Dillsworth (Theatre of Marvels) delivers a crisp Victorian gothic about a former slave owner and the Black doctoress who treats him on his deathbed. In 1833 London, Hester Reeves worries about her younger sister, Willa, after she catches the eye of wealthy rogue Rowland Cherville. Hester begrudgingly agrees to treat Rowland’s father, Gervaise, for the enormous salary of £10, enough to move her and Willa somewhere safe from Rowland. Because Hester regularly treats sex workers, she recognizes that Gervaise has syphilis. Sensing he’s near death, he confesses to Hester that he made his fortune from plantations in Honduras and that he wishes to atone for his sins. He then charges Hester with finding two women, Aphrodite and Nyx, who were enslaved on one of his plantations many years earlier and later worked as servants in his London house until they ran away, so he can make amends. When Hester learns there was a third woman who left the house with Aphrodite and Nyx, she begins to question Gervaise’s motives. Much of the plot is predictable, but Hester is a heroine worth rooting for, and her search leads to the discovery of some surprising connections between her family and the women who escaped. Historical fiction fans will be pleased. Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Butler’s cutting latest (after The New Me), an aimless young woman leaves Chicago for the Midwestern university town where she grew up. Fleeing her toxic boyfriend, Nick, and a city she’s come to see as an “enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect,” Moddie plans to reconnect with her high school friends and make new ones, but she frequently alienates people with her unfiltered speech and strong opinions (her criticisms of “tedious” celebrity interviews on NPR cause her friend Pam to look at Moddie as if she were “incoherently ranting about the CIA”). The men in the novel—other characters’ partners and an artist who claims he invented New Media, whom Moddie humiliates during a game of air hockey—are for the most part cartoonishly vile. There are tender moments, too, as Moddie opens up to Pam about Nick’s emotional abuse and her failures as an artist. For all of Moddie’s anarchic energies, her character arc feels conventional, though it serves as a vehicle for Butler’s laser-sighted satire of Millennial conformity. This sharply funny novel pulls no punches. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Sullivan (Friends and Strangers) toys with gothic and supernatural elements in her propulsive latest. After a drunken faux pas lands Harvard archivist Jane Flanagan in trouble at work and on the rocks with her husband, she moves back into her recently deceased mother’s house in coastal Maine. Grief and shame weigh heavily on her, so when Genevieve, the new owner of a neighboring cliffside mansion, offers Jane a research project, she jumps at the chance for a distraction. Genevieve has overheard her young son talking to someone in an upstairs bedroom who might be a ghost, and she asks Jane to investigate the house’s history, terrified that her renovations—including digging up graves to make room for a swimming pool—have disturbed the spirits of those buried on the property. The stories Jane discovers reach back through the Victorian era to encounters between Indigenous people and colonists, and include a rewarding twist that sheds light on long-held mysteries from Jane’s childhood. Sullivan leans on many pages of exposition and a few too many coincidences to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, but, for the most part, the plot motors along like a well-oiled machine. This satisfies. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

Sestanovich's leisurely debut novel (after the collection Objects of Desire) traces the divergent paths of two friends from different socioeconomic strata. After college, middle-class Brooklynite Eva moves to Washington, D.C., where she hopes her “boring internship at an exciting newspaper” will lead to a real job. Though she's eventually hired as a researcher, her tasks remain rote and unsatisfying. In D.C., she reconnects and begins sleeping with her ambitious college boyfriend, Eli, but is similarly bored by details of his work for a U.S. senator. Eva's story plays out in counterpoint to that of her wealthy Upper East Side friend Jamie, who embraces the Occupy movement during college, refuses to accept money from his family, and joins a cult-like church in Brooklyn. By the end of the novel, Jamie's well-meaning desire for community, which drives him to purchase an abandoned warehouse where he illegally houses artists, leads to disaster. While readers hungry for plot and resolution may be left unsatisfied, Sestanovich captivates with her distinctive characterizations—including of Eva's parents, who offer Jamie financial support and show more interest in him than their daughter—and insights into the reverberating consequences of a gap between one's intentions and one's actions. The result is an intelligent exploration of lives in the making. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this scintillating collection from Indigenous Canadian author Belcourt (A Minor Chorus), queer Cree men grapple with the legacy of colonialism. “Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century can mean that a single hour can be governed simultaneously by joy and sadness,” says the narrator of “Lived Experience.” Such conflicting emotions play into his ambivalence about sex, but after swearing off encounters with other men, he falls for a painter named Will, and shows up at Will’s art gallery opening wearing a denim jacket emblazoned with the phrase “GAY 4 PAY JK ABOLISH WORK.” Amorous and economic concerns also overlap in “Poetry Class,” about a poet who believes in the “revolutionary demand” of his craft, while his ex was obsessed with satisfying the market. In the gritty and moving “Outside,” a restless young man named Jack beats a drug trafficking charge, returns from jail to his grandmother’s trailer on the reservation, and matches on Tinder with a neighbor named Lucy. Throughout, Belcourt sheds light on the transformative potential of love, describing, for instance, how Jack is changed by Lucy when she invites him into her life, which “open[s] space inside his mind for different memories” and drives him to “give [himself] over to new pasts, future emotional histories.” These wise and open-hearted stories astonish. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

