Archives de catégorie : Fiction

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.

IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN de Katy Sewall

Sold in a heated 9-person auction in the US, right before Frankfurt, a prequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden, for fans of Broken Country and The Thornbirds.

IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN
by Katy Sewall
Random House, Spring 2027
(via The Friedrich Agency)

A sweeping emotional tale and love story. IN EVERY BIRD: BEFORE THE GARDEN begins at the moment The Secret Garden starts—just as a cholera epidemic is sweeping through India—except this time, we flash back into the life of Mary Lennox’s mother, and the boy who will help her realize how expansive life can be.

“I was captivated and charmed by Katy Sewall’s debut novel, which more than does justice to its classic inspiration. I came into this book knowing as much about The Secret Garden as I did the Olive Garden, but by the end, I wanted nothing more than to stay a little longer in her rich and insightful world.” — Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

Katy Sewall is a writer and radio professional based in Seattle. She spent more than two decades working with NPR and currently hosts a weekly podcast called The Bittersweet Life, now in its 11th year.

THE GREAT WORK de Sheldon Costa

A grieving man and his nephew hunt down a myth in this gothic Western adventure for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.

THE GREAT WORK
by Sheldon Costa
Quirk Books, November 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Alone in a frontier town in the brand-new state of Washington, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam, a self-taught alchemist, was killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew Kitt arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down, so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

It’s a hard and haunted journey through the Northwestern frontier. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. And Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liam’s alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand it—and the terrifying visions it causes—before it’s too late.

Unsettling and profound, THE GREAT WORK is an arcane adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.

“The Great Work is a vision of America as both homeland and horror story. And it also is just a good ol’ page turner, the kind of dark tale that delivers on every promise it makes.” — Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale

“Costa’s rip-snorting debut is a wild ride through freaky old America: backwoods alchemists, a sadistic reverend judge, an animalistic cult, and a quest for a primeval monster of nightmares come together in a hell-for-leather frontier yarn packed with action, wonder, and heart.” — James Kennedy, author of Bride of the Tornado “A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic.” — Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

Sheldon Costa is a writer originally from Post Falls, Idaho. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journal Project, the 2018 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award, and the Cream City Review’s 2019 Summer Prize in Fiction, judged by Ramona Ausubel. He holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in rural Missouri with his wife and three cats. This is his debut novel.