Korean Swiss journalist Rinny Gremaud's debut novel, Generator, provides a meditative examination of identity, provocatively conflating nuclear power with biological ancestry. Holly James smoothly translates from the original French. In 1977, the narrator was born at Kori, the site of a nuclear power plant in Busan, Korea. Her Korean mother's English fluency got her a job with a British company, where she met her daughter's father, a British engineer. Once reactor Kori 1 was complete, however, the father left Korea, abandoning mother and child.

Forty years later, Kori's shutdown is imminent, and this end of "the first atomic age" triggers a backward gaze for the narrator: "The word 'generator' resounded throughout my child­hood.... It seemed to mean many things at once: generator as in genitor, birth, and spark. Generator as in father." The search commences to geographically trace "this absentee" across the world: "I'll constitute a genitor for myself from the little information I have." At 16, this genitor left his widowed mother to become an engineering apprentice in Wales. At 20, he spent 10 years with the U.K. lighthouse authority, then went on to a Wylfa nuclear construction site. After promising a local girl he'd return, he moved to Taiwan, where he would marry and father two children, before his "stint in South Korea."

Gremaud writes in first person, eschewing names, as if names--like her protagonist's--are unreliable. She uses "you" to address the missing father, unapologetically creating his life on the page: In the four decades of his absence, she's earned the right to imagine him to life--and then decide whether to hold or discard him. --Terry Hong

Jennifer Niven (When We Were Monsters) picks the pivotal year of 1964 as her setting for the charming, thought-provoking Meet the Newmans. The world is still reeling from the Kennedy assassination; many women who had been part of the workforce during World War II are questioning their place in society; and the Beatles have recently arrived in the U.S.

Del and Dinah Newman of television's Meet the Newmans are "America's favorite married couple." Their sons, Guy, 22, and Shep, nearly 18, have grown up on the show. Guy longs to direct, and Shep, who launched a lucrative singing career, feels like he's owned by both CBS Studios and CBS Records. When Del is in a car accident and winds up in a coma, the Newmans know the show must go on, even as they keep his condition a secret from the network. Just two episodes remain in the season, their sponsors have backed out, and the final episode's script has yet to be written.

Dinah taps journalist Juliet Dunne to be her co-writer on the season finale. Juliet is a daring choice, considering she made clear to Dinah just how "out of touch" she believes the series is. This fascinating relationship becomes the constellation around which the novel orbits. Niven humorously and perceptively exploits the juxtaposition of a TV family who have lost the distinction between their on-air personas and their real lives. She wisely does not go for the quick fix or the sitcom ending. Niven instead leaves readers with a realistic picture of a loving family reconstituting itself as growing individuals after a tectonic shift. --Jennifer M. Brown

Debut author Jennie Godfrey has written a singular serial killer novel. Told from the point of view of an adolescent trying to discover the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper, The List of Suspicious Things is part thriller, part coming-of-age story, and part historical fiction.

12-year-old Miv is convinced that if she can solve the Yorkshire Ripper case, she and her family won't have to move away from their hometown. This childhood logic is prevalent throughout The List of Suspicious Things, told primarily from Miv's point of view, as Miv recruits her best friend, Sharon, to help her in the search. "We'll make a list," Miv says to Sharon. "A list of the people and things we see that are suspicious. And then... we'll investigate them." But in a small town with a powerful gossip mill, anything and everything can seem suspicious: the immigrant who owns the local convenience store; the grieving widower too sad to sleep in his marital bed; even Miv's own father, taking secret calls and sneaking out late at night when her mother is asleep.

The stakes grow ever higher, and the truth ever murkier, as the girls encounter situations well beyond their understanding of the world. Godfrey succeeds in handling serious, adult themes through the eyes of a young girl without infantilizing or oversimplifying. The result is a stand-out mystery in a genre crowded with whodunit thrillers. This captivating tale of a young girl coming of age in 1979 Yorkshire, set against a backdrop of secrets and violence and hardships, carries glimmers of the joy that can be found and felt in family, friendships, and community. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

"Well, here we are. The final book in the Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery series," writes author Mia P. Manansala in the acknowledgements of her delectably entertaining novel Death and Dinuguan. Since returning to Shady Palms, Ill., after escaping a toxic relationship in the series opener, Arsenic and Adobo, Lila Macapagal has been lovingly surrounded by her extended Filipino American family and running the deliciously successful Brew-ha Cafe with her Pakistani Muslim BFF, Adeena, and Adeena's Mexican American girlfriend, Elena. Her relationship with everyone's favorite dentist, Dr. Jae, is solid, and his (much) older brother, Jonathan, a private detective after leaving the Shady Palms Police Department, is happily dating Lila's Tita Rosie.

