Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2025 Adult Fiction

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.

GRIEFDOGG de Michael Winkler

Michael Winkler’s first novel Grimmish became a cult hit. Griefdogg is another triumph. Funny, sad, always entrancing, it tells a crazy-sane story about identity, love, family and forgiveness.

GRIEFDOGG
by Michael Winkler
Text Publishing (Australia), April 2026

Meet Jeffrey Watson-Johnson: hydrologist, husband of Martine, father of Bern, model citizen of Mildura.

After inheriting a small fortune from an obscure aunt and a disconcerting encounter with his cousin Pam, Jeffrey decides it’s time to change everything.

He wants to live like the family pet.

As his relationships face upheaval, Jeffrey withdraws further from his old life. Sleeping through the day or wandering beside the river, he discovers a new power: he can sense secret grief in others. What to do with this gift? Or with his awareness of the endless streams of water flowing unseen beneath the earth?

Michael Winkler’s first novel Grimmish became a cult hit. Griefdogg is another triumph. Funny, sad, always entrancing, it tells a crazy-sane story about identity, love, family and forgiveness.

Michael Winkler is a writer from Melbourne, living on the unceded lands of the Kulin nation. He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books. His novel Grimmish was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and he won the Calibre Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’. His journalism, short fiction, reviews and essays have been widely published and anthologised.