Katie Kitamura's spectacular Audition, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, examines the enigmatic relationship between a middle-aged woman and a younger man, until readers "can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real." Kitamura (A Separation) divides her spare, Manhattan-set novel into two distinct parts that open and close in the exact same settings--a "large establishment in the financial district" and a theater stage. Both feature the same main cast: an unnamed actor; her husband, Tomas; director Anne; playwright Max; and Xavier. While the actor claims the definitive "I"-voice throughout, the linchpin is actually Xavier, as the mutability of who he is drives both narratives, with unpredictable results.

Kitamura offers a virtuoso performance of sly agility, presented in elliptical, elegant prose. "There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it," the actor observes about the theater, "and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think." Provocatively perplexing and utterly beguiling, Audition deftly captures that playacting magic on every page. --Terry Hong

A long-hidden diary in which a Lutheran pastor records a strange confession reveals a mysterious horror with repercussions that span centuries in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the chilling and original vampire novel from Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians).

In the 20th century, Arthur's small Montana town is shocked by the discovery of an exsanguinated corpse. Soon after, a Blackfeet stranger appears among Arthur's congregation during the Sunday service and asks to make his confession. The stranger, named Good Stab, recounts a story that begins with a massacre and his encounter with a creature he calls the Cat Man, after which he can consume only blood. As the confession continues and more bodies appear, it becomes clear that Good Stab is in this specific church for a purpose, and the horrors of the American West's past have not been laid to rest.

Jones has built a Native American revenge narrative on the scaffolding of a highly inventive approach to vampire lore, all the more horrifying for the logic that grounds it. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Three young women from different centuries wrestle with hunger and carve out lives for themselves in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a haunting tale of immortality, death, and lesbian vampires by V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue).

In early 16th-century Spain, when Maria finds that marriage is only a new kind of cage, a mysterious widow offers her a choice. In 2019, Alice's attempt at spontaneity leads to a one-night stand, which in turn leads to a desperate quest for answers. Lottie, who left Alice while she was sleeping, made her own bid for freedom years ago. Now, she feeds her tender heart on memories in an attempt to avoid a terrible price.

Schwab has created a vampire mythos at once beautiful and dark. The result is both expansive, as the story stretches almost 500 years, and claustrophobically close, as the women and readers are trapped in their hunger: for blood, for love, for freedom, for their waning humanity. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a brilliant, emotional fantasy. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Xenobe Purvis's immersive debut novel, The Hounding, is a haunting exploration of turn-of-the-18th-century England, when men held all power, women and children had no voice, and the church and alehouse were the primary gathering places.

An overriding mood of foreboding shrouds the novel, which begins with a startling prologue: "The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body." The villagers--a "vengeful mob"--advance toward the five Mansfield sisters, certain that the girls played a part in the murder. Purvis's close third-person narration then moves among several characters, the multiple perspectives contributing clues to an inexorable progression that leads to this initial scene.

With the puritanical overtones of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and its hints of superstition, The Hounding taps into universal themes of fear, violence, lust, and also empathy. Pete the ferryman starts the rumor that the five girls are transforming into dogs. More rumors spread like infection through the town and, like its citizens, readers are left to decide what is real and what is projected outward in order to avoid looking inward. --Jennifer M. Brown

Never underestimate the drama in seemingly ordinary lives. That's a lesson English novelist Andrew Miller (The Crossing) reinforces to brilliant effect in The Land in Winter, 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. Two married couples dominate the narrative: Eric and Irene Parry, an adulterous doctor and his pregnant, London-transplant wife; and Bill and Rita Simmons, a would-be farmer whose immigrant father got rich as a vile slumlord, and his wife, also pregnant, who used to dance at a club called the Pow-Wow and isn't thrilled about her new life among chickens and dairy bulls.

There's little plot here, but Miller expertly unearths many layers of raw emotion. Booker Prize-shortlisted and Walter Scott Historical Fiction-winning The Land in Winter exemplifies patient, thoughtful, and generous storytelling. The second half of the novel includes a magnificent extended sequence with multiple characters on multiple trains, shifting among their perspectives as the snow falls. Fans of the literary slow build will be dazzled. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Readers of well-crafted historical fiction will be drawn in by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's sure-footed Mutual Interest, which is set in turn-of-the century Manhattan, in the aftermath of the Gilded Age. Wolfgang-Smith is nothing short of virtuosic in her wry and witty world-building, which immediately immerses readers into a rough-and-tumble capitalist quagmire where the stakes are incredibly high and safety nets are totally absent.

To survive on her limited prospects, Vivian Lesperance relies on her charm and manipulative abilities. Her latest plan finds the awkward, sexually surreptitious, socially ascendent Midwestern transplant Oscar Schmidt. Vivian assists Oscar in navigating the competitive waters of his business and muffles the potential reputational damage of both of their same-sex adventures by marrying him. But threats to their unconventional union--blackmail, social expectation, and justified labor unrest--loom, and any of them could dismantle the home they've so carefully constructed for themselves.

This is a novel of families won and lost, love, envy, and betrayal told in a remarkably fresh and entertaining way, with immersive period detail and compelling emotional stakes. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.

Ed Park (Same Bed Different Dreams) writes books that are easy to love and hard to define. His writing is hilarious but also serious; chaotic while still cohesive; irreverent and earnest all at once. The short stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are not linked, not exactly, but characters do recur, and the whole thing hangs together like an ensemble cut from the same cloth. The stories maintain an odd kind of continuity, making the collection highly satisfying.

Park upholds a deadpan delivery even in the most absurd of situations. Not every story is openly funny, but they all create an unexpected alchemy of droll humor, detached irony, and serious reflection. A narrator of one story suggests to his father that they chat online, but his father ignores the invitation while continuing to post on Facebook. He asks, "Doesn't he know I can see them? Doesn't he know I'm his friend?" This sense of longing for something just out of reach is the thread that binds Park's stories--to each other and to the reader. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Readers who have ever straddled multiple countries and/or cultures, readers who have endured and adjusted to peripatetic relocations, will find deep, aching resonance with Jinwoo Park's enthralling debut, Oxford Soju Club. Park spotlights diaspora, heritage, family, self-knowledge--all commingled into a lightning-paced spy thriller with substantial body count.

Park's cast converges in Oxford, England. That the main players are all initially introduced with descriptions rather than names suggests identities are mutable, especially amid political and historical (dis)loyalties. The Northerners are two: legendary North Korean spymaster Doha Kim and his protégé Yohan Kim. The Southerner is Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul, now the proprietor of Soju Club, Oxford's only Korean restaurant. The American is Yunah Choi, a CIA agent assigned to break up a North Korean cell.

Park moves fluidly, effortlessly between Oxford in the present and all the various pasts that had to happen to produce this intricate, lethal convergence. He expertly connects and comforts, severs and shocks, all the while navigating revelatory twists and turns. --Terry Hong

Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.

The story opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon's civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja's ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists' residency in Virginia. Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, as well as self-deprecating--naming himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit.

He and his mother bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving. Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with "a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous," Raja's mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heart-wrenching novel. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Inspired by notes from her grandfather's caregivers, Swedish author Lisa Ridzén's debut is a realistic, poignant retrospective on the last months of a life. When the Cranes Fly South is 89-year-old Bo's first-person meditation during his final summer. His carers' brief, perfunctory reports introduce each passage and contrast with Bo's vivid memories and hopes for his last days.

As his body grows weary, Bo is secure in the home he grew up in and shared with his beloved Fredrika for almost 60 years. His narration of richly detailed recollections is addressed to her. His reliable comfort is his faithful elkhound, Sixten, but his son, Hans, has determined Bo can't care for the dog and plans to re-home him. The heartbreaking possibility of losing Sixten exacerbates the rocky relationship between Bo and Hans, but Bo doesn't "want there to be any hard feelings between us at the end." When the Cranes Fly South ruminates on a long life lived with care, a deep appreciation for natural surroundings, and a commitment to leaving a legacy of love. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y,

In Actress of a Certain Age, Jeff Hiller nimbly folds tenderness and vulnerability into a riotously disarming memoir. Standing more than six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds in the sixth grade, with "a gay lisp" and "a nervous and girlish giggle," Hiller was constantly tormented with the F-slur and other forms of bullying at school. Church was his haven, however, and its theatrical elements gave Hiller his first taste of dramaturgy. For a time he considered entering the ministry, but deep down he really "just felt called to be a singing, dancing, wocka-wocka showman of God. Pastor Charo! 'In the name of God, let's cuchi-cuchi!' "

One might have described Hiller's acting career as niche, until he won the 2025 Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy, for his starring role on the endearing HBO comedy series Somebody Somewhere. As he documents his gradual ascent, through improv groups and commercial gigs, Hiller is a generous and entertaining storyteller. Actress of a Certain Age distills the feel-good, laugh-till-you-cry reminiscences of a sweet, silly, and thoroughly lovable man establishing the career of his dreams. --Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

Anelise Chen's second book, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, defies categorization in the most stimulating, hilarious, and heartfelt ways. There's a section narrated by collective of Asian clams. Other sections are narrated by a retired Taiwanese father who's exasperated by his adult daughters and wife. Then there's the 30-something woman writer at the center of the story who calls herself "the clam," a formulation that emerges in the aftermath of a marriage ending: "Hadn't this clamming down method worked well enough in her marriage?" The clam, an avatar for Chen (who, in her author's note, writes that Clam Down "could be" considered memoir), travels to California to borrow her reluctant father's car, then road trips to New Mexico with her mother for a writing residency.

Throughout, Chen shares fascinating information about other people who found inspiration and solace in mollusks, such as Charles Darwin and Georgia O'Keeffe. This is a künstlerroman mixed with an interrogation of the author's family's legacy of trauma and immigrant struggle, and even includes a strong dash of romance. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator

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 shine, soaking up light, space, time, your attention and wonder."

The death of the poet's father grounds the collection, especially through the "Grief Interlude" poems interspersed throughout, each varied in style and tone but combining to provide an image of the man she describes in "Snow Poem" as "the fence to hold things out and keep us in." Despite this heaviness, Lullaby for the Grieving feels buoyant, luminous, bold. It is an incomparably fine meal, each poem to be savored, each so good as to make readers doubt the next poem could measure up. But it does. It always does. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

Deliverance from a troubled family history lies at the core of Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me, an origin story fueled by the Indian author's ferocious wit and the masterful storytelling that is her trademark. Now a globally acclaimed literary phenomenon, Roy (The God of Small Things) charts her path from the tea estates of Assam and a tiny village in Kerala to big-city life in Delhi via the beaches of Goa. The one figure who remains present on every page, in person or in spirit, is Roy's larger-than-life late mother, the formidable Mary Roy. Roy admiringly describes her mother as having "the edginess of a gangster." Mrs. Roy famously petitioned the Supreme Court in Delhi to repeal the Christian Succession Act that limited a woman's inheritance rights, winning an equal share in her father's ancestral property.

With staggering clarity and self-awareness, Mother Mary Comes to Me excavates the deeper truths behind a fraught yet liberating bond with a mother who instinctively understood that Roy "has a writer's heart." This elegant book memorializes the maternal courage and devotion that was Mrs. Roy's final bequest. --Shahina Piyarali

A journalist and storyteller internationally renowned for the stunning eloquence of his prose, Omar El Akkad brilliantly chronicles the painful fracturing of his relationship with Western liberalism in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. For readers devastated at how powerful Western nations have endorsed and financed the "world's first livestreamed genocide" in Gaza, the author's refusal to ignore the deep cracks in the "freedom" narrative of his chosen home, the United States, will resonate profoundly.

Reflecting on a life of departures and arrivals, El Akkad (American War; What Strange Paradise) is engaged in quiet resistance to a Democratic Party whose progressivism and value for human rights "so often ends at the lawn sign." His moral courage in voicing his objections will inspire hope for similarly tormented readers in the face of their helplessness. Amid reminders of how much worse the political alternative will be, "there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil," El Akkad insists. For him and many others, "genocide is that point." --Shahina Piyarali

Raymond Antrobus's first nonfiction book, The Quiet Ear, takes up the themes of his poetry--being deaf and mixed-race, losing his father, becoming a parent--and threads them into an outstanding memoir that integrates his disability and celebrates his role models.

