New Releases I'm Looking Forward To 2025: Winter/Spring (Fiction & Nonfiction)
It's a brand new year, which means brand new books. I've been diving into the many listicles coming out and the depths of NetGalley to figure out what books are going to be my big 2025 release priorities in the next few months. I'm starting off by making picks for spring (by publisher definition), winter by the fact that I will be surrounded by snow until at least May. I apologize for the release dates not being in order within months, that just didn't happen this time around, but I hope it will be useful nonetheless. Because I haven't read (almost) any of these books because they haven't been released, I can't offer you the self-made summaries that I love to write, so we're settling for the Goodreads blurbs. If you want to add any of these to your Goodreads lists, the pages are linked over the word "summary" for each blurb. Also, any books I've received an ARC of is noted with a *. These books are gifted for review purposes, and while sometimes they're sent to me unsolicited, they're largely books that I found and requested myself, and if they are through PR, they are books I'm wildly excited to read on my own. Beneath the summary, I discuss what's caught my eye about these different titles to give you insight on why they're on my list for the year. I'm hoping to make this an ongoing series that I'll post before each new season (so probably 3 times a year) to give you insight on what I'm excited about. January is always the hardest because there's been less time for the hype to generate, but 15 books for the start of the year is still a strong beginning.If you do work for a publisher and happen to be reading this, I would love ARCs of any of these books! But all of these are ones that would be well worth the wait. Let's get excited for 2025 releases!January
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight (out now)Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents’ secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.
Thoughts: January always gets off to a quiet start for books off the back of the holidays and the silence of the end of the year. I learned about this one from a Barnes and Noble email and then seen it pop up a few more places since. My Libby hold is months out, but I'm definitely curious to pick this one up. I've never read a book set in Scotland and wasn't successful on finding one when I was there recently, so I'll take it now.
February
*Dream State by Eric Puchner (February 18)Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garret doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett—a haunted by a tragic event from his past—become impossible to bury; she soon anticipates the big day with dread. And when she finally decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, their lives will be altered forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations.Years later, Cece’s daughter, Lana, and Charlie’s son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Before long, they find themselves enacting the very same mistakes that dogged their parents, falling victim to the perennial pitfalls of adulthood. How do we avoid duplicity, heartbreak, and deceit when mortality looms over us all? With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, Dream State casts the timeless travails of family in a singular light. Puchner has written a richly layered, character-driven novel that is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence.
Thoughts: I have read this one already because I got an ARC in advance! Growing up in Wyoming, I don't get to read many books set in a place I know inside and out. This setting in a tourist town in Montana comes very close, and I absolutely loved all the little Western outdoorsy details here. Puchner does a great job with the setting. The future casting consequences about the further consequences of climate change in the near future has sent me into a bit of a doom spiral with what's going on in the world already, lately, but if you have a stronger constitution for that than I do, it's worth picking up.
*You Didn't Hear This From Me by Kelsey McKinney (February 11)Can you keep a secret? As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that she’d typically collect over drinks with friends. She realized she wasn’t the only one missing these little morsels and her hunger for this aspect of normalcy took on a life of its own and the blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born. With listenership in the millions and gossip quickly becoming her day job, Kelsey found herself with the urge to think more critically about gossip as a form, to better understand the role that it plays in our culture.In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin and how can we better recognize when gossip is being weaponized against the oppressed? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life because they are a public figure? And how do we even define “gossip,” anyway? She dishes on the art of eavesdropping and dives deep into how pop culture has changed the way that we look at hearsay. But as much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture the heart of how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear. With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth – and how much the truth really matters in the first place.
Thoughts: I've had the chance to read this one as well thanks to the publisher, and I'll tell you that it's a fantastic read! I'm a huge believer in gossip, so this was very validating, but for anyone who loves pop culture and the internet like I do, this book will make you go, Someone else remembers that?! Such smart, wonderful essays.
No Fault by Haley Mlotek (February 18)Summary: Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.
Thoughts: This one immediately grabbed my attention. I tend to gravitate towards fiction, but much of my early list is picking up nonfiction titles. This sounds like a fascinating blend of memoire with wider dimension creating a commentary about a subject that is particularly at the top of societal mind at the moment.
*Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (February 25)When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes calling, offering an opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS-affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup, Nadia leaps at the chance.In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused about taking orders from an obvious UN novice, and the murmurs of deradicalization being inherently unethical and possibly illegal threaten to end Nadia’s UN career before it even begins.Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decides to visit the camp with her sullen team, composed of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr.At the camp, after a clumsy introductory session with the ISIS women, Nadia meets Sara, one of the younger refugees, whose accent immediately gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction, Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamanté headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home.But the system Nadia finds herself trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment barely makes a dent in Nadia’s ultimate goal of freeing Sara . . . and the other women, too, of course. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined.A triumph of dark humor, Fundamentally asks bold questions: Who can tell someone what to believe? And how do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?
