Vanessa Hua's Coyoteland is a fast-paced and often humorous novel brimming with community and family woes that nevertheless balances strife with hope.

The upscale Bay Area suburb El Nido is desirable, but the brusque welcome the Chang family receives from their new neighbor, real estate developer Blair Belle, is a tip-off that fitting in could be challenging. As Jin Chang hides his tenuous financial straits from his family, his daughter, Jane, bravely assists another teen, Tasha, when she's attacked by a notorious marauding coyote. The girls are the primary protagonists within the novel's large cast of characters, the residents of El Nido, who are all struggling to succeed in their own ways. Jane, who is Chinese American, and Tasha, who is Black, identify the exclusionary attitudes of their privileged peers and the adults around them. They hatch a plot to jeopardize the Belle family's housing development, which is designed to attract affluent buyers.

Oblivious to how their experiences coming of age during the Covid-19 pandemic have led to a naïve reliance on the Internet, the teens use social media to anonymously mock El Nido and what they perceive to be its hypocrisies, with disastrous results. Meanwhile, Ana, the Belles's nanny, appreciates the opportunities the town offers her young son, yet her struggles for security include anxiety over immigration restrictions.

Hua (A River of Stars; Forbidden City) imbues even the snootiest townspeople with redeeming qualities. They share the threat of encroaching wildfires, and they eventually prioritize community spirit over personal prominence, evolving to embrace compromise and forgiveness. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House, Albany, N.Y.

The simplicity of its title masks the depth of insight and emotion that makes Maggie O'Farrell's novel Land such an encompassing reading experience. This story of a humble 19th-century Irish family is both a microcosm of the country's travails and a timeless exploration of themes of love, abandonment, loss, and grief.

Opening in 1865, a little more than a decade after the end of the Great Hunger, Land focuses on the family of Tomás, a surveyor and skilled cartographer who supports his family on commissions from the despised "scarlet-jacketed soldiers" engaged in a massive mapping project of his native land. Tomás is determined that his maps "will bear an account of what happened, what was lost, if it kills him."

In the midst of one of his expeditions, he experiences a shattering trancelike state after drinking from an ancient spring. When he recovers, he uproots his family--mapmaking assistant son Liam, wife Phina, daughters Enda and Rose, and soon-to-be-born son Eugene--from their Dublin home and resettles them on the remote peninsula that transformed him.

Over the next two decades, as they pursue their outwardly simple existence, there are deaths and departures--Liam first to Rome and then India as a Jesuit priest, and Enda, a headstrong, talented fiddle player, to Canada--amid moments of tenderness and violence. In Land, Maggie O'Farrell (The Marriage Portrait) has chosen to record her representation of Irish life on a much larger canvas than she did the world of William Shakespeare in Hamnet, but the same qualities of empathy and grace she displayed in that beautiful novel reappear here in abundance. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Sofi Stambo won the 2024 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature with People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, a collection of 34 short stories that highlight warm, humorous, poignant details of quotidian lives lived between Bulgaria and Brooklyn. Yana Mihaylova, Stambo's daughter, enhances every story with black-and-white drawings, sometimes just a few lines that capture crossed legs, others that present architecturally intricate cityscapes.

Born in Bulgaria and relocated to New York, Stambo mines her own experiences into vulnerable fiction. Feeling that she's no longer quite Bulgarian, not quite fully American, Stambo transforms that liminality into an outsider's insight. In the opening "Spying in Manhattan Diners," the narrator and her boyfriend share lunch, all the while sharply observing both staff and customers--"fragile" owner George, the $4.75/hour grumpy and arthritic waiters, out-of-towners who ask for pics but won't leave a tip, the Guy Who Waits who gets an earful before his takeout order is finally ready. Glimpses of childhood in Sofia in "Devil's Heart" intertwine innocence and danger--amid youthful games and play is the looming awareness that "if someone reported you, you could just disappear."

Stambo's direct and unadorned writing, her pithy, sometimes stinging observations, make her a particularly convincing storyteller. Impressive, too, is her comedic timing, often lightening--without dismissing--heavier realities: geese droppings on cemetery gravestones, for example, as proof that "at least someone came to visit." Relationships among family, friends, strangers--despite the everyday maelstrom of movement and chaos--compose the core of Stambo's diverse collection. The goal, as a character comments, is to "feel peaceful and connected to this world." --Terry Hong

Publishing professional Vincent Yu's accomplished debut novel, Seek Immediate Shelter, reads like an interlinked story collection; nine chapters spotlight nine residents of small-town Beckitt, Mass., amid a terrifying crisis. A broadcast emergency warning reading "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL" would send most recipients into a chaotic spin. Eighteen minutes later, the Beckitt residents receive a "FALSE ALARM" notification, but their lives are irrevocably altered in that pivotal interval.

