Archives de catégorie : Literary

CO de Rina Schmeller

“Rina Schmeller […] writes with empathy but eschews all sentimentality, revealing not only the full horror of her situation, but also love in all its facets.” —Jenny Erpenbeck

CO by Rina Schmeller
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, March 2026

They met on a bridge. They recognised a kindred spirit in each other. They fell in love. And now they have decided to share their lives with each other, regardless of the drug to which he is addicted, and which will henceforth govern her life too. She becomes entangled in his addiction, and starts to orbit him like he orbits the drug, both calm centre and third party. She leaves again and again, to escape the violence, but always comes back. Almost always.

CO is a story about empathy and creeping self-sabotage, about the dynamics of addiction – which affects us all – and about what life is like when you’re co-dependent. Yet it is also the story of a woman’s empowerment and liberation, who finds the strength to let go. And as she embarks on the long and tough road to survival, she gradually regains her independence and finds her way back to herself. A powerful, elegant novel about regaining your inner freedom, sober, quiet and fiercely honest.

Rina Schmeller, born in 1986, studied creative writing in Leipzig and literary studies with comparative literature in Berlin. She has been awarded several fellowships and was a member of the 2020 prose writers’ workshop at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. In 2024 she published the essay Bedeutung erleben (‘Experiencing meaning’, Edit no. 91) about writing « Co ».

TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN de Dana Grigorcea

In a Romanian mountain town still marked by the past dictatorship, two young people from completely different worlds experience the miracle of love.

TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN
(Dancing Woman, Blue Rooster)
by Dana Grigorcea
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, March 2026

In 1990s Romania, the dust of socialism still hasn’t quite yet settled. Every summer Roxana and Camil meet in the small town of Busteni in the Carpathian Mountains: she is there on holiday, while he lives on the other side of the tracks. They observe the town’s couples, take inspiration from them and try to discover their secrets: from the successful lawyer who removes her roof when a tree starts growing through her house, to the chalk-and-cheese engineering couple who suffer from the same ailment, to the local beauty who looks like a TV star, who has found love with an unremarkable-seeming man. And with each successive summer, Roxana and Camil’s own story develops too – until they realise that they can only ever be a guest in each other’s lives.

Light as a feather yet profound, TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN is a kaleidoscope of love and what it takes for it to take root. A novel about desires unexpectedly fulfilled, opportunities that pass by unnoticed – and how the wheel of life carries on turning regardless.

Dana Grigorcea was born in Bucharest in 1979, she is a Germanist and Dutchist and has lived with her family in Zurich for many years. The Romanian-Swiss author’s works have been translated into several languages and have received numerous awards such as the Ingeborg Bachmann/3sat Award. Her novel « Those Who Never Die » won the 2022 Swiss Book Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 German Book Prize. Dana Grigorcea is a recipient of the Romanian Order of Cultural Merit with the rank of Knight.

THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY de Natalie Rose Richardson

A mesmerizing debut that combines the transformative friendships of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the suspense of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the varying vocal registers of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch.

THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY
by Natalie Rose Richardson
Knopf, May 2027
(via Writers House)

Two weeks before freshman orientation, four soon-to-be (unlikely) friends arrive at the University of Chicago as part of its token Scholars of Color (SOC) program: there’s Darwin, an insecure physics geek on a quest to lose his virginity; Nat, an elusive aspiring writer who starts secretly dating her much older mentor; Jordan, the would-be campus all-star who’s too stuck in his head to fulfill his potential, and Stephanie, the undisputed hottest girl on campus, who’s carrying a shocking secret.

Four years later, they combine their strengths to stage a protest as part of Scav – a notorious campus secret society that organizes a yearly competition, one that often spawns dark, borderline illegal situations that the school pays good money to cover up. This year’s prompt: to dramatically reenact “an actual tragedy.” Fifty-five students from SOC don shabby costumes and pitch tents in a Chicago park that, only days prior, was purged of real asylum seekers. But when the cops arrive at the scene, performance becomes reality when tragedy strikes.

Told in four parts, the novel dives into the life of each irresistibly compelling protagonist during one year of college. Their relationships to each other and themselves are tested as they each weather their own individual tragedies. It’s these friends’ complicated ties and devotion to each other that lead them to organize the asylum seeker reenactment—the consequences of which will mark the survivors forever.

With an irreverent, razor-sharp voice that dips into the serious, THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY probes loneliness and belonging, race, class, sex, friendship, and the absurdities of American higher education, and marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Natalie Rose Richardson is a writer from Oak Park, Illinois with degrees from the University of Chicago (BA), Northwestern University (MA & MFA in Poetry), and the NYU Creative Writing Program (MFA in Fiction). The manuscript was closely advised by Jonathan Safran Foer, who writes: “Natalie Rose Richardson arrives with a vibrant, irreverent, singular voice. THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY is an actual joy.” Her work has appeared in Narrative, Orion Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and more.

HABILA de Wayétu Moore

From the acclaimed author of She Would Be King, a dazzling and daring work of magical realism that weaves through the lives of a Liberian immigrant family and the water goddess who haunts them.

HABILA
by Wayétu Moore
Viking, January 2027
(via Writers House)

In this ambitious new novel, the bestselling and prize-winning writer Wayétu Moore delivers us into the lives of a young girl, Melanctha, and her family amid the loss of their patriarch, Tokpa. In search of a fresh start, they relocate from Liberia to the backwater town of Hunt, Texas, a land that proves hostile to them—until one day, when a school bully pushes Melanctha into a lake, and she finds that she can breathe underwater. Melanctha discovers that her newfound power comes from Habila, a gorgeous, beguiling half woman half sea deity who bestows on her a gift: a comb that, if touched, can lure people into the water and make them disappear for good.

But Melanctha’s connection to Habila has not come without a price. Habila has languished alone for millennia, blaming men for her loneliness. She harbors a hatred so potent that she has committed her existence to ridding the world of them. As Melanctha’s ties to Habila deepen, a family mystery unravels, and she learns that the siren may have secrets, too.

Inspired by the African legend of Mami Wata, HABILA is a kaleidoscopic tale tracing a family and a woman through the years as they navigate the supernatural forces and long-buried truths that shape their lives. In her signature lush, lyrical prose, Moore crafts an elegant story that probes the corners of womanhood and motherhood, immigrant identity, and the legacies wrought by men who take but never give back.

“A spellbinding epic about a fractured family haunted by a vengeful spirit, HABILA weaves mythology into a modern-day story about sacrifice, grief, and the costs of striving toward the American dream. A ferocious novel.” —Brit Bennett

Wayétu Moore is the author of the novel She Would Be King and the memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction and the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Moore is a graduate of Howard University, the University of Southern California, and Columbia University.

THE BRIGHTNESS de Chad Harbach

At long last, the NYT bestselling author of The Art of Fielding returns with an immersive, generation-defining epic: Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—THE BRIGHTNESS follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella Affenlight and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way into a larger world that won’t stop changing.

THE BRIGHTNESS
by Chad Harbach
Little, Brown, October 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank — one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond— threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.

It’s been fifteen years since The Art of Fielding published, but it continues to come up in conversation with many people referencing it as one of their favorite novels of all time. In The Brightness, Chad Harbach gives those who loved that book the opportunity to return to its indelible characters, but to see them in an entirely new light, while inviting a whole new generation of readers into his Westish world.

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling The Art of Fielding and a co-founder of n+1. He grew up in Wisconsin and attended Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in California.