Newly welcomed into the fold is Jae and Jonathan's cousin Hana and her three-year-old daughter, Aria; Hana's just started working with local chocolatier Blake. Despite a rash of burglaries over the last month, Lila's enjoying some well-earned contentment, at least until her cousin Bernadette calls Jae to report that Hana's in a coma after being attacked--and Blake is dead. The SPPD couldn't be slower, so as usual, Lila needs to take the lead to get real answers.

Over six satisfying volumes, Manansala has the main ingredients down--unreliable witnesses, misleading clues, red-herring suspects. And in the series finale, she deftly, sharply exposes racism, misogyny, stalking, and generational disconnects. Discontent and murder get sweetened with culinary decadence: Tita Rosie's Filipino feasts, Lila's baked confections, Adeena's inventive refreshments--a few of which readers can try at home with Manansala's appended recipes. "Despite all the pain and tragedy, I couldn't help but be grateful for it all," Lila muses. Readers will too. --Terry Hong

In her debut novel, Secret Nights and Northern Lights, Megan Oliver brings readers along for the adventure of a lifetime in Iceland with Mona and Ben, two childhood friends turned lovers turned enemies. This second-chance romance, narrated by Mona, begins when she is given a career-changing opportunity to write an article about Iceland for the travel magazine where she works. When she meets her assigned freelance photographer and travel partner, Ben, she recalls the hurt she felt after he abandoned her when they were teenagers. She's not sure she can handle her first international assignment with him.

Oliver draws readers into Mona's world through her friendly first-person narration, told in a youthful, upbeat tone. She conveys Mona's pain about her crumbling teenage relationship, her anxiety about her career, and her excitement at finally landing a big assignment. Through flashbacks to Mona's childhood and adolescence, readers see the relationship between her and Ben grow; at first, Ben is just one of her brothers' friends, then they build their own friendship, and more.

While the plot mainly follows Mona and Ben, the novel also contains entertaining side characters. Mona's roommate and co-worker, who packs Mona's suitcase for her--and includes the tiniest possible swimsuit for the visit to the Blue Lagoon, of course--is a particular highlight. The novel gets steamy as the pair rediscovers their attraction to each other, and there are also plenty of humorous moments. This charming debut foretells a promising future in contemporary romance for Megan Oliver. --Alyssa Parssinen, freelance reviewer and former bookseller

The different ways people express emotion go in and out of fashion, reflecting the values and conventions of a given era. In his expansive cultural history, Soft, Ferdinand Mount unpacks the current disdain for sentimentality as mawkish and insincere and argues instead that the emotional capacity for genuine empathy has occasioned great social change since the medieval period.

Mount (Big Caesars and Little Caesars) describes three "Sentimental Revolutions." The first, in the 11th century in Languedoc, France, celebrated romantic love. The second revolution occurred in the 18th century, prompted by the publication of Samuel Richardson's watershed novel, Pamela, and its "obsessive dwelling on the ramifications of one's inner feelings." The final revolution involved cultural shifts in the 1960s in Great Britain and the West. Each period provoked a reaction, which Mount notes constituted a "culture war." For example, Mount notes that Brexiteers such as Nigel Farage in the U.K. sneered at the notions of unity put forward by the European Parliament, which used "Ode to Joy" on its opening day in 2019. Similarly, contemporary ideas of men getting in touch with their feelings are often vilified by the political right wing in the U.S., in favor of harsher, more codified gender roles.

While Mount's research is exhaustive and immersive, it's his prose that makes his well-formulated argument a joy to read, such as when he highlights Henry III's "practical sentimentality" as having taken "the edge off the old feudal aggro, softened relations between the classes, as it did relations between the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish, to an extent seldom repeated in later centuries."

Soft will be a page-turner for readers of all stripes, regardless of how stiff their upper lip. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.

