A struggling new age author’s brush with a forest fire sends him in search of help from a higher power in this resonant drama from Raymond (Denial). At 41, Arthur Zinn has seen better days. He recently released his fourth book to critical pans and tepid sales, forcing him to relocate to his... Continue reading »

Icelander Jónasson’s top-notch sequel to Death at the Sanatorium takes inspiration from Agatha Christie’s still-unexplained 11-day disappearance in 1926. Set mainly in 2012, the action picks up where the last book left off, with young Reykjavík detective Helgi Reykdal planning a quiet futur... Continue reading »

Intricately plotted with luxuriant worldbuilding, the dark fantasy debut from illustrator Wong announces her as an exciting new voice. Alma is 11 years old and living in disgrace with her unwed mother when her aristocratic father, Lord Zander Avera, comes to retrieve her. As head of one of the Four ... Continue reading »

Hammett makes an effervescent debut with this enemies-to-lovers sports romance. Lucas, a cox for the Cambridge crew team, has always had issues with George, the club president, an underwear model from Wisconsin. After losing a big race against their rival, Oxford, the teammates hate each other more ... Continue reading »

Boyd’s understated yet deeply moving second graphic memoir (after Chicken Rising) recounts her experience as a shy girl entering junior high in late 1970s Canada. Dawn’s mom, a bridge- and bingo-playing paragon of small-town decency, thunders against sex in movies, declares that the Legion ... Continue reading »

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding... Continue reading »

In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »

New York Times Magazine staff writer Mahler (The Challenge) provides an expansive yet fast-paced history of the final chaotic years of New York City’s 1980s. Mahler characterizes the era as one of overlapping crises: Wall Street’s 1987 Black Monday crash, the rise of crack and home... Continue reading »

“What ultimately matters is that we think like an herbalist,” contends Robinett, an herbalist herself, in her standout debut. Framing her treatment of the topic as a “why-to” more than a “how-to,” Robinett covers such categories as nervines (which target one’s nervous system), sedatives (fo... Continue reading »

Historian Fletcher (Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century) incisively explores the dark underbelly of American evangelical missionary work via the experiences of missionaries’ children. Drawing on her own childhood in Kenya and interviews with 80 others who w... Continue reading »

Twining the fantasy of an unfettered childhood adventure with the majestic reality of an ancient redwood forest, Fleming (Rock That Vote) and Groenink (Whales in the City) offer an outdoors variation on a classic children’s rhyme: “This is the forest./ This is the steeple./ Giants ... Continue reading »