The British are Coming: Quercus Books arrives on US shores, debuting with Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, a gripping and extremely intelligent thriller that will fully engage, mercilessly shock, and unexpectedly surprise its readers from its first page to its last.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell says of Roxana Robinson’s new novel, Sparta: “Robinson remembers and honors the veterans and families of one war, and all wars. She speaks for her father and mine, for all the daughters and mothers, the sons and fathers.”
Robert Boswell’s new novel adopts an unusual point of view: unreliable omniscience. And though the author’s execution of this bizarre form is provocative when it finally culminates, that’s not the reason Tumbledown is such an absorbing read.
Alexandra Chasin’s second novel, Brief, takes the form of the oral legal brief of an unnamed and ungendered “J. Wanton,” a “vandella,” petitioning an also unnamed judge for clemency in an elided case of art vandalism.
Stephen King’s newest novel, Joyland, is set in a North Carolina amusement park during the summer of 1973. Like the attractions that populate the book, it’s a read perhaps more enjoyable for the ride than the destination.
Elanor Dymott’s debut novel, Every Contact Leaves A Trace, presents itself as both love story and mystery. Told retrospectively months from the action of the novel, a man relates the series of events that led to his wife’s murder — a story that, in his process of uncovering, reveals the image of a woman he clearly never really knew.
Benjamin Percy’s fourth book and second novel, Red Moon, takes everything enjoyable about Percy’s fiction and cranks up the dials. It’s a rollicking, tightly plotted, hirsute good read that takes the classic werewolf trope and drops it into a modern Homeland-esque political landscape.
Kathleen Tessaro’s fifth novel, The Perfume Collector, invites the reader into a fashionable world where scent and apparel wield transformative magic.
In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco), Ethan Rutherford’s fine debut collection, is part realism, part satire, part historical reclamation, and part dystopian prophecy. Of the eight stories in this collection, half tread in domestic realism, while half, give or take, are tales of survival.
Over the course of these stories, a conviction emerges: faith and lust are not unalike.
Julie Wu’s debut novel, The Third Son (Algonquin), depicts the struggles of a Taiwanese boy, Saburo Tong, to escape his impoverished, cruel background and to establish a meaningful adult life for himself, a journey that takes him from poverty and oppression in Taiwan to the opportunity and relative freedom of 1950s America.