David Li attempts to drive out of the garage before it's fully open and without his wife and infant son; a public relations expert, he continuously fumbles to contrive an acceptable spin to his actions beyond his wife's verdict that he's a "coward." Clare Hilldon loses her husband to a heart attack; his death reveals an extramarital affair and a young son. Russell Zhang refuses to leave his wife and son after placing them into the bathtub for safety; later, he follows a provocatively mysterious text message: "I've never stopped thinking about you." Nina Chang nearly destroys an already strained relationship with her daughter with a cruel, thought-to-be-final text message; after, she must still confess her impending death. Chase Sun, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency employee responsible--and publicly reviled--for the false alarm, is pushed "toward a richness of possibility."

Yu creates a delightful puzzle of diverse characters, overlapping and interrelated by small-town intimacy, for attentive readers to connect. Facing impending doom understandably causes a range of reactions. With exacting insight, scathing truth, and surprising humor, Yu deftly plumbs snap decisions and the lasting complex consequences that follow. --Terry Hong

With Love Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Swati Hegde (Match Me if You Can; Can't Help Faking in Love) has created a funny workplace romance set in Bangalore, India, that's sure to appeal to fans of Sally Thorne's The Hating Game or Elena Armas's The Spanish Love Deception.

Eighteen months ago, just after her fiancé ended their engagement, Naina Shetty went alone on what would have been her honeymoon to Goa. There she met Tejas Rajput, and the two had a fantastic vacation fling, but Naina insisted they couldn't continue seeing each other in their regular lives. Since then, Naina has thrown herself into work at her law firm, where she is determined to make partner. Her best friend, Anil, bemoans how she refuses to date and teases her about missing her "Prince Charming" from Goa. Anil and Naina are shocked when the firm's new hire turns out to be none other than "Prince Charming" himself, Tejas. What's more, their bosses assign Tejas and Naina to a team investigating the murder of a famous Bollywood director. Amid clever sleuthing and escalating stakes, workaholic Naina begins to wonder if she really can squeeze in a relationship with Tejas, too.

Smart and sweet, Love Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a lovely second-chance romance combined with a Bollywood murder case. Hegde describes the Bangalore setting with energetic prose, and the mystery that Naina and Tejas must solve is as thrilling as the flashbacks to their steamy days in Goa. --Jessica Howard, former bookseller, freelance book reviewer

Tessa Bickers's charming second novel, The Night Bus, explores the delights of serendipitous connection and the power of learning to trust and stand up for oneself.

Each morning for several months, radio journalist Daisy Douglas has spotted the same man aboard her 4 a.m. London bus, avidly rereading a worn copy of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Who is he, and why that book? When the bus breaks down one day, Daisy meets Tom, a photographer who is convinced the key to undoing his recent breakup lies in Orlando's pages. Daisy, sympathetic and intrigued, helps Tom hatch a plan to win back his ex. Over subsequent bus rides and much plotting, the two become close enough for Tom to learn that Daisy is having second thoughts about her upcoming wedding.

Bickers (The Book Swap) delicately explores the nuances of people pleasing as Daisy struggles to decide whether her wedding jitters are cold feet or a deeper, more serious instinct. Her fiancé, Zack, long ago convinced Daisy he knows what's best for them both. But as Daisy's friendship with Tom grows, she begins to question Zack's narrow, prescribed path for her life, and to wonder about pursuing other possibilities, which may include a bold career move or a certain handsome photographer.

Love of all kinds is a vital force in Bickers's cheer-worthy narrative as Daisy discovers that the person with the most power to change her life is sitting in her bus seat and not in the one across the aisle. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

"I was never really in the world," the great Scottish author Muriel Spark told an interviewer late in her life. That would explain her ability to squirrel herself away and write 22 novels, some of them among the finest of her time, as well as poetry, plays, and short stories. Her colorful life has been catnip for biographers since Spark, a lifelong cat lover, died at 88 in 2006. One such biography is Like a Cat Loves a Bird by the English critic James Bailey, author of the scholarly analysis Muriel Spark's Early Fiction. With this volume, he widens the aperture for a reverent and engrossing look at Spark's peripatetic life.

Bailey became obsessed with Spark, "perhaps modern literature's finest shapeshifter," when he read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Once he finished the rest of her output, he was struck by "how deceptively violent her books are," with shootings and cannibalism, and "in one particularly grisly scene, a corkscrew driven through the neck." Her range of subjects made her a hard author to pin down. Bailey wrote this book to capture "this lifelong slipperiness, this sense of perpetual reinvention," and to present, as he puts it, "a series of flickering sparks, each illuminating a different aspect of a life in constant motion."

The result is an affectionate work that covers Spark's life from her Edinburgh childhood, when she was already "an avid watcher of others," to her final years in Tuscany. To its credit, Bailey's book is not indiscriminately adulatory. But he's clearly a fan, and readers unfamiliar with Spark's work will be, too, after reading this excellent work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Lance Woods and Joe Robinson founded the We Run 313 run club in Detroit with a clear mission: connect runners--especially Black runners--with one another; run together; build a community. Since the club's very first two-mile run in May of 2019, they've done all that and more--as captured in the stories, reflections, and race recaps on the pages of We Run 313: The Pulse of Detroit's Run Club. Cowriting with Lynzee Mychael Slappey, Woods and Robinson collect essays and thoughts from more than 40 club members and runners and place them alongside full-color photographs. The careful curation captures the joy, love, and camaraderie that We Run 313 has cultivated: "This isn't just a book about running. It's about what keeps us alive.... It's about Detroit. And it's about us."

Running is an inherently solo sport; no one can run for someone else. But when running as an activity is held collectively, as in We Run 313, it becomes something communal, greater than the sum of its parts. The stories here--of runners who have found themselves on the streets of Detroit, of couples who have found each other at group runs, of individuals who have found community--speak to this transformative power of running as both a physical and mental pursuit. We Run 313, like the club it represents, is "joyful, rhythmic, loud, Black, and proud," a beautiful rendering of the power of possibility and solidarity in the running world and far beyond. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective

Children's and teen author Joy McCullough (Basil & Dahlia; Code Red) offers readers the introspective, unguarded Kestrel Takes Flight, a middle-grade novel-in-verse about an 11-year-old girl's escape from her pastor grandfather's abuse.

Kestrel Sinclair is confused and bitter when her mother sneaks them out of her grandfather's San Diego home without warning. She and her mother "don't keep secrets" from each other, but Kestrel's mother covertly took a summer job training Karelian bear dogs (a breed of hunting dog) at a conservation institute in Montana, where "some lady.../ figured out how to train Karelians/ to keep bears and humans apart." Kestrel's grandfather says that dogs are "unpredictable,/ naturally aggressive/ and filthy" and Kestrel is initially "terrified" of the Karelians. The girl's resentment toward her mother deepens when she learns the move to Montana is permanent. Although Kestrel is at first furious, with support from the institute's founder and the welcoming care of new friend Nico, she starts to feel safe. Eventually, Kestrel questions the reasons for the move as well as Grandpa's beliefs, rules, and cruel words.

McCullough's skillful use of contrast between Kestrel's past and present drives the novel's powerful poetic imagery. The institute's dogs only bark and never bite, but Kestrel's grandfather taught her "how badly a bark can hurt." Flashbacks of painful episodes that reveal the extent of her grandfather's control and his strict church community punctuate Kestrel's healing. Recurring unsent letters from Kestrel to her grandfather poignantly track her development, allowing her to safely confront her abuser and process her experiences. Fans of Jamie Sumner's Deep Water and Megan E. Freeman's Alone will likely admire Kestrel's bravery. --Cristina Iannarino, children's book buyer, Books on the Square, Providence, R.I.

In Banana Express: The Big Journey Behind One Small Delivery, Korean picture-book maker Jung Jinho (Look Up!), two-time winner of the Bologna Ragazzi Award, cleverly illuminates the logistics necessary to enable a quick breakfast for his protagonist. Aerin Park (Late Today translator) offers an enthusiastic translation.

Even before the book's title page, Minjoo orders bananas for early-morning delivery tomorrow. The title page follows, showing several boxes being loaded into a truck. "The bananas need to arrive early, so a delivery truck heads out before sunrise," initiating the process of getting Minjoo fed on time. With the sun still sleeping, the driver must find a gas station open at 4 a.m. Employees with jobs starting predawn catch even earlier subways, which means the tracks require repairs through the night. Once finished, those hungry workers need breakfast, sending restaurant owners shopping, prepping, and cooking before sunrise, necessitating food and vehicles--as well as power. Dad works all night to keep the electrical plant going, leaving Mom to do the early drop-off at the daycare center where Minjoo works. Hence Minjoo's early, quick breakfast.

Jung creates invitingly simple black-and-white line drawings with yellow highlights to complement his easy, step-by-step narrative. Humor is included: $6.99 per pound for U.S. meat, $55 per pound for Korean. An author's note recalls Jung first noticing his own pre-daybreak suppliers, "people I had often taken for granted. This book was put together from the stories of those unseen hands." Jung warmly reminds readers--factory assemblers and engineers, fishermen and suppliers, drivers and deliverers, and parents and caregivers alike--that "we are all connected." --Terry Hong

The Heirs, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé's (winner of the 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Youth/Teen Literary Work) third solo YA novel, is an electrifying locked-room mystery about wealth, genius, and obsession.

Sixteen years ago, Leontes Button, an eccentric French billionaire, adopted five children from around the world. His intent was to prove that, through his Button Method, " a genius can... be plucked from a random orphanage and made in a lab." Now, the teens are preparing for the 10th annual Prodigy Ball, a two-day showcase hosted by Button. Perdita, Bilal, Fola, and Octavius--nicknamed by journalists "the Artist, the Olympian, the Brain, the Maestro," respectively--will all be featured. Romeo, "the Failure," will not. But the media's characterizations are hardly the full story. Fola, a chess champion, struggles with proving herself to her father. Octavius, regularly heartbroken and detached from his family, has run away to boarding school. Bilal, "the world's youngest Olympic fencing gold medalist," has a potentially career-ending injury. And Perdita created her "supposed masterpiece... over two years ago" and hasn't been able to paint since. When Leontes's battered body is found the morning after the showcase, everyone becomes a suspect as plentiful motives and devastating secrets are uncovered.

Àbíké-Íyímídé (Where Sleeping Girls Lie) delivers a gripping, emotional, slow-burn family drama and deft mystery told in four acts. The novel's first half focuses on the siblings' inner lives, strained family bonds, and burdens of expectation. Àbíké-Íyímídé gives the second half to the investigation, exploring the roots of the Button family: nature vs. nurture, power and status, love and obsession. Teen fans of Jennifer Lynn Barnes's The Inheritance Games, The Umbrella Academy, or Knives Out should revel in this exhilarating mystery. --Natasha Harris, freelance reviewer

In My Name Is Harriet Mansoor (NOT Hairy Man Suit!) Iranian Americans Haleh Massey (Say Something, Poupeh Babaee!) and Rashin Kheiriyeh (Two Parrots) offer a comedic and sincere middle-grade story that depicts 11-year-old Hangameh "Harriet" Mansoor as she strives to navigate bullying and family expectations.

Iranian American Harriet's parents moved to the U.S. so she and her older sister, Noosheen, could have more options for their future. Such options include "becoming a doctor or, if worse came to worse, a dentist." Harriet wants to fit into her small Los Angeles suburb; instead she feels like "an awkward Iranian girl who looks like a boy." What's more, classmate Sarah--who dubbed Harriet "Hairy Man Suit" after noticing Harriet's "hairy" legs--is now dating Harriet's crush. Luckily, Harriet has best friend Cathy, an "awkward White girl with stupid brown freckles," to lean on and help Harriet convince her parents to let her go on the sixth-grade camping trip. But Harriet's father tells her and Noosheen that "business is bad" and they may have to move back to Iran. Now Harriet has bullying, a crush, a camping trip, and "brainstorming" a way to stay in L.A. on her plate.

Kheiriyeh's cartoonish black-and-white spot drawings amp up the humor, depicting figures with exaggerated facial expressions and body language. Massey notes at novel's end that this work was inspired by her own experience, which may explain the text's straightforward candor. Massey thoughtfully expresses the worries of a tween and uses moments with Harriet's family, as well as cultural details such as Farsi phrases and Iranian dishes, to add layered authenticity to her story. --Hadeal Salamah, blogger, librarian, freelance reviewer