Amitav Ghosh's Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment gathers 25 years of essays and correspondence into a collection that is both expansive and accessible--offering not just knowledge, but a compelling invitation to rethink how we inhabit the world.

Organized into six sections, including "Travel and Discovery" and "Witnesses," the book showcases Ghosh's well-researched, conversational style, and provides fresh insights on climate change, colonialism, and migration. Ghosh (Gun Island; Smoke and Ashes) observes that the "relationship between people and their surroundings constitutes as vast a spectrum of experience as the human mind is capable of conceiving." His essays reflect this breadth, exploring displacement, cyclones, spices, and the history of the lascars ("indigenous sailors from the Indian Ocean area"). Yet, he notes that one thread runs through the collection: a chronicling of the era that began 300 years ago with the rise of industrialization and the expanding dominance of the West. This through line pairs a sense of measured reflection with an urgent call to action.

The titular essay argues that the very idea of an "untouched" forest is a wild fiction, shaped by colonialist assumptions that have often led to the exploitation of ecosystems and Indigenous people. More broadly, the collection examines how human hubris--and the belief of the inferiority of other species--has fueled today's planetary crises.

In Wild Fictions, Ghosh ultimately makes the case that, "in order to hear the Earth, we must first learn to love it." That call resonates throughout this thought-provoking, and deeply intriguing, collection. --Grace Rajendran, freelance reviewer

Whether professor and scientist Michelle Carr is discussing athletes who use lucid dreaming as a performance enhancer or sensory stimulation designed to influence dream content, her first book, Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer's Guide Through the Sleeping Mind, offers a fascinating, easily digestible overview of why people dream and the wonders of dream science.

Carr describes nighttime dreamscapes as "fully immersive and self-relevant realms" where the mind sifts through a tangle of emotions and memories. Dreams help process lessons learned, soothe distress, and even serve as "overnight therapy." She agrees with researcher and lucid dream pioneer Stephen LaBerge, who says that "Dreams can't be fooled... because the dream is always wise to your inner feelings." One upside to bad dreams is that they allow people to process worries during sleep. It is a different matter, however, when the "bodily stress of nightmares" leads to disruptive sleep and impacts health. Carr explains how innovative sensory techniques such as "imagery rescripting"--where patients create a different version or rewrite the script of their nightmare--directly access the sleeping mind to dampen the negative emotions that can lead to nightmares.

Dreaming about a skill can improve one's performance. Lucid dreaming, a technique anyone can learn, is when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and can exert control over their dream content. For instance, Carr describes "a swimmer who does laps in a pool full of jelly (in his dream) to train his body to swim against greater resistance and slow down the flow of each stroke."

Packed with engrossing and actionable information about people's sleeping lives, Nightmare Obscura is sure to help readers "dream well tonight." --Shahina Piyarali

A tiny, powerful investigative team of body cells uncover the mystery of a young girl's gastrointestinal illness in Tummy Trouble, the first title in Ben Elcomb and Terri Po's delightfully engrossing nonfiction picture book series Diagnosis Detectives.

When healthy Sophia least expects it, evil Queen Tox ("Antigen team: Flu virus") attacks, leaving Sophia curled up on the couch in distress. The detective cells--including immune system members neutrophil, T-cell, B-cell, and monocyte--are assembled in the Gastric Bay district (Sophia's stomach lining) "training their minds and muscles" when they are "distracted by a thunder-like rumbling." After a thorough investigation, they find the "culprit" back where they started in the Gastric Bay: Nori V, aka norovirus. The quartet captures Nori in an oversized net while Sophia recovers in bed.

The plot and formatting follow a consistent pattern: first a symptom is introduced; then a close-up perspective is revealed of the detective cells at work; finally a "suspect" profile appears alongside a headshot of the accused foreign body. Po's detailed illustrations include both factual diagrams and playful art in tandem with Elcomb's informative and clever text. In one instance, Po's cross-sections of the skin emphasize the description of what happens when we spike a fever. The colorful troupe of detectives travels to "Skindanavia" and tromps across Sophia's blood vessels alongside a recurring "YOU ARE HERE" map of the body.