YA author Anderson (Feed) makes an auspicious adult debut with this rollicking tale of 11th-century relic hunters. After Brother Nicephorus, a Benedictine monk in the pox-riddled Italian city of Bari, has a dream about St. Nicholas, the archbishop orders him to travel to Myra, in the Byzantine Empire, to procure the saint’s bones, which are reputed to leak a mysterious liquid that can heal those afflicted with the disease. Accompanied by legendary relic hunter Tyun and his dog-man sidekick, Reprobus, Nicephorus sets sail for Myra, only to discover they are in a race with a rival crew of Venetian relic hunters. After reaching Myra, Nicephorus and company experience many setbacks on their way to disinter the bones from the basilica where they are guarded. Anderson stocks the exhilarating narrative with sea battles, comely spies, duels, and double crosses, and succeeds at transporting the reader back to 11th-century Italy and Byzantium. Readers will be swept up in this marvelous adventure. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Brazilian author Drummond’s sharp English-language debut, curator and self-proclaimed “misandrist and misogynist” Vivian Noronha navigates her privileged life of designer goods, endless parties, drugs, and sex in Rio de Janeiro. She recounts her family’s multigenerational history of serving as diplomats and her difficult teen years, when she was diagnosed with depression and heavily medicated. Now she’s in her early 30s, and though her family is less well-off than it once was, she coasts on her upper-class status. While attending a rave with mostly white, gay, and wealthy revelers, she witnesses the police attack a street vendor named Darlene. First they smash Darlene’s illegal caipirinhas stand, then they beat her, but the ravers continue filing into the club, unbothered by the brutality. As the party continues, Vivian considers the abuses and hypocrisies of Brazil’s classist and racist society. The book’s power comes from Vivian’s scathing assessment of the elite: rich people are painted as oblivious to the concerns of others, the artistic class as disingenuous in their calls for social equality, and even the protagonist herself as more interested in being glamorous and sexually desirable than anything else. Drummond’s incendiary tale burns bright. (June)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Tripp (Georgia) offers an intimate portrait of Jackie Kennedy during her courtship and marriage to JFK. The story starts in 1951 when Jackie has just graduated from Vassar and hopes to break into magazine publishing. Friends and family members try to set her up with Jack Kennedy, but initially she’s uninterested in the boyish congressman, perceiving him as the type who “loves a game and will leave it once he’s won.” As the two keep running into each other socially, she starts to fall for him, and eventually breaks off her engagement to stockbroker Johnny Husted. She and Jack begin dating as he hits the campaign trail in his bid for the Senate and get married in 1953. Jack’s infidelities, the death of their third child, and the stress of the Cold War cause fractures in their relationship, which are only beginning to heal in the months before their fateful trip to Dallas in 1963. Tripp brings Jackie and Jack’s romance to life through carefully crafted scenes, and offers a humanizing portrayal of Jackie’s complex love for her husband. Camelot devotees, take note. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (June)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Wroblewski delivers a gratifying if overstuffed prequel to his 2008 bestseller, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. In May 1919, 22-year-old Wisconsin automotive worker John Sawtelle witnesses his boss’s murder and heads north with his wife, Mary, and their friends Ulysses Elbow and Frank Eckling out of fear he’ll be falsely implicated in the crime. After the four settle on a dilapidated farm, John works as a dog breeder, raises two sons, Edgar and Claude, and encounters some unsettling surprises in the woods surrounding the property. One plot thread features a neighbor with supernatural abilities—she ages at half the normal human rate and can see into a person’s future. Another involves a violent and tragic episode, which results in the Sawtelles and their friends going their separate ways. The author tends to lose his way in lengthy sections of backstory and drawn-out conversation pieces as the plot slowly approaches the events of the first novel. Still, there are beautiful passages on the bonds between humans and animals and plenty of folksy charm. Fans of the first book will be satisfied. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (June)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Bordas (How to Behave in a Crowd) sets her clever twist on the campus novel at the country’s first MFA program for stand-up comedy. Unfolding over a single December day at an unnamed university in Chicago, the narrative begins with a faculty department meeting and progresses to a student workshop. Everyone involved in the program is nervously anticipating the arrival of a controversial guest lecturer, recently disgraced comedy legend Manny Reinhardt. Dorothy, the only female faculty member, hopes to make a comeback in her comedy career, while her colleague Kruger dreams of quitting teaching and ascending to movie stardom. Among the students, Artie fears he’s “too good-looking to be funny,” while Jo is constantly on the lookout for Andy Kaufman, who she thinks is still alive. A subplot involving reports of an active shooter on campus feels unnecessary; more successful are Bordas’s explorations of what a stand-up routine requires of its writer and what, if anything, is off-limits, either because the subject is too offensive or because the material belongs to someone else. Occasional moments of broad comedy, like an embarrassing bathroom scene, spice up the observational humor incorporated throughout. It’s a knockout. Agent: Jackie Ko, Wylie Agency. (June)

Reviewed on 04/26/2024 | Details & Permalink