Archives de catégorie : Fiction

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE de Christopher Tradowsky

This tender, exuberant novel about a young man navigating coming of age in’90s San Francisco is perfect for readers of Garth Greenwell and André Aciman.

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE
by Christopher Tradowsky
Simon & Schuster, June 2025
(via Neon Literary)

Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.

As the three embark on adventures across the city, filled with joie de vivre, their lively friendship evolves in unexpected ways. When Walter befriends Lawrence, a filmmaker and former child actor living with HIV, they pursue a film project of their own, with hilarious and tragic results.

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE is a vibrant and nostalgic exploration of young souls discovering themselves amidst the backdrop of a disappearing city. Christopher Tradowsky’s astonishing debut captures the essence of ’90s queer culture and the complex lives of friends seeking an aesthetically beautiful and fulfilling way of life.

Christopher Tradowsky is a writer, artist, and art historian. He was awarded the 2023 J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE is his debut novel.

THE NEW NEIGHBOURS de Claire Douglas

You know your neighbours are plotting a crime but no one believes you . . .

THE NEW NEIGHBOURS
by Claire Douglas
Penguin UK, March 2025
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Do you trust the couple next door?

When Lena overhears a conversation between her next-door neighbours, she thinks she must have misheard.

After all, the Morgans are a kind, retired couple who have moved to a suburban street in Bristol where nothing ever happens.

But it sounded like they were planning a crime.

Her family and friends tell her she’s made a mistake.

Yet the more Lena looks into the Morgans, the darker things seem.

And the more she fears it might be linked to a secret from her own past.

Because, if her suspicions are true, then someone is in real danger.

And it might just be her…

Claire Douglas worked as a journalist for fifteen years, but had dreamed of being a novelist since the age of seven. She finally got her wish after winning the Marie Claire Debut Novel Award with her first novel, The Sisters. She is a Sunday Times bestseller and a frequent Richard & Judy Book Club pick. Her books have sold nearly two million copies in the UK alone. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.

THE GREAT WHEREVER de Shannon Sanders

A multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day.

THE GREAT WHEREVER
by Shannon Sanders
Holt, Spring 2026
(via DeFiore and Company)

THE GREAT WHEREVER is a multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day. As she’s done in her previous short story work, Sanders sends the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt through generations. She is especially brilliant about invisible legacies—not only family secrets, but also lineages hidden in plain sight; aspects of a family tree that are consciously and unconsciously shaped, especially by women; and inheritances that are interrupted or thwarted, sometimes violently.

The novel is about a family, but it also breaks open the idea of what a family is, how a family interacts with land, history, time. Sanders conveys this all while being so attentive to the life and character and thoughts and feelings of one very specific and very relatable millennial.

In the tradition of expansive family sagas The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow, and with the thoroughly modern anxieties and crackling social commentary of novels like Such a Fun Age. The Great Wherever is a story of race and generational wealth, family and ambition, and a young woman’s coming-to-terms with her legacy.

Exploring the many people, places, and events that can shape our inheritances without our knowing Sanders puts forth the notion that each generation exerts an influence on the ones to follow, even when that influence isn’t consciously felt and people are challenged to find their own emotional truths. This is an intricate meditation on the ways we learn to define ourselves in—and out of—our loved ones’ orbits, how we carry forward after loss, and what is choice and what is fate in the tumultuous conveyance of an ancestral home across generations.

Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sanders’ debut story collection Company won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, was named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly, was an Indie Next Pick, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS de Hank Phillippi Ryan

Is a debut author’s blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by « master of suspense » (Publishers Weekly) and USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Minotaur, September 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house.

But there’s a chilling problem with Tessa’s triumphant book tour―she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who’s obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home.

Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made―what felt like a genuine deal with the devil―appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can’t untangle who’s threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she’ll lose her career, her family―and possibly her life.

« A nail-biting thriller. » ―People

« ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a captivating and irresistible portrayal of the deals we make, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when the fine lines between fiction and reality blur under the searing pressure of fame, fans, family ― and a secret sinister bargain. A propulsive page-turner with a hugely satisfying reveal. »
Elle Cosimano, New York Times bestselling author of Finlay Donovan is Killing It

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan has won five Agatha Awards, five Anthony Awards, the Daphne, the Macavity, and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won thirty-seven Emmy Awards and many more journalism honors. A past president of national Sisters in Crime, a founder of Mystery Writers of America University, and a board member of International Thriller Writers, Ryan lives in Boston.

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES de Malavika Kannan

Malavika Kannan stands on the shoulders of The Idiot, Luster, the works of Sally Rooney and Honor Levy, asking: Which comes first: experience or narrative?

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
by Malavika Kannan
Holt/Macmillan, Fall 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Our story begins as a love letter to the distinct, batshit, yet canonical experience of the Queer Homoerotic Friendship. We enter the coming-of-age story of Rishi, an Indian-American girl from Orlando who beaches herself on the shores of Stanford “for the plot.” She sees nothing ahead of her except freedom, experience and love, and begins her journey with her sexuality and queerness as fast as humanly possible. Her roommate Georgia, a wealthy white girl from Maine and the daughter of two scientists, quickly becomes her best friend and confidant in all things. But the friends and love affairs that fill Rishi’s days (and the recaps she gives Georgia every night) and make her believe she is truly becoming herself begin to unravel with the abrupt onset of Covid. (I haven’t yet seen a Gen Z voice that talks about this period and the intense loss of possibility, just when they had reached the thing that had worked so hard for: college!).

Rishi and Georgia and their friends endure going back to the homes they had just left, but soon strike out on a new adventure: the Covid Gap year, where they join a farm collective and grapple with political radicalization and growing disillusionment…along with sexual tension and responsibility. Things start to get interesting with Georgia: she and Rishi get drunk and make out. Rishi thinks that she and Georgia have « gotten past » the kiss — she rationalizes it to herself that it is very normal for best friends to kiss, and if they are meant to be in love, they will figure it out much later. Georgia thinks otherwise.

Rishi has been focused on herself as the main character of her story, one rooted in her feminist and queer sensibilities of progress and agency, but by the end of the novel she faces painful experiences that shatter her sense of narrative, so all she can really do is feel her way through it, and trust that she will understand it later. Along for the ride, we may see the mistakes Rishi is making, but we learn something about ourselves and the world around us alongside her.

Malavika Kannan is a writer and organizer from Florida. According to men online she is « lazy, dumb, and loose, » but she prefers to identify as an advocate for queer women of color, online and IRL. She’s been featured by Seventeen Magazine, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, and graduated from Stanford University this year. Her YA novel, All the Yellow Suns was published by Little & Brown in 2023. She’s also written about Gen Z and culture for San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She draws viral cartoons and posts about queer identity for an audience of 40,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida, she organized with March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, and is forever committed to centering queer youth in movements for justice and joy.