Hidden Gems You May Have Missed

Zuzu met her best friend Cash on the first day of college, and nothing was ever the same. Tall, witty, and popular, his friendship represented a kind of belonging for Zuzu, who had always felt like an outsider. Now approaching her forties, Zuzu has built a stable life with her wife Agnes, a steadfast and career-driven lawyer. Yet Zuzu is haunted by the choices that have shaped her: Living with her mother instead of her father in childhood, pursuing law over art, and marrying Agnes while harboring complex feelings for Cash … A novel that speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age, The Other Wife is as heartfelt as it is daring in its deep reckoning with the past and quest for true joy.

A young book publicist finds herself in an all-consuming workplace affair with her literary idol in this “very impressive debut” (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of All the Colors of the Dark). Tender and poignant, Bitter Sweet is an intimate exploration of power, of vulnerability, of what it means to love another person, and what it means to love yourself.

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters bemoan their fleeting youth, focus on their breathing, meet cute, break up, write book reviews, translate ancient glyphs, bid on stuff online, whale watch, and once in a while find solace in the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. Spanning a quarter century, these sixteen stories tell the absurd truth about our lives. They capture the moment when the present becomes the past — and are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most imaginative and insightful writers working today.

Maya, an artist, and Noah, a quantum physicist, share an insatiable curiosity about the world. When Noah is invited by the Janus Project to unravel the secrets of time travel, he jumps at the opportunity. Meanwhile, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past in Japan, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah and Maya grapple with hope and despair, new information emerges that the experiments might not be exactly what they seem … A luminous novel, “as breathtaking as it is mind-bending” (Rachel Khong), that asks: What would you give to relive the past?

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.

A son returns home to his dying mother to discover the astonishing truth of his origins and the secrets of a woman whose life and wisdom he is only beginning to understand. Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, the boy comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him. Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is an emotionally searing meditation on the most essential human themes: Loss, healing, memory, and the redemptive power of love.

A riveting tale of forbidden love centered on an estranged couple brought together to reckon with the mysterious events that splintered their family. This Kind of Trouble traces the intertwined legacies of one family’s history, exploring the complex relationship between tradition, modernity, and the ways we seek healing in a changing world. With this debut novel, Tochi Eze announces herself as a dazzling new voice in world literature.

“A vibrant, heartstrings-tugging novel” (People) about a mother’s love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption, from the prize-winning author of Golden Child. It’s an emotional journey that leads her to retrace her steps — from Trinidad to Venezuela and then to London — and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since. Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself — a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.

An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for — two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone? In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria. As they work to establish themselves in the city’s lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.

An eerie, hypnotic debut about friendship, desire, and memory set against the sultry backdrop of Florida’s swamplands. Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance — even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it’s like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city.

An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ‘90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence. Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts of the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

A thrilling historical mystery about a young woman searching for her father, a young man trying to solve an impossible problem, and the quest for the power to transcend time. Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s beautiful meditation on time, love, and obsession shows us how we never truly know what happened in the past, and often how the past eerily mirrors the future.

In this poignant retelling of The Great Gatsby, set amongst L.A.’s Black elite, a young veteran finds his way post-war, pulled into a new world of tantalizing possibilities — and explosive tensions. Told from the unique perspective of a young man who has just returned from a grueling, segregated war, The Great Mann weaves a compelling narrative of wealth and class, illuminating the complexities of Black identity and education in post-war America.

A young Victorian Egyptologist traverses the Nile River on a mission to undo a curse that may have befallen her family in this spellbinding novel. “An intoxicating tale of adventure and obsession, told in prose that shimmers like the Nile” (Emilia Hart, author of Weyward).

A breathtaking, sliding-doors, will-they-won’t-they love story and a tender epic that explores the weight of a choice, the love of community, and how joy is found in even the darkest corners.

“One of the sharpest and most emotionally vulnerable novels on the complicated dynamic of dating cisgender straight men as a trans woman” (Autostraddle). Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships — familial and romantic — that make us who we are.

Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “a cause for celebration” — an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.