Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2025 Adult Fiction

BIRD DEITY de John Morrissey

A scout retrieving artifacts from an ancient species on a distant planet sets out on a search for his missing mentor.

BIRD DEITY
by John Morrissey
Text Publishing Australia, August 2026

David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now his contract is ending, and he’s ready to go home, a wealthy, successful man.

Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom vanished on a recent expedition. David doesn’t know what has happened to him. And, as he waits for the ship that will take him away, he begins to question the choices he has made.

That’s when he is visited by a researcher, a specialist in non-human societies. She has travelled far to learn about this strange world and wants to hire David as her guide. One more expedition, one more trip to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau—and he can go home at last, rich beyond his dreams.

But he comes to realise that he may yet lose everything, as he is drawn inexorably towards an encounter with the terrifying soul of this world.

John Morrissey’s BIRD DEITY is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it’s a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny.

‘Bird Deity is a spare and moving story about the burden of history and the vicissitudes of the colonial project. Morrissey’s novel has a dignified, undeniable power. It’s like Coetzee in space. I devoured it.’ –Dominic Amerena, author of I Want Everything

John Morrissey is a multi-award-winning Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks, Meanjin and the anthology This All Come Back Now. He was the winner of the 2020 Boundless Mentorship, the runner-up for the 2018 Nakata Brophy Prize and named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2024. His debut short story collection, Firelight, was published in 2023 and won Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards 2023 as well as the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection in the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards.

THE NIGHTLESS CITY de Callum McSorley

The first in a new series of historical thrillers set in nineteenth-century Japan, from the prizewinning author of Squeaky Clean.

THE NIGHTLESS CITY
by Callum McSorley
Pushkin Press, September 2026

Tokyo, 1886.

Chino Kunio, a male courtesan in Tokyo’s infamous Yoshiwara neighbourhood, the Nightless City, discovers his one and only client, a British diplomat, dead and himself in the frame for the man’s grisly murder.

Trying to save Chino from the judicial blade are his friend, samurai rebel turned reckless drunk Shimura Shingo, police inspector Tokuda Reiji, and the victim’s wife, Fiona Gordon, a Scottish teacher living a stifled life in the foreign concession, who is seeking her own answers.

But as more foreigners are slain, dredging up the shadow of shipwreck that led to a diplomatic scandal, Chino’s only hope may be to escape the Nightless City for good, before it explodes into violence between belligerent westerners and nationalist bully boys.

Callum McSorley is a writer based in Glasgow, where he grew up. His debut thriller, Squeaky Clean, the first book in the Alison McCoist thriller series, was published to great acclaim and went on to win the prestigious McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish Crime Book of the Year. THE NIGHTLESS CITY is the first in a new series of historical thrillers set in nineteenth-century Japan.

CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STRANGERS de Krista Diamond

A modern literary noir in the tradition of Bret Easton Ellis for fans of A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan, the LA stories of Emma Cline, and Uncut Gems.

CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STRANGERS
by Krista Diamond
Simon & Schuster, Fall 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STRANGERS follows a Las Vegas wildlife photographer who, while moving to Los Angeles to become a paparazzo, loses his relationships, his morals, and eventually his tether to reality.

A Los Vegan itching for LA, Ben is an amateur wild-life photographer and busser in a diner where tourists come to recreate a movie scene starring Jack Whitlock, “the last real movie star.” He meets a man who promises money as a paparazzo, which he likens to wildlife photography, inciting Ben to move to LA. The job is a thrill; high that he chases to increasingly damaging ends.

A year and a half later, Ben—broke, single, and receiving increasingly credible death threats from a pop star’s stans—is desperate for a win. And when scandalous photos of Jack Whitlock leak, and Ben becomes obsessed with being the first photographer to break new photos of Jack. He follows leads through the absurd horrors of celebrity LA, dodging close encounters with fans, weaving his way back to Las Vegas and the desert of his redemption or demise.

Krista Diamond is a Black Mountain Institute PhD fellow in creative writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her writing has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, the Nevada Arts Council, and has appeared in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, Longreads, Hazlitt, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. The opening of CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STRANGERS was longlisted for both the First Pages Prize and the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize.

NERVE DAMAGE d’Annakeara Stinson

A riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself.

NERVE DAMAGE
by Annakeara Stinson
Knopf, May 2026
(via Neon Literary)

Credit: Greg Wonder

Clarice’s breakup with P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, hundreds of phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her house and her office. He sent her flowers and poems, and, perhaps most sinister of all, a link to the music video for Dido’s “White Flag.” Relief only arrived when Clarice finally obtained a restraining order and one-way ticket from New York to L.A.

Just as the restraining order expires—and three years to the day since she left him—Clarice spots a man who looks suspiciously like P.T. at a nightclub. Could it be him? Her best friend thinks she’s imagining things. Her therapist wants her to focus on healing her inner child. Her mother is busy planning her wedding to her fourth husband. A psychic medium can only reveal that P.T.’s energy is too volatile to locate on the spiritual plane. As painful memories resurface, Clarice is convinced her ex has returned to ruin her life. . . But with scant evidence to prove it, she takes increasingly unhinged steps to uncover the truth, ultimately leading to a place where paranoia and reality begin to blur.

A profane and poignant debut novel, Nerve Damage is a different kind of survivor narrative, about how far one woman will go to wrest back control of her life in a world determined to send her spiraling.

Annakeara Stinson is a writer whose work has appeared in Bustle, Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Marie Claire, and more. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from The New School and currently lives in L.A.

THE GREAT WHEREVER de Shannon Sanders

From an award-winning writer of “riotous and dazzling” stories (Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies), a debut novel that paints a sweeping portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction to the present day.

THE GREAT WHEREVER
by Shannon Sanders
Holt, July 2026
(via DeFiore and Co.)

At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a serious relationship. When Aubrey learns that she has inherited a shared stake in a sizable Tennessee farm from her father, she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt.

Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm, and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the choices and mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family and faces pressure from developers, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hoped to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the

land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it divides the family, turning Thomas’ descendants against each other and drawing the attention of neighbors eager to wrest the land from Black hands, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes down through the decades.

Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.

An expansive family saga perfect for fans of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and told with a wry and very modern voice, THE GREAT WHEREVER is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our family, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature, and received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons.