by Beatriz Serrano, trans. by Mara Faye Lethem
Beatriz Serrano, a journalist for Spain's El País newspaper, hypnotizes with her brilliant fiction debut, Discontent, engagingly translated by Mara Faye Lethem. Serrano's dedication, "For everyone who wakes up, every day, with no desire to go to work," sets the perfect tone to introduce her protagonist's attitude about her stifling career.
Marisa, 32, has worked in advertising for eight years, the last four as creative strategist for a Madrid agency. She also teaches at a private university, "thanks
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by Laura Venita Green
With Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green invites her reader to navigate a shape-shifting world, beginning in rural Louisiana and ranging overseas and into starscapes and imagination. Rotating among a small group of girls and women, this imaginative narrative muddies the line between the novel's real world and a fictional one within it. The result is dreamy, often disturbing, and hauntingly unforgettable.
Tess uses her isolated job as a live-in nanny to hide away from the life she feels has already cratered,
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by Daniel Nayeri
Iranian-born author Daniel Nayeri's middle-grade novels Everything Sad Is Untrue and The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams received between them the Michael L. Printz Award, a Newbery Honor, a Middle East Book Award, and a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor. The Teacher of Nomad Land, a tightly crafted odyssey about two siblings in World War II Iran, seems unlikely to break Nayeri's award-winning streak.
After occupying British soldiers kill their father, 14-year-old Babak and nine-year-old
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by Margot Kahn
Margot Kahn's radiant first poetry collection, The Unreliable Tree, ponders how traumatic events interrupt everyday life. Poles of loss and abundance structure delicate poems infused with family history and food imagery.
The title phrase describes literal harvests but is also a metaphor for the vicissitudes of long relationships: "My husband and I marry every year/ eating apricots from the unreliable tree./ Some years it's only two or three,/ while others we have enough for jam." California's wildfires, Covid-19,
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by Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones (Reparations Now!) is both the youngest person and the first person of color to serve as the poet laureate of Alabama, and Lullaby for the Grieving makes abundantly evident the talent that elevated her to that position. Though a thick line of grief threads through the collection, the poems are full of life and punctuated with joy and possibility. In the full-justified prose poem "I feel powerful when," the speaker celebrates her hair, her voice, her "legs are shined up in the way Black legs
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by ND Stevenson
Bestselling author/illustrator ND Stevenson (Nimona) creates his first middle-grade fantasy with Scarlet Morning, a suspenseful and exceptionally magical illustrated novel that follows two orphans determined to change--and save--a world destroyed by adults.
Once, the world wasn't broken: "the sky was blue, and the spray of the sea wouldn't burn your flesh." At that time, the people of Dickerson's Sea were ruled by a beloved Queen. But the "blackhearted" Scarlet Morning killed the queen and brought a dreadful
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by Brian Lies
Brian Lies's visual delight Cat Nap is a feline-fueled romp through 10 masterpieces of art history, all lovingly re-created by hand. The story opens in a late-afternoon living room where a sleepy gray kitten stirs. When a mouse darts by, Kitten leaps after it into a Metropolitan Museum of Art poster, and the chase begins--through time, culture, and media.
Caldecott Honor winner Lies (Little Bat in Night School) opens with soft alliteration--"Late light lies, warm, over sofa, Kitten, book"--setting a lyrical
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