Thoughts: This book was on my radar, but it didn't become a priority on my TBR until I read an article by Joanne Finney in Good Housekeeping calling this book "one of the funniest I've read for ages." She also characterizes it as "thought-provoking" and "sensitive". That all sounds amazing to me, so I'll take the recommendation and move it up in TBR.
When We Grow Up by Angelica Baker (February 25)Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation in Hawai'i with five of her oldest friends as they each approach thirty, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. There is Jessie, who won’t stop talking about her new boyfriend; Mac, trying to pretend he hasn’t outgrown the group; Kyle, the eternal peacemaker; and Renzo, who brought them all together but keeps picking fights. And then, of course, there’s Liam, who Clare has barely seen since high school but somehow can’t get out of her head—or her bed.But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers. As the resentments and tensions that have always simmered just beneath the surface begin to boil, Clare must ask if their shared history is enough to sustain their friendships, or if growing up might mean letting go.With crackling wit and emotional fearlessness, When We Grow Up is a provocative portrait of friendship in a world that feels ever more unrecognizable and a searing exploration of what it means to be a good person.
Thoughts: This just checks all the typical boxes of books that draw me in. It's about a writer, it's about a character getting removed from their normal surroundings, and there's a friend group. Consider me thoroughly intrigued.
March
*We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (March 4)“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace – the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.
Thoughts: I am very curious about this one! I love books set in the UK, and I've never read one set in Doncaster, but I have enough musicians I've followed over the years from there that I can hear the accent in my ear. Hopefully that will help with adjusting to the dialect here.
*Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley (March 11)Jane and Dan have been married for nineteen years, but Jane isn’t sure they’re going to make it to twenty. The mother of two feels unneeded by her teenagers, and her writing career has screeched to an unsuccessful halt. Her one published novel sold under five hundred copies. Worse? She’s pretty sure Dan is cheating on her. When the couple goes to the renowned upscale restaurant La Fin du Monde to celebrate their anniversary, Jane thinks it’s as good a place as any to tell Dan she wants a divorce.But before they even get to the second course, an underground climate activist group bursts into the dining room. Jane is shocked—and not just because she’s in a hostage situation the likes of which she’s only seen in the movies. Nearly everything the disorganized and bumbling activists say and do is right out of the pages of her failed book. Even Dan (who Jane wasn’t sure even read her book) admits it’s eerily familiar.Which means Dan and Jane are the only ones who know what’s going to happen next. And they’re the only ones who can stop it. This wasn’t what Jane was thinking of when she said “’til death do us part” all those years ago, but if they can survive this, maybe they can survive anything—even marriage.
Thoughts: I was a huge fan of Tanner and Louise last year, so I was going to jump straight on another Colleen Oakley book. These are great as lighter reads that still have a real emotional core.
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul (March 4)Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.
Thoughts: This book is either going to change my life or send me into the deepest anxiety spiral, but I'm intrigued enough by the summary and the cover to give it a try. I love a good essay collection.
On the Clock by Claire Baglin (March 4)Claire Baglin’s On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator’s summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and a sharp ear for workplace jargon, dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin’s depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. The past is remarkably vivid in On the Clock: her childhood memories of their bleak small town and of summer vacations spent at campgrounds by the sea in Brittany resonate. And the present blazes in scenes of the young woman’s current fast-food trial: the awful boss, the nasty manager, and all the tedium and horror of dead-end work:Slowly the oven door opens and a nursery-school tune announces that the salad rolls can come out [and] I’m mired in the heart of pointlessness. I stick a straw into the whipped cream but don’t take off the end of the paper wrapper so they’ll know it hasn’t been used, I’m conscientious.
Thoughts: This caught my eye from a random listicle. I love getting to read books in translation, and I also tend to like books that revolve around jobs and experiences that come at work.
April
*Bad Nature by Ariel Courage (April 1)When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part revenge tale, part lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.
Thoughts: I love a road trip novel. If I hear about them, I'll tend to pick this one up. The position this character is in plays with stakes in a fascinating way, and I'm curious to see how this will unfold. It's also interesting (and will likely become more common), that so much of literary fiction is putting a point on climate change in novels that are also about a variety of other things.
*Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker (April 15)It’s 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends—that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses. But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men—including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto—and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt–racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan’s worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down. Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all—addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father’s string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends—we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.