The book's winning treatment of clear, accurate data and a lighthearted whodunit plot provide plenty of opportunity for discovery and DIY activities offer a fun way to engage with the material, like using glitter to model the transference of food particles. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms

Katrina Leno (Summer of Salt) lyrically brings together the hallmarks of myth, gothic narratives, and the enduring bildungsroman of Little Women in Persephone's Curse, a retelling of the Persephone legend that takes place in a spellbound New York City.

The Farthing sisters are descendants of Persephone and know their lineage is a gift: Bernadette, the eldest, is a talented writer; Evelyn, the second eldest, is an excellent musician; Clara, the youngest, paints beautifully; and Winnie, the third, can see the ghosts of Farthing women. But all four sisters can see Henry, the ghost who lives in their Upper West Side brownstone. When Evelyn, now a junior in high school, falls in love with the perpetually 15-year-old Henry and seems to lose hope in the world, Winnie tries to help her sister. Instead, she accidentally banishes Henry. Evelyn, desperate to bring him back, disappears into one of Persephone's "fragile places in the earth." As in the myth, Evelyn travels to the Underworld. As in the myth, there are consequences.

Winnie's first-person narration is like an impressionist painting, slowly coming into focus. She describes the enchantment of New York, slowly revealing the depth of the mystical events that affect her family. The beauty of Leno's narrative is how the magic becomes the backdrop and the relationships between Farthing sisters become the foreground, their connections with one another allowing them to grow and learn through grief and joy. Fans of Greek myth, Charles de Lint's The Blue Girl, or authors like Louisa May Alcott are likely to find a new favorite in Persephone's Curse. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Glowing art and lyrical verse combine in Through the Telescope by author, photographer, and poet Charles R. Smith Jr. (Black Jack, with Shane W. Evans) and debut illustrator Evening Monteiro. The book introduces readers to the young Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut to travel into space. Smith writes in rhyming couplets, capturing the awe that defines young Mae's fascination with the universe.

Readers first meet Mae as a young girl in Chicago, peering through a telescope, eyes wide with possibility. Soon, she's soaring "just past the exosphere" in her imagination, wonder on her face as she takes in "hundreds of billions of galaxies." Monteiro's illustrations elevate the text, radiating a modern, graphic-novel energy. The spreads are sleek and cinematic, with luminous stars and planets shimmering against the deep black of space. Mae, her curls bouncing and eyes alight, anchors every spread with joy. Readers see her flying through space on a star, measuring light years, and hovering near the moon, her dream of "floating so far... through space someday" both poetic and prophetic. In the powerful closing spreads, the adult Mae, now in her NASA uniform, stands behind her younger self, pointing ahead. She's a visual echo of dreams realized. The back matter cleverly continues the theme, presenting facts about Jemison's life in a countdown format that nods to rocket launches and childhood curiosity alike. Through the Telescope, both a celebration of wonder and a tribute to perseverance, invites readers to look up at the night sky, dream big, and remember that exploration begins with imagination. --Julie Danielson

Leah Johnson (You Should See Me in a Crown) and George M. Johnson (Flamboyants) bring queer exuberance to their heartfelt YA holiday romcom, There's Always Next Year.

Cousins Andy and Dominique Cole's family have been in the Midwest town of Oakrun for generations. Two years ago, "Start Up Tech Ninjas" with "more money than God" starting moving in. Around the same time, Dom went viral as a fashion influencer and left for New York City. Now, 17-year-old Andy's parents are on the brink of losing Cole's Hardware (another local fixture being demolished to push out the "Black folks who have been the backbone of this town") and 19-year-old Dom is coming back for New Years Day to act as the face of a fancy hotel chain, courtesy of the town's mayor. Andy loathes Mayor Youngblood and is certain that Dom will be appalled when she tells him the real reason Youngblood chose him as spokesperson. While Andy and her "lesbian punk band"-vibed crush dash to get to Dom before the Festival of Lights hotel announcement, Dom reunites with an old track teammate who had always felt like "something more" than a friend.

Andy's and Dom's sympathetic, enthusiastic, and candid first-person narratives unfold over a single day. The authors (no relation) sprinkle the story with plenty of twists, hilarious hijinks, and an "ageless fairy gayparent" drag queen. They tactfully touch on racism, the complexity of life post-high school, and the need for unconditional love. Above all, the witty prose brings constant laughs. There's Always Next Year is a holiday title that should brighten any spirit. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer