Archives de catégorie : Fiction

CLEAR WATER de Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

An atmospheric and mesmerizing literary thriller that follows a woman’s return to her small town, and the secrets of its haunted past. For fans of Liz Moore and Samantha Schweblin.

CLEAR WATER
by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
Flatiron Books, November 2026

Alma Figueroa, recently furloughed from her job as a paralegal and still trying to find her footing after a divorce, is driving home one night when a girl dressed in white appears out of nowhere. Afraid that the girl is injured, Alma takes her to the hospital. The girl is unharmed, but won’t speak and has no identification. Alma is determined to help her, but then the girl disappears without a trace. She is not the only girl in white to be seen. Reports come in of girls appearing in the snow, in the woods, and in the middle of roads. And while none of their faces match the photos on the missing persons posters scattered all over town, evidence of neglect echoes in their unwavering silence.

As Alma starts to investigate, she soon uncovers something larger, something the town has been actively ignoring, that just might connect back to her sister Kayla’s death when they were in high school. When another girl from town goes missing, Alma must figure out what the girls in white are trying to tell her before it is too late.

Clear Water unfolds over three timelines, moving between the present-day appearance of the girls in white, Alma’s return to the small town several years earlier, and the teenage years in which her sister Kayla gets pulled into addiction. With a haunting quality, a literary feel, and elements of mystery and noir, this lush and lyrical book is a poignant story about sisters, secrets, grief, and what it means when the people in authority continue to overlook the most vulnerable in their community.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland and author of Are We Ever Our Own: Stories (winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, 2022) and The Sleeping World (Touchstone, 2016). She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Millay Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and was a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf.

TREPPE AUS PAPIER de Henrik Szántó

What stories would the walls tell, if they could speak? A house and its inhabitants, from the Nazi era to the present day. For fans of Imre Kertész, Saša Stanišić and Jenny Erpenbeck.

TREPPE AUS PAPIER
(Paper Stairs)
by Henrik Szántó
Blessing Verlag/PRH Germany, August 2025

When 15-year-old Nele Bittner and 90-year-old Irma Thon meet in the stairwell of a four-storey period building, their conversation breathes life into what Nele always thought was boring old history.

The narrator of Nele and Irma’s story is the house itself, whose walls, hallways, pipes and nooks and crannies harbour the memories of all those who have lived in it over the past hundred years. Irma has a special connection to the building: she and her Nazi-supporting parents lived here when she was a child. Nele, meanwhile, lives on the top floor, in a flat once occupied by the Sternheim family – and Irma feels responsible for what happened to them.

For this house, everything happens simultaneously: when little Ruth Sternheim skips down the stairs, the house remembers the SA who, years later, will smash the window of the Sternheims’ ground-floor watch shop with their truncheons. While Irma looks back on her life, Nele’s questioning of her own family brings to light things they had hoped to suppress.

A daring, courageous novel about remembrance, responsibility and the shadow cast by history.

Henrik Szántó, born in 1988, is a half-Hungarian, half-Finnish author and presenter living in Hannover. He performs as a spoken word artist on stages across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and has won several fellowships. He also works as an instructor, running poetry, creative writing, public speaking and performance skills seminars, and stages events showcasing both new and experienced voices. He is particularly interested in multilingualism, remembrance and multiculturalism.

BATTLEGROUND STATES de Shawn Otto

A scientist and her young son embark on a harrowing journey through the Midwest in the not-too-distant post-civil war future in which the country has divided into different geographical factions, disinformation reigns, and the most powerful weapon ever created is about to be unleashed. Pitched as The Road meets Station Eleven.

BATTLEGROUND STATES
by Shawn Otto
Milkweed, 2027
(via David Black Agency)

For those millions who binged “The Last of Us” and those millions more who still look to 1984, It Can’t Happen Here and The Handmaid’s Tale as dystopian classics.

What if you alone could save the world, and the enemy trying to stop you was your father?

Ten years have passed since the outbreak of the second American Civil War. The United States has been torn into four new nations and an ungoverned Midwest region known as Heartland, where the war rages on.

Christine Haber, once the UW-Madison’s youngest endowed chair in genetics at age twenty-three, lost everything in the war. Now she runs the Preserve, the last functioning university in Heartland, while her father rises in power as a ruthless demagogue intent on controlling the war-torn region.

Situated in tents on a former nature preserve in Wisconsin, the Preserve has survived because it offers objective, neutral education to anyone regardless of their politics. There Christine has also been raising her eight-year-old son Robby alone, after his father was killed in the war.

One night Christine is woken by a fellow scientist seeking her help. The woman carries a stolen vial containing a new type of biological weapon—a deadly virus designed using advanced epigenetic editing to infect and kill “genetic liberals,” the people Christine’s father blames for the war. The scientist wants Christine’s help to smuggle the stolen vial out of Heartland to Canada so researchers can develop a vaccine before it’s too late.

But then the Preserve is attacked. Christine and Robby escape with the vial and begin a harrowing journey through a darkly beautiful world that is both recognizable and strange, where destruction and disinformation reign and questions about what is true or not become more and more unanswerable.

Ultimately, Christine’s odyssey leads her to confront her radicalized father and, in a stunning twist, to make a devastating choice that will change them all forever. Otto’s unforgettable novel imagines a dysfunctional family writ large and, by probing the biological roots of how we see ourselves and each other, asks how different we really are.

Shawn Otto speaks to audiences worldwide about writing, the scientific foundation of democracy, and the causes of anti-truth, antidemocratic movements. He is a past board chair of the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, where he lives in a solar- and wind-powered home he designed and built. His award-winning debut novel, Sins Of Our Fathers (Milkweed), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He wrote and co-produced the Academy-Award nominated movie House of Sand and Fog, starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. Otto is also author of two award-winning nonfiction science books, Fool Me Twice (Rodale) and The War On Science (Milkweed), which predicted the rise of anti-truth authoritarianism. The Guardian called The War On Science “a game changer, and probably the most important book you’ll read this year.”

BABY QUEEN de Ty Landers

A sharp-as-a-blade tale of small-town suspense that feels a bit like Ozark as directed by the Coen brothers. Toss in a Hollywood star with a legendary mean streak, ice-cold hitmen posing as used car salesmen, and entire buckets of frog legs, and you have a debut novel that reads like a Southern homage to The Godfather. For fans of S.A. Cosby, Ace Atkins, and Eli Cranor.

BABY QUEEN
by Ty Landers
HarperPerennial, pub date TBD
(via David Black Agency)

When a queen bee can no longer do her job, the workers will kill her, producing a baby queen to take her place.

A perfectly preserved but very dead body is found in a barrel of honey, and the town of Noccalula, Alabama, will never be the same.

Natalie Link has inherited the family honey business from her beloved grandmother Lana, who raised Nat after her mother ran off to Los Angeles. But it turns out Nat had no idea what Lana’s been hiding in the bee goop. Is Nat up to running an enterprise of questionable repute, evading the investigator whose been on her family’s case since she was a kid, and surviving her suddenly lethal life?

Bob Sauk is a PI on a twenty-year losing streak who torpedoed his own promising cop career once upon a time when a man vanished under very suspicious circumstances and Sauk knew in his core that Lana Link was to blame. Will he finally get the chance to prove he was right all along?

Ed Sorter is a small-town sheriff who has to get this all figured out without pissing off absolutely everyone in town, or at least not too bad.

Ty Landers writes southern crime fiction. His short stories have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, In Shades Magazine and Fjords Review. He is currently working on his first novel, set in his home state of Alabama. Ty spent over twenty years in Nashville, Tennessee before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife Emily and their sons Jack, Rowan, and Barrett.

ENORMOUS WINGS de Laurie Frankel

An urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality, and mortality, combined with Laurie Frankel’s signature warmth and wit.

ENORMOUS WINGS
by Laurie Frankel
Holt, May 2026
(via The Friedrich Agency)

At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. Her children and grandchildren worry it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: she’s pregnant.

Once word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and the paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, all descending on Vista View as Pepper tries to determine her next move. Soon Pepper has some hard decisions to make—and some she’s not allowed to make.

Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of the novels Family Family, One Two Three, Goodbye for Now, The Atlas of Love, and the Reese’s Book Club Pick This Is How It Always Is. Frankel lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie. She makes good soup.