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?

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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?

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.”

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop

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.

Buy at Bookshop