou

After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain exactly what has happened to her.

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by Torrey Peters

In this collection of one novel and three stories, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

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by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

As a temp in Tokyo, Riki barely scrapes by. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance. Meanwhile, Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. It seems futile—until Motoi learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, a company has found a loophole. Before long, everyone has an opinion on the matter: from Yuko’s sex-obsessed best friend, to Motoi’s mother, and even the sex-worker-slash-therapist Riki has been to, after she accepted a down payment as a surrogate.

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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.

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by Abdulrazak Gurnah

At the turn of the 21st century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with a new sense of ambition. There he catches the eye of Fauzia, who sees in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. When the two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all, they little imagine how deeply their fates will entwine and diverge.

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by Emma Pattee

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Ore. With no way to reach her husband—and a city in chaos—there’s nothing to do but walk. Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines. For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.

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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.

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by E.Y. Zhao

Ryan Lo begins playing table tennis at age eight, under the tutelage of his brilliant but ruthless coach Kristian, who sees talent in him that might be nurtured into greatness. Throughout an adolescence circumscribed by Kristian’s demanding behavior, Ryan forms jealousy-fueled and mutually adoring friendships with his teammates and competitors, falls in love with fellow table tennis star Anabel Yu, and above all, wins championships. By 21, Ryan ascends all the way to the highest echelon of international table tennis, but he doesn’t stay there. Instead, he abandons competition and is dead before his 25th birthday. What happened?

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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.

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by Aram Mrjoian

Outside Detroit on the island of Gross Ile, the Kurkjians receive news that Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, has swum into the depths of Lake Michigan with no intent of returning to shore. More than a century earlier, Gregor, the great-grandfather and patriarch of the Kurkjian family, survived the Armenian Genocide. Decades later, Gregor’s epic mythos is inherited by his family as they navigate living in its shadow. As the Kurkjians now struggle with their new, devastating loss, secrets and shortcomings rise to the surface, forcing each relative to decide where their own story fits.

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by Adam Johnson

The Wayfinder is an epic, sweeping novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed.

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by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.

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by Erika Swyler

The walled city Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most, called the Sainted. Saint Enita Malovis, a bio-prosthetist, feels the end of her life approaching, and decides to create a physical being, Nix, filled with her knowledge. Suddenly, a fellow Sainted is murdered and the city AI erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into a war that could change everything between Bulwark’s underclass and the imposed order.

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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.

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by Jade Chang

Nobody is more surprised than Lola when a jackpot falls in her lap: She stars in a viral video, opening a path for her to become a self-help guru. But is she a scammer or a sage? Just as Lola tells others to be their own guiding lights, she can’t find hers: She’s grieving; she’s accused of using the notoriety of her friend’s death to fuel her rise; and she’s full of questions about the fate of her mother, who came to America fleeing China’s one-child policy, got deported when Lola was eight, and has now vanished.

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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.

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by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, can they trust each other enough to protect one another—and the seeds in their care? And can they put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together?

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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.

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by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang

Enter the world of an elite Chinese couple: a life of luxury, wealth, and around-the-clock service, which includes their trusted nanny, Yu Ling. Slipping in and out of the shadows, meticulous in her care of their only son, she has served the family for years and knows their secrets. But little do they suspect that Yu Ling has secrets of her own. When the family becomes the subject of a government investigation, their fortunes crumble, and the nanny is left to make a series of life-changing choices. How far will she go to claim her due?

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by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

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