by Andrew Miller
Never underestimate the drama in seemingly ordinary lives. That's a lesson English novelist Andrew Miller (The Crossing; The Slowworm's Song) reinforces to brilliant effect in The Land in Winter, finalist for the 2025 Booker Prize and a work that, like the legendary U.K. winter of 1962-63 that is the novel's setting, starts quietly but gathers immense power as it proceeds. In a West Country asylum, a 19-year-old patient, "the baby of the ward," dies from an overdose. Readers eventually discover the connection
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by Bruce Handy, illus. by Julie Kwon
Using only four words and various punctuation marks, journalist/author Bruce Handy (The Book from Far Away) and artist Julie Kwon (Pedro & Daniel) mesmerize young readers with a life-changing adventure in Balloon. A smiling, brown-skinned parent and exuberant child gambol through the park, so enthralled by the child's orange balloon that both miss the pigeons feeding in their path. The interrupted flock scatters in great haste, causing the child to let go of the precious orb. Ellipses turn the single word
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by Kelly Foster Lundquist
"I've spent a lifetime feeling drawn to gay men," Kelly Foster Lundquist writes in her riveting debut memoir, Beard. Her brother and best friend are gay; she loves musical theater and considers Judy Garland a patron saint. So it's all the more ironic that she didn't realize for years that her first husband was homosexual.
Lundquist met Devin during college, when they were counselors at a Christian summer camp in Mississippi. She knew he'd been bullied in adolescence for being effeminate but only later learned
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by Meryem El Mehdati, trans. by Julia Sanches
A young woman in the Canary Islands struggles through the daily grind of work, dating, and inexplicably disdainful coworkers in Meryem El Mehdati's funny, brutally honest slice-of-life debut novel, Supersaurio.
Protagonist Meryem, a 25-year-old Canarian woman from a Moroccan family, has a humanities degree, lives with her parents, and has started an internship in the corporate offices of Supersaurio, the largest grocery store chain in the Canary Islands. Getting the internship felt like a stroke of fortune,
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by Cathy Malkasian
Animation director and cartoonist Cathy Malkasian's powerfully poignant Shadows of the Sea brings together two gentle, suffering strangers who create a healing community of found family. Stanwick, aka Landmine Sniffer Dog #336, has been dismissed with a mere letter and wad of cash. While paused in his aimless wandering to adjust his prosthetic leg, he smells serious trouble: three sore losers viciously attacking a woman for prizes not theirs. Stanwick strategically intervenes, intertwining his future with
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by R.M. Romero
Siblings Malka and Ezra try to make sense of the world following a cataclysmic climate event in R.M. Romero's incisive middle-grade cli-fi fantasy, The Tear Collector.
Twelve-year-old Malka and 10-year-old Ezra remember little of their lives before "the polar ice caps melted and caused the Flood." Malka can't remember anything from life on the Mainland, but Ezra has a "list of memories" that sadden him so deeply he keeps them secret: glimpses of his mother; "a cat the color of orange peels"; "the milky light
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by Jodi Meadows
In Confessions from the Group Chat, Jodi Meadows (Bye Forever, I Guess; the Lady Janies series) skillfully and authentically evokes the challenges of navigating a middle-school social life in the time of social media, when any misstep may be disastrous.
Thirteen-year-old Virginia has a prickly relationship with her three best friends. The group is at the top of the eighth-grade social ladder, but the roles within the foursome, at least on the surface, have some not-so-subtle delineations. There's the
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