Archives de catégorie : Fiction

ONE ANOTHER de Gail Jones

At Cambridge University, in the summer of 1992, Australian student Helen is completing her thesis on Joseph Conrad. But she is distracted by a charming and dangerous lover, Justin, and by a ghost manuscript, her anti-thesis, which she has left on a train.

ONE ANOTHER
by Gail Jones
Text Publishing, March 2024

Haunted by this loss and others, by Justin’s destructive tendencies and by details of Conrad’s life, Helen is unmoored. And then the drama of the lost manuscript sets in motion a series of events—with possibly fatal consequences.

In her masterly new novel, Gail Jones traverses the borders between art and life, between lif and death, in a journey through literary history and emotional landscapes. Elegantly written, deftly crafted, One Another covers new territories of grief, memory and narrative.

Gail Jones is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. She is the author of two short-story collections and nine novels, and her work has been translated into several languages and has received numerous literary awards. Originally from Western Australia, she now lives in Sydney.

LUMINOUS de Silvia Park

Prescient yet timeless, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, this highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea tells the story of three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood.

LUMINOUS
by Silvia Park
Simon & Schuster, March 2025
(via The Friedrich Agency)

“I once had a family. At least, the earliest version of me had a family.”

In a reunified Korea of the near future, the sun beats down on a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, broken down for parts. Eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through the scraps, searching for a piece that might support her failing body. There among the piles of trash, something catches her eye: a robot boy—so lifelike and strange, unlike anything she’s ever seen before.

Siblings Jun and Morgan haven’t spoken for years. When they were children, their brother Yoyo disappeared suddenly, leaving behind only distant memories of his laughter and near-human warmth. Yoyo—an early prototype of a humanoid robot designed by their father—was always bound for something darker and more complex. Now Morgan makes robots for a living and is on the verge of losing control of her most important creation. Jun is a detective with the Robot Crimes Unit whose investigation is digging up truths that want to stay buried. And whether they like it or not, Ruijie’s discovery will thrust their family back together in ways they could have never imagined.

At once a thrilling work of speculative fiction and a poignant exploration of what it really means to be human, Luminous is an unforgettably brilliant debut.

One of Debutiful‘s Most Anticipated Debuts of 2025
One of LitHub’s 20 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Look Forward to in 2025

“Extraordinary…set in a not-too-distant future, debut novelist Silvia Park’s Luminous gloriously explores the unpredictable, fading lines between man and machine.”—Shelf Awareness

« With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death…Lustrous. »—Publishers Weekly

« A well-crafted take on the vagaries of memory and what it means to be human, with a satisfying investigative backbone. »—Booklist

“Inventive, rollicking, and poetic, Luminous is a future classic novel about robots that reveals itself to be profoundly, beautifully human.”—Juhea Kim, author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds

“Wildly and, yes, luminously emotional.”—Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library

« [Luminous] is a spectacular debut, taking place in a thoroughly imagined, vividly written future. Harrowing but full of heart, a work of enormous ambition and brilliance with an ending that fully justifies the title and brought me to tears. »—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Luminous is warm, expansive, and particular. Park renders the intersection between family and technology with wit and philosophical depth, but ultimately this is just incredibly exciting to read. It’s utterly beautiful.”—Raven Leilani, bestselling author of Luster

Silvia Park’s stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Tor, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from NYU and attended the Clarion Science and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. They teach fiction at the University of Kansas and split their selves between Lawrence and Seoul. LUMINOUS is their first novel.

MASQUERADE de Mike Fu

Exploring social, cultural, and sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu’s MASQUERADE is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel for readers of Jason Mott’s A Hell Of A Book and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

MASQUERADE
by Mike Fu
Tin House, October 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s own in Chinese, Liu Tian–a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.

Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. He is a co-founder and editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently teaches fiction and translation at Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

THE STONE MEN de Timea Sipos

Imagine it’s possible to breathe life into stone — your hand meets the cool surface of a sculpted man and finds it pulsing with life… This is the Budapest of THE STONE MEN, a vibrantly original debut novel for fans of Clarice Lispector and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark.

THE STONE MEN
by Timea Sipos
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Four female sculptors in their final year of art school discover their ability to animate statues. Their first creation: the ideal man. What starts as a creative experiment grows into a media sensation. Seeing an opportunity, two of the sculptors, Bori and Hajni, begin to monetize their art, sculpting men for wealthy patrons who desire companions. As the operation grows, the streets of Budapest become restless with discarded animate statues, many of whom long for integration into human society. Haunting the novel is a mysterious mass casualty which leaves an untold number of stone men dead.

Through the perspectives of the stone men, their creators, and their occasional human companions, the novel explores the blurred the lines between art and life, female agency and sexuality, and questions what we owe our creations.

Timea Sipos is a Hungarian-American writer and translator with a MFA from the University of Nevada, and studied translation at the Balassi Institute. She has been supported by MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.

MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING de Zee Carlstrom

A loud, fast-paced debut that punches the road-trip novel right in the face.

MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING
by Zee Carlstrom
Flatiron, Spring 2025
(via Neon Literary)

The newly nameless narrator of MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING has rejected the gender binary, flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate job, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is drinking enough booze for two people.

A call from their mother with the news that their conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing, launches the narrator from Chicago to Deep Red Arkansas in a stolen car and their new bestie in tow a self-proclaimed « garbage goth » with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail). Along the way. they unpack the narrator’s childhood, one ruled by the whims of their father’s anger and paranoia, and a recent personal loss they would rather eat glass than face.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, the liberal/conservative divide, toxic masculinity, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, fucked-up enby road-trip novel of our times.

Zee Carlstrom is a creative director and writer from Illinois. They live in Brooklyn.