by Marie-Helene Bertino

As a child, Adina Giorno recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

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by Bothayna Al-Essa

The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish—allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

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by Kate Greathead

George is a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; sweet yet noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend; distant from but still reliant on his mother; charmingly funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Despite his failings, it’s hard not to root for George at least a little. Beneath his cynicism is a reservoir of fondness for his girlfriend, Jenny, and her valiant willingness to put up with him. Each demonstration of his flaws is paired with a self-eviscerating comment. No one is more disappointed in him than himself (except maybe Jenny and his mother).

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by Kelly Link

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom one year after disappearing from their hometown, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. In the room with them is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of a bargain their teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been.

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by Danzy Senna

If Jane can just finish her latest novel, she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped, and like countless writers before her Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with a hot young producer to create “diverse content” for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer” to create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy ever to hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.

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by Jennifer Croft

Eight translators arrive at a house belonging to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore her home and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets—and deceptions—of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for.

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by Vinson Cunningham

When David first hears the senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’s first Black president. Working for the senator’s presidential campaign over the next 18 months, David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

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by Rita Bullwinkel

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of a group of eight teenage girl boxers has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs, the competitors’ pasts and futures come to the fore as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

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by Ben Shattuck

In these 12 linked stories set across three centuries, two men meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine.

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by Percival Everett

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

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by Rufi Thorpe

At 20, Margo is alone with an infant and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up and asks to move in with her, she agrees. Then Margo begins to form a plan: She’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems?

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by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

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by Samantha Harvey

A day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts who’ve been selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

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by Tony Tulathimutte

A novel-in-stories that follows a cast of linked characters. In “The Feminist,” a young man’s allyship turns to nihilism as he realizes it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

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by Dinaw Mengestu

After abandoning his career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah. Five years later, with his marriage to Hannah collapsing, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, of his childhood. With Hannah and their two-year-old back in Paris, Mamush sets out on a journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. He begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them.

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by Miranda July

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

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by Sarah Manguso

When aspiring writer Jane meets filmmaker John, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

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by Alison Espach

Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe’s plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

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