Thoughts: I'm not sure what direction this book is going to go, and I'm not sure I'm going to like it, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a go. A book about writers, a Fleabag comp, and a ridiculous family published by Dutton has my attention.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (April 8)Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her – and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.Taut, hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
Thoughts: I loved Intimacies, so I am incredibly excited to pick up this novel. The blurb itself sounds fantastic as well.
May
Food Person by Adam Roberts (May 20)Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare hungover, flakey, shallow, and—worst of all—indifferent to food. But between Molly’s bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly’s charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly’s heart and stomach? Or will Isabella’s devotion to her culinary idols and Molly’s monstrous ego send the entire cookbook—and both of their careers—up in flames?A mouth-watering, hilarious debut peppered with insider food world detail—the real writers behind celebrity chef cookbooks, the hot restaurants that run on the backs of their sous-chefs, the secret to perfect blinis á la Russe—Adam Roberts' Food Person is a literary soufflé—a deceptively light, deliciously rich, showstopping confection.
Thoughts: Books set at magazines are always going to spark my attention, and I particularly love when they can incorporate food too. I think that this has a lot of what I loved about Piglet in it, which makes me very excited.
*Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan (May 27)Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy.Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.
Thoughts: I'm already seeing this book getting bookstagram buzz, and the cover is giving major My Year of Rest and Relaxation vibes. This feels like a super fresh concept, and I love a good voice driven novel. It also already has heaps of great reviews on Goodreads.
Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents’ secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .
As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.
Thoughts: January always gets off to a quiet start for books off the back of the holidays and the silence of the end of the year. I learned about this one from a Barnes and Noble email and then seen it pop up a few more places since. My Libby hold is months out, but I'm definitely curious to pick this one up. I've never read a book set in Scotland and wasn't successful on finding one when I was there recently, so I'll take it now.
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garret doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett—a haunted by a tragic event from his past—become impossible to bury; she soon anticipates the big day with dread. And when she finally decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, their lives will be altered forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations.
Years later, Cece’s daughter, Lana, and Charlie’s son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Before long, they find themselves enacting the very same mistakes that dogged their parents, falling victim to the perennial pitfalls of adulthood. How do we avoid duplicity, heartbreak, and deceit when mortality looms over us all?
With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, Dream State casts the timeless travails of family in a singular light. Puchner has written a richly layered, character-driven novel that is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence.
Thoughts: I have read this one already because I got an ARC in advance! Growing up in Wyoming, I don't get to read many books set in a place I know inside and out. This setting in a tourist town in Montana comes very close, and I absolutely loved all the little Western outdoorsy details here. Puchner does a great job with the setting. The future casting consequences about the further consequences of climate change in the near future has sent me into a bit of a doom spiral with what's going on in the world already, lately, but if you have a stronger constitution for that than I do, it's worth picking up.
Can you keep a secret? As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that she’d typically collect over drinks with friends. She realized she wasn’t the only one missing these little morsels and her hunger for this aspect of normalcy took on a life of its own and the blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born. With listenership in the millions and gossip quickly becoming her day job, Kelsey found herself with the urge to think more critically about gossip as a form, to better understand the role that it plays in our culture.
In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin and how can we better recognize when gossip is being weaponized against the oppressed? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life because they are a public figure? And how do we even define “gossip,” anyway? She dishes on the art of eavesdropping and dives deep into how pop culture has changed the way that we look at hearsay. But as much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture the heart of how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear. With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth – and how much the truth really matters in the first place.
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.
Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.
When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes calling, offering an opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS-affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup, Nadia leaps at the chance.
In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused about taking orders from an obvious UN novice, and the murmurs of deradicalization being inherently unethical and possibly illegal threaten to end Nadia’s UN career before it even begins.
Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decides to visit the camp with her sullen team, composed of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr.
At the camp, after a clumsy introductory session with the ISIS women, Nadia meets Sara, one of the younger refugees, whose accent immediately gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction, Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamanté headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home.
But the system Nadia finds herself trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment barely makes a dent in Nadia’s ultimate goal of freeing Sara . . . and the other women, too, of course. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined.
A triumph of dark humor, Fundamentally asks bold questions: Who can tell someone what to believe? And how do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?
Clare is supposed to be the grown-up one. Married to the love of her life, with a major deal for her first novel, she has everything she thought she wanted. So then why does it all feel so wrong? When she agrees to a weeklong vacation in Hawai'i with five of her oldest friends as they each approach thirty, she is hoping for an escape with the people who know her best. There is Jessie, who won’t stop talking about her new boyfriend; Mac, trying to pretend he hasn’t outgrown the group; Kyle, the eternal peacemaker; and Renzo, who brought them all together but keeps picking fights. And then, of course, there’s Liam, who Clare has barely seen since high school but somehow can’t get out of her head—or her bed.
But when a terrifying news alert shatters their peace, it becomes harder to ignore how much the world has changed since they were teenagers. As the resentments and tensions that have always simmered just beneath the surface begin to boil, Clare must ask if their shared history is enough to sustain their friendships, or if growing up might mean letting go.
With crackling wit and emotional fearlessness, When We Grow Up is a provocative portrait of friendship in a world that feels ever more unrecognizable and a searing exploration of what it means to be a good person.
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace – the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?
Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.
Jane and Dan have been married for nineteen years, but Jane isn’t sure they’re going to make it to twenty. The mother of two feels unneeded by her teenagers, and her writing career has screeched to an unsuccessful halt. Her one published novel sold under five hundred copies. Worse? She’s pretty sure Dan is cheating on her. When the couple goes to the renowned upscale restaurant La Fin du Monde to celebrate their anniversary, Jane thinks it’s as good a place as any to tell Dan she wants a divorce.
But before they even get to the second course, an underground climate activist group bursts into the dining room. Jane is shocked—and not just because she’s in a hostage situation the likes of which she’s only seen in the movies. Nearly everything the disorganized and bumbling activists say and do is right out of the pages of her failed book. Even Dan (who Jane wasn’t sure even read her book) admits it’s eerily familiar.
Which means Dan and Jane are the only ones who know what’s going to happen next. And they’re the only ones who can stop it. This wasn’t what Jane was thinking of when she said “’til death do us part” all those years ago, but if they can survive this, maybe they can survive anything—even marriage.
Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.
Claire Baglin’s On the Clock packs a family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story into a compact tale told in two alternating strands. The first follows the 20-year-old narrator’s summer job at a fast food franchise and the other shows us moments from her childhood with her family, with a particular focus on her hapless, infuriating, good-hearted father, a low-paid but devoted electrician in a factory. These two skeins sketch out in swift turns two stories of underappreciated work: one covering several decades, the other a summer; one constituting a sort of life, the other a stopgap on the way to something different (the narrator is a college student). With a keen eye for eloquent details and a sharp ear for workplace jargon, dry humor, and a crisp compelling style, Baglin’s depiction of their lives is particularly rich, at once affectionate and alienated. The past is remarkably vivid in On the Clock: her childhood memories of their bleak small town and of summer vacations spent at campgrounds by the sea in Brittany resonate. And the present blazes in scenes of the young woman’s current fast-food trial: the awful boss, the nasty manager, and all the tedium and horror of dead-end work:
Slowly the oven door opens and a nursery-school tune announces that the salad rolls can come out [and] I’m mired in the heart of pointlessness. I stick a straw into the whipped cream but don’t take off the end of the paper wrapper so they’ll know it hasn’t been used, I’m conscientious.
It’s 2011, and twenty-three-year-old Joan West is not like the rest of her liberal peers in Austin, nor is she quite like her Tea Party Republican, God-loving family. Sure, she listens to conservative talk radio on her way to and from her internship at the Capitol. But she was once an America-hating leftist who kissed girls at parties, refused to shave, and had plenty of emotionless sex with jazz school friends—that is until a drug-induced mania forced her to return to her senses.
But above all Joan is a writer, an artist, or at least she desperately wants to be. Always in search of inspiration for her novel, she catalogs every detail of her relationships with men—including with her former muse slash current arch nemesis Roberto—and mines her very dysfunctional family for material. But when her beloved, credit card debt–racked cousin Wyatt finds himself in crisis, Joan’s worldview is cracked open and everything comes crashing down.
Funny, whip-smart, and often tender, Bitter Texas Honey introduces us to the unforgettable and indefatigable Joan West: ambitious, full of contradictions, utterly herself. As she wades through it all—addiction, politics, loss, and, notably, her father’s string of increasingly bizarre girlfriends—we witness her confront what it means to be a person, and an artist, in the world.
Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare hungover, flakey, shallow, and—worst of all—indifferent to food. But between Molly’s bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly’s charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly’s heart and stomach? Or will Isabella’s devotion to her culinary idols and Molly’s monstrous ego send the entire cookbook—and both of their careers—up in flames?
A mouth-watering, hilarious debut peppered with insider food world detail—the real writers behind celebrity chef cookbooks, the hot restaurants that run on the backs of their sous-chefs, the secret to perfect blinis á la Russe—Adam Roberts' Food Person is a literary soufflé—a deceptively light, deliciously rich, showstopping confection.
Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.
Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy.
Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.
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