Even with hearing aids, Antrobus (All the Names Given; Signs, Music) explains, he catches just 60% of conversations; the rest he must fill in. He was diagnosed with high-frequency deafness at age seven. What has he been missing? What has he gained in return? These questions drive the touching exploration of his coming to terms with Deaf identity. The several strands of inquiry include his family history (a Jamaican father experiencing alcoholism; a matrilineal lineage of English painters and ministers), the development of deaf education (Thomas Braidwood opened the U.K.'s first deaf school in Hackney, London--where Antrobus grew up--in 1783), and teachers and Deaf public figures who have inspired him, such as singer Johnnie Ray.

This frank, fluid memoir of finding one's way as a poet illuminates the literal and metaphorical meanings of sound. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck

Mary Roach (Gulp) has earned a well-deserved reputation for delivering useful scientific information to a general readership with impressive style and wit. Replaceable You is a lively survey of the state of the art in the field of regenerative medicine--a collection of disciplines that, in the aggregate, function as the equivalent of a human auto body shop.

Each of Replaceable You's chapters focuses on a discrete body part or system, such as hair follicles and the rectum. With Roach as an inquisitive, intelligent guide, readers learn about topics like the evolution of the technology for joint replacements. Roach isn't afraid to step out from behind her computer and observe cutting-edge research up close. Among other places, her travels took her to Sichuan, China, where researchers are working to overcome traditional Chinese reluctance to donate organs by exploring ways of adapting pig organs to human beings, and to a clinic in Tbilisi, Georgia, attempting to track down a doctor who uses fingers for penis transplants.

Anyone interested in an informative, entertaining exploration of the fast-moving developments in these fields will enjoy taking that trip with Mary Roach. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Listen in on the conversation between women's rights in the U.S. and the cinematic world through six classics of the horror film genre in the adept, intelligent pop-culture history Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) by Eleanor Johnson. Horror is often cited as a misogynistic genre, but here Johnson, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, points out a golden era of scary stories with a grounding in reproductive rights, domestic violence awareness, and attitudes toward women working outside the home.

Johnson's chapters peel away what the reader thinks they know about each film and point out the subtext, intentional or not. Rosemary's Baby and Alien explore reproductive violence. The Stepford Wives spotlights conflict over women's liberation. This commentary on the horror genre's ability to shape and echo the political landscape is riveting, enlightening, and occasionally scream-inducing in its reminders of the not-so-long past. This deep excavation of art imitating life is more than positive affirmation for horror fans; it is a call--or scream--to action. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone compassionately brings readers to the city of Atlanta, Ga., and the efforts of several "working poor" families who are trying to keep roofs over their heads in There Is No Place for Us, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. With Goldstone's true-to-life reporting, readers are not guaranteed happy endings to every story.

Goldstone demonstrates the precarity of being working class in the 21st-century United States. Even Maurice and Natalia Taylor, who were married and both full-time workers, found that their family wasn't safe from homelessness. Families shuffle from "dingy" apartments to the living room floors of relatives, to extended-stay motels, the backseats of cars, and even unsafe rooming houses. Through the accounts of the families featured, Goldstone illustrates how difficult it is to get ahead as debts and evictions pile up. Aid is hard, if not impossible, to obtain.

Throughout this carefully observed work of reportage, Goldstone takes pains to be truthful yet depicts challenges without judging or condemning the choices any of these families made when there were simply no good choices available. --Alyssa Parssinen, freelance reviewer and former bookseller

Craig Mod's Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, about his traverses in Japan's rural Kii Peninsula, is striking and deeply felt. Framed as an address to his deceased childhood best friend, Bryan, Mod's memoir intermingles present-tense observations and anecdotes from his life on foot with past-tense memories from a postindustrial U.S. childhood. As he perambulates historic pilgrimage routes and finds "an unexpected peace in these recondite hinterlands," Mod shares bits of Japanese history from longtime friend John, who messages him every morning before he sets out.

Along with marvelous scenes captured through his camera lens, which are reproduced in black-and-white and peppered throughout, Mod charmingly relates the small moments of his encounters. Incorporated throughout the narrative--cloaked in a comparison between Bryan's tragically shortened life and Mod's own life--is a critique of how the U.S. handles poverty, education, and social services, which Mod positions as starkly different to his experience of Japan. When he does turn his gimlet eye on Japan, he seems a bit blurred by his entrancement with the country. Nevertheless, this layered and profound memoir shines with care and devotion. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator