ONLY IF YOU’RE LUCKY de Stacy Willingham

A sharp and twisty exploration of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things.

ONLY IF YOU’RE LUCKY
by Stacy Willingham
Minotaur, January 2024
(via Writers House)

Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can’t say no―something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.

And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It’s a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she’s been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered… and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

From the author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things comes a tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal―another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.

Stacy Willingham is the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things. She studied journalism at the University of Georgia and holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design.

MY NAME IS IRIS de Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse, the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, returns with a riveting literary dystopian novel set in a near-future America where mandatory identification wristbands make second-generation immigrants into second-class citizens—a powerful family saga for readers of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.

MY NAME IS IRIS
by Brando Skyhorse
Avid Reader, May 2023
(via Writers House)

One day, Iris Prince, a middle-class, ideologically conservative Mexican American mother and wife, finds a mysterious wall growing outside her modest Southern California home. In addition to the maddening structure—which is impossible to remove and mutates at random—the rest of the world is also changing. A newly passed law suddenly denies basic rights like drivers’ licenses and steady employment to Americans who cannot prove at least one of their parents was born in the United States. Biometric wristbands are used to identify people who are “of verifiable origin” under the new system, while unverifiables are ignored or harassed with abandon.

Iris has always prided herself on being a model minority and assimilating into White American culture. She and her like-minded Mexican American husband Alex have raised their daughter Melanie to be bilingual, but there are strict rules about when Spanish is and isn’t acceptable, and about what other parts of their culture to selectively embrace. As Alex’s behavior becomes suspicious, Iris soon realizes she may not be eligible for the coveted wristband—at least not without going to dangerous, drastic lengths to get one. Meanwhile, the wall outside their home is growing, and their neighbors are watching more closely than ever…

A powerful story about family, identity, intolerance, and immigration, MY NAME IS IRIS is a brilliant and timely look at what it means to be American as seen through one woman’s tumultuous journey through a world that insists on telling her who she can and can’t be.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and one of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine.

THE DEGENERATES de Raeden Richardson

Composed in propulsive, layered prose, THE DEGENERATES shatters conventional narratives and pays tribute to those characters often lost in the margins.

THE DEGENERATES
by Raeden Richardson
Text Publishing:, January 2025
(via Writers House)

THE DEGENERATES is a spiritual novel for the twenty-first century following the interconnected lives of four characters: Somnath, a humble, Bombayite shoeshiner subject to a government-enforced sterilization in 1975; Titch, a working-class Australian teenager left grieving after his soulmate live-streams his suicide; and Ginny, a prodigious young woman propelled to Brooklyn to make a new life and escape her cruel family. At the heart of the novel, Maha Sonpate waits in an illegal underground garage, listening to the tales of these and other outcasts who wander the streets of Melbourne. As she collects the nightmarish histories of her followers, wrestling with her paradoxical role as both writer and reader, Maha journeys to The Red Plains, a surrealist landscape on the fringes of suburbia, and writes until the edge of language where reality itself begins to dissolve.

THE DEGENERATES contends with contemporary tragedies—the sorrow of displacement, the addictive allure of cryptocurrencies, the longing for a home beyond the banality of the suburbs—and finds love in its most timeless form. Bridging Australia, India and the United States, the novel blends the holy with the base, grappling with the realities of modern loneliness and every form of departure—from our homes, from our families and even from life itself.

“THE DEGENERATES so radiates with vitality that one feels as if its pages are somehow emitting the material of real life. This extraordinary novel is as much a story — one that is simultaneously entertaining and purposeful — as an argument for the value of storytelling itself.” —Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao

“It’s rare to find a novel that moves as confidently yet unpredictably as THE DEGENERATES. Raeden Richardson writes like a composer scoring a symphony, with such grace, fluidity, and musical control you almost feel you can see the notes rising off the page. Each of his characters possesses a wholly unique interiority, and through their minds, he communicates a vision of a world in which dissolution and creation—the degenerative and the regenerative—are inseparable from each other.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of Things That Fall from the Sky

Raeden Richardson is an Indian-Australian writer raised in Melbourne and has lived in Singapore and New York. He is a graduate of Yale-NUS College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has received support from the American Australian Association, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the John Anson Kittredge Fund. He has taught Creative Writing at The University of Iowa and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Masters Review, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Strangely Enough and New Australian Fiction.

REMEDIAL MAGIC de Melissa Marr

The Magicians meets One Last Stop in this brand-new fantasy romance REMEDIAL MAGIC, about an unassuming librarian who 1) has fallen in love with a powerful witch; 2) has discovered that she is a witch; and 3) must attend magical community college to learn how to save her new world from complete destruction by New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr!

REMEDIAL MAGIC
(A Course in Magic, Book 1)
by Melissa Marr
St. Martin’s, February 2024
(via Writers House)

Ellie loves working in her local library in the small town of Ligonier. She loves baking scones and investigating the mysterious and captivating in her spare time. And there is nothing more mysterious and captivating than the intriguingly beautiful, too properly dressed woman sipping tea in her library who has appeared as if out of nowhere. The pull between them is undeniable, and Ellie is not sure that she wants to resist.

Prospero, a powerful witch from the magical land of Crenshaw, is often accused of being… ruthless in her goals and ambitions. But she is driven to save her dying homeland, and a prophecy tells her that Ellie is the key. Unbeknownst to Ellie, her powers have not yet awakened. But all of that is about to change.

Melissa Marr writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into 28 languages and been bestsellers in the US (New York Times, LA Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal) as well as overseas. REMEDIAL MAGIC is the first of two books in a witchy lesbian fantasy-romance series.

ONE OF US KNOWS d’Alyssa Cole

From the critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author of When No One Is Watching comes a riveting thriller about the new caretaker of a historic estate who finds herself trapped on an island with a murderer—and the ghosts of her past.

ONE OF US KNOWS
by Alyssa Cole
William Morrow, April 2024
(via Writers House)

Years after a breakdown and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder derailed her historical preservationist career, Kenetria Nash and her alters have been given a second chance they can’t refuse: a position as resident caretaker of a historic home. Having been dormant for years, Ken has no idea what led them to this isolated Hudson River island, but she’s determined not to ruin their opportunity.

Then a surprise visit from the home’s conservation trust just as a Nor’easter bears down on the island disrupts her newfound life, leaving Ken trapped with a group of possibly dangerous strangers—including the man who brought her life tumbling down years earlier. When he turns up dead, Ken is the prime suspect.

Caught in a web of secrets and in a race against time, Ken and her alters must band together to prove their innocence and discover the truth of Kavanaugh Island—and their own past—or they risk losing not only their future, but their life.

Alyssa Cole is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of romance and thrillers. Her debut thriller When No One Is Watching was the winner of the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut. Her Civil War-set espionage romance An Extraordinary Union was the American Library Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, and her contemporary royal romcom A Princess in Theory was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018. Her books have received critical acclaim from The New York Times, Library Journal, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, Booklist, Jezebel, Shondaland, Vulture, Book Riot, Entertainment Weekly, and various other outlets.