Getting old is not for the faint of heart. You are no longer young in looks or temperament, and if you continue to engage in the indiscretions of your twenties, you become a cautionary tale: the sad, middle-aged person who’s desperate to regain the flame of youth. Whatever choices you’ve made, good or bad, have…

Nghiem Tran’s debut novella, We’re Safe When We’re Alone, opens with a straightforward premise: “I have lived in the mansion my whole life. I was born here. I have never left.” The narrator, simply named Son, lives in the mansion with Father. Father leaves each morning for work, traveling to an undisclosed location for an…

Late in her novel The Long Form, Kate Briggs quotes the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin: “There is never any problem, ever, which can be confined within a single framework.” Briggs’ novel is an architectural masterpiece that takes Bakhtin’s point as its premise; it is a novel that cannot be contained by any one form…

Mornington Hall, once a grand country estate, has fallen to ruin in a drought-stricken, dystopian English landscape. An earthquake has compromised the library’s storage system, and flooding from burst pipes has damaged the art collection. Many valuable artworks are sold to finance the repairs, including J.M.W. Turner’s A View on the Seine (1833), once the…

A family saga sweeping across seventy years through four generations of the Song family, Carol Roh Spaulding’s debut collection contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Starting with the family’s emigration to the U.S. in 1924, the collection comes full circle in 1997, when an aging Grace Song journeys with her lover and her seven-year-old grandson to the family’s…

In Snakes of St. Augustine, Ginger Pinholster’s second novel, qualities of acceptance, belief, and trust spur the novel’s beautifully drawn characters to survive—no, thrive—in seemingly impossible circumstance. This entertaining novel introduces readers to a cast of marginalized characters who navigate their lives with limited resources and without the security that comes from having had stable…

Shannon Bowring opens her debut, The Road to Dalton, by immersing readers directly in the loneliness of small town life. “Imagine this,” she writes. “You are driving along on a road in Northern Maine. Your head’s still humming from the monotonous drone of I-95 that empty highway. On the radio, nothing but static and outdated country…

In Industrial Roots, a collection of connected vignettes, author Lisa Pike explores the lives of working-class women in Ontario, writing in a style that is reminiscent of oral storytelling, of the digressive anecdotes of a great aunt. Told by different female narrators, these seventeen stories follow a family across three generations. Grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and…

Translated into English for the first time, Michele Mari’s story collection, You, Bleeding Childhood, is obsessive, neurotic, mimetic, strangely intimate, and absurdly funny. Published in Italian in the 1990s, this collection—supplemented with stories from Mari’s first collection, Euridice aveva un cane (Eurydice Had a Dog)—revisits emotional objects from Mari’s past, ruminates over troubling parental relationships,…

Our editors share their recommendations for books to enjoy over the summer break Lacey Dunham, fiction editor The narrator in Johanne Lykke Holm’s novel Strega (Riverhead, 2022), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel,  is sent by her parents along with eight other girls to a remote resort hotel in the Italian alps. The girls…

Time is the anchor of our lives, but it’s also the glue of plot. Rebekah Bergman’s debut novel, The Museum of Human History, investigates the human obsession with time—specifically, with finding a cure for aging. Unspooling the potential dark consequences of that cure, the novel explores what happens when we dispense with time as a…

In 1909, as the first electric lights are installed in Boston, Artie Quick, the young heroine of Relentless Melt by Jeremy P. Bushnell, wonders: Will they leave the world open to deeper inspection, or will they simply erase the shadows she likes to disappear into? The answer is both and neither. Indeed, Bushnell’s Boston is…