LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER de Naomi Kritzer

Set in a distinctive world with a charismatic protagonist, “the political critique is sharp and the mystery is gripping” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review).

LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER
by Naomi Kritzer
Fairwood Press, November 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Beck Garrison lives on a seastead—an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, assembled by libertarian separatists a generation ago. She’s grown up comfortable and sheltered, but starts doing odd jobs for pocket money. To her surprise, she finds that she’s the only detective that a debt slave can afford to hire to track down the woman’s missing sister. When she tackles this investigation, she learns things about life on the other side of the waterline—not to mention about herself and her father—that she did not expect. And that some people will stop at nothing to keep her from talking about . . .

“Admirers of Chris McKinney’s Water City trilogy will be riveted.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Kritzer’s got a sharp knife and she slips it in so smoothly that you barely notice that you’re bleeding. The best sf uses the future to make a point about the present, and Kritzer’s got today’s enshittified, profit-worshipping, sociopathic present’s number.” —Cory Doctorow, author of the Little Brother series and The Lost Cause

“This book offers a different kind of dystopia and a different kind of rebellion against it: a libertarian seastead that has managed to survive forty years while walking smack into all the expected bears, and a kid fighting those bears with all the strength of freedom and agency that the place has accidentally given her.” —Ruthanna Emrys, author of A Half-Built Garden

“LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER is a fast-paced, forthright, funny voyage through libertarian seasteads and teenage heroism.” —Marissa Lingen, Novel Gazing Redux

Naomi Kritzer has won the Hugo Award and the Locus Award and been a finalist for the Nebula (as well as finalist for the Hugo) for her short stories. Her young adult novel Catfishing on CatNet won the 2020 Lodestar Award and its sequel Chaos on CatNet was a finalist in 2022. Several of her stories and books have been optioned for film. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her family and a few cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

THESE BODIES BETWEEN US de Sarah Van Name

A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.

THESE BODIES BETWEEN US
by Sarah Van Name
Delacorte, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.

This summer, they’re going to disappear.

For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.

Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.

Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves…and do they even want to?

“A lusciously crafted and achingly poignant story about girlhood with a haunting twist that readers will savor. You won’t soon forget it.” —Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces

“Spellbinding…Readers might be tempted to disappear alongside this kaleidoscopic foursome.” —K.L. Walther, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules

“A gorgeous, wistful meditation on the pleasure and pain of adolescent girlhood, friendship, and the magic of summer.” —Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer

Sarah Van Name grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and now lives and works in Durham with her family and dog. She is the author of two previous young adult novels, The Goodbye Summer (2019, a Junior Library Guild pick) and Any Place But Here (2021).

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.

THE GINNY SUITE de Stacy Skolnik

“A Handmaid‘s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.” —Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0.

THE GINNY SUITE
by Stacy Skolnik
Montez Press, June 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance, THE GINNY SUITE asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

“Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.” —Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions

“THE GINNY SUITE is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies. I adored it.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

“THE GINNY SUITE is formally innovative, a great read.” —Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chaplet Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade as Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). Her writing has been featured in journals and magazines such as Lambda Literary, The Operating System, Fjords, and Pfeil, among others. She is a cofounder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform.

THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING de Jason Rekulak

The author of Hidden Pictures returns with a deliciously twisty new thriller about a mysterious family and the lengths parents will go to protect their children.

THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING
by Jason Rekulak
Flatiron, October 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Meet Frank Szatowski, a widowed UPS driver in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He has spent the last three years estranged from his adult daughter Maggie—but as our story opens, Maggie calls home to announce that she’s getting married, and she wants her father to walk her down the aisle.

Maggie is marrying into one of the wealthiest families in the United States, and Frank is overjoyed for a chance to finally reconnect. But then he makes some alarming discoveries about his future son-in-law, Aidan Gardner, and learns that Aidan’s previous girlfriend has gone missing. Is Maggie about to make a fatal mistake? And can Frank express his concerns to his daughter without losing her all over again?

Set over a three-day wedding weekend on a lake in New Hampshire, THE LAST ONE AT THE WEDDING features all the same storytelling that made Hidden Pictures an international bestseller: a murder mystery, class warfare, lots of heart, and big surprises around every corner.

Jason Rekulak is the author of the international bestselling thriller Hidden Pictures (winner of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Horror) and The Impossible Fortress (an Edgar Award finalist). His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.