Archives de catégorie : Literary

GHALEN de Walter Mosley

A stellar addition to the Amistad list: a beautiful coming-of-age novel from MWA Grand Master and PEN and Edgar Award-winner Walter Mosley that explores love in all forms—romantic, familial, and platonic, centered on one Black family, including a neurodivergent man, and the found bonds that helps ground them.

GHALEN: A Romance in Black
by Walter Mosley
Amistad/HarperCollins, May 2026

One of the most acclaimed writers working today, Walter Mosley spins magic once again in this beautiful novel that explores the lives of Black characters and one remarkable family through a lens both universal and unique. It touches on the lives of those whose deepest thoughts and motivations are seldom explored—including the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and the immigrant tortured by their past—characters who will stay with you and change how you see the world.

Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegetarian restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education.

His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.

The journey through Ghalen’s coming-of-age tale, as he ventures out into the world, is marked with peaks and valleys and such a drive that you can’t help but strap in for it all, while not wanting it to end.

Lush and cinematic, with the narrative drive and indelible power of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead andPaul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Ghalen is one of this bestselling, prize-winning writer’s finest achievements.

Walter Mosley is one of America’s most celebrated writers. He was given the 2020 National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, numerous Edgars and several NAACP Image Awards. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and the young adult novel 47. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has published fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Nation. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX’s Snowfall.

In 2020 he was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and from the National Book Foundation. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and he is the winner of numerous awards, including an Edgar Award, an O. Henry Award, the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a Grammy Award, and several NAACP Image Awards. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY de Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue’s long awaited epic new novel, about loss, sorrow, forgiveness, redemption and surviving unspeakable tragedy.

EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House, Fall 2026
(via Writers House)

Credit: Kiriko Sano

Three years ago, Wolo’s pregnant wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, his great love was gone, and so was their shining future: the twins they were expecting, the PhD she was on the cusp of finishing, and all the plans they’ve had for a long, happy life. At times the loss seemed insurmountable, but with the help from his tight knit family Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life, he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. His sorrow never leaves him and neither does the anger towards Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. His wife was not just the love of his life, she became the daughter his mother never had, beloved cousin to all members of his family, her loss has left them all devastated and angry.

Then one day a letter arrives, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria. Wolo’s pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from even reading it; his whole family is against it. But Wolo does read it and agrees to meet with the person who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman he meets surprises him. He is not the only person whose life was shattered by the accident and he begins to wonder if forgiving Victoria is the only road to healing for them both.

Moving, empathetic, insightful and compassionate EVERY STORY IS A LOVE STORY charts the uneven path from heartbreak to hope; from standing up to one’s own family and following one’s own path, to love lost and love found.

Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021.

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.

THE END OF ROMANCE de Lily Meyer

A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant novel about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance—only to find a love that could change her life forever.

THE END OF ROMANCE
by Lily Meyer
Viking, February 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors whose greatest priority was enjoying the life they’d snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie believes in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure—yet, somehow, finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, where she develops a new philosophy: Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.

Now, Sylvie prides herself in separating sex from tenderness—having fun with men, but never committing to one. Then she meets Robbie and Abie, and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her comfort she hasn’t had since childhood. Abie is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.

Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, THE END OF ROMANCE is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine’s tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.

Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. She is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.

LOCALS de Jared Jackson

In the vein of Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, this debut, in the form of a strongly linked story collection, brings to brash and tender life a cast of young, working-class characters navigating love, grief, survival, and the pursuit of something more in Hartford, Connecticut in the aughts.

LOCALS
by Jared Jackson
Viking, Spring 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Mikey becomes a man too early when he begs for emotional scraps from his uncle’s girlfriend. Collin reveals his cowardice when he fails to show up for Bebo, an outsider far braver than Collin will ever be. Enis, a refugee on the local baseball team along with Collin, Bebo, and Mikey, wants more than he can ever get from his neighborhood or his girlfriend. Minnie wants redemption. Suit Man wants a warm place to sleep. Ms. Ana wants a daughter. And Andrews wants his white fraternity brothers to accept him despite being a “local,” while all his cousin Ant wants is for Andrews to remember he already has a family—that Hartford has always been his family.

Vibrating with vivid imagery and characters whose voices alternate between aching frankness and exhilarating swagger, the interlocking pieces of this book tumble one into another like so many expertly laid dominoes. The result is a striking vision for reclamation—of faith in city, and faith in self. Jackson is a generational talent descended from a distinct literary tradition (encompassing everything from Joyce’s Dubliners to Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love; Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street to Barrett’s Young Skins) but blazing a thrilling path all his own.

Jared Jackson is a proud Hartford native and writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator currently living in New York. He has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, Baldwin for the Arts, Tin House, and several others. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, and VQR, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2023 (guest edited by Min Jin Lee). He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was a chair’s fellow, creative writing teaching fellow, and an adjunct assistant professor. Jackson is the director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers, Inc. He was previously the program director of literary programs at PEN America.