A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS de Jori Lewis

From the winner of James Beard, Harriet Tubman, and Whiting Awards, a shimmering and unexpected vision of the world we inhabit together.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS:
On Ecology, Belonging, and the Sublime
by Jori Lewis
The New Press, November 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

From the celebrated journalist whose work has been hailed by Tiya Miles as “broad, complex, and unexpected,” and by Publishers Weekly as “informative and compassionate,” award-winning author Jori Lewis’s stunning new book blends scientific research, myth, folklore, and cultural analysis in a lyrical literary work that observes the natural world as an entry point into understanding the traumas of our history and the unexplored dimensions of our spiritual lives.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS offers profound meditations on the history of colonialism, racism, and social and ecological change, exploring such wide-ranging subjects as the reproduction crisis of the long-lived African baobab tree in the face of climate change; the evolutionary history of the watermelon and how racist stereotypes related to it developed and persist in the United States; the disquieted spirits of the Senegalese island Sangomar in the wake of new oil and gas exploration in the area; and how, by observing the habits of plants and animals, we may more deeply understand how we create home.

For readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SPIRITS grapples with how we have made, and continue to make, meaning of the world by reading the land, the animals, the water, and the skies.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared on PRI’s The World and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is also a contributing editor of Adi, a literary magazine about global politics. The author of Slaves for Peanuts (winner of a Whiting Award, a James Beard Award, and the Harriet Tubman Prize), Lewis splits her time between Chicago, Illinois, and Senegal.

DUST SETTLES NORTH de Deena ElGenaidi

It’s 2012, and post-revolution Egypt is sparking with political energy—but Hannah and Zain are numb.

DUST SETTLES NORTH
by Deena ElGenaidi
Bindery Books, September 2025
(via Context Literary)

The flight from New York to Cairo is long—longer still for two siblings on a journey to bury their mother. When they discover their father’s unforgivable betrayal, what’s left of their family crumbles.

Hannah gives up her spot at Columbia Law to remain in Egypt, where she navigates romantic entanglements and a new culture. Back in America, Zain’s self-destructive behavior begins to catch up with him, leaving him to wonder whether he’s any different from his father.

When the siblings reunite in Cairo months later, Zain is nearing rock bottom, and Hannah finds herself in the middle of the Arab Spring uprising. Together they confront shared secrets and reconcile their conservative upbringing with their new beliefs as adults. Will they heal together, or has the loss of their only bridge—their mother—set them permanently adrift?

A tender reflection on the effects of grief and loss, this deeply felt novel explores how siblings come together to mend a fractured family and, in the process, find themselves.

Deena ElGenaidi writes about the arts, identity, and pop culture for a number of publications, including Nylon, MTV News, Oprah Magazine, Longreads, Catapult, Vulture, and more. She wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning comedy web series Codependent. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Sasha. DUST SETTLES NORTH is her first novel.

FEMINISM VS. FASCISM de Mona Eltahawy

In the spirit of On Tyranny, a ten-point plan for how feminist principles can be harnessed to combat totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism.

FEMINISM VS. FASCISM:
Ten Tactics to Topple Tyrants
by Mona Eltahawy
Mariner/HarperCollins US, February 2027

Far-right authoritarians have been rising to power around the world. Each election won and each rung of power snatched from the people is a sobering reminder of what’s at stake when dangerous ambition and aspirational tyranny get real.

Solutions that stick have been fleeting, despite the growing outrage and protests.

Feminist author, activist, and noted firebrand Mona Eltahawy makes a strident case for a new approach. She argues ten feminist practices as an unstoppable force against fascism because, where fascism benefits and empowers the few, feminism frees everybody. Feminist-inspired principles like “Be savage and dangerous » and “Target all tyrants,” in fact, have constantly nudged us towards a freer world. Now laying out these principles as an actionable ten-point plan, Eltahawy empowers a new generation of citizens and reignites action in those whose fury has felt aimless.

Pocket-sized and ready to return to again and again, FEMINISM VS. FASCISM offers a new way to fight.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls took her disruption worldwide. Eltahawy’s essays and op-eds have been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), and The New York Times, and she has appeared as a guest commentator on the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al Jazeera, NPR and dozens of other television and radio networks. She writes the newsletter FEMINIST GIANT, which has more than 23,000 subscribers in 172 countries.

WE ARE FINE de Gretchen Lieberum

Sometimes you don’t blow up your own mid-life. Sometimes, life blows it up for you. And sometimes…that makes you want things you shouldn’t want.

WE ARE FINE
by Gretchen Lieberum
Cardinal/Hachette US, TBD 2028
(via The Gernert Company)

Sarah is a middle-aged, married LA props stylist—wife to reliable Charlie (giver of excellent bear-hugs and perpetrator of just one teensy, immediately regretted affair); mother to ethereal Gracie (fourteen years old, hilarious and still poignantly becoming). Give Sarah a few more years and she might round the corner to a proper mid-life crisis, exploding the first stable family she’s ever known in search of something forever on the tip of her tongue. But woman flails and the universe laughs; Sarah, it turns out, might not have a few more years. 

WE ARE FINE spins life-affirming comedy from tragedy in this tenderly off-kilter, hot and bothered novel about a married woman who has a bomb go off in her life in the form of a possibly terminal diagnosis. Instead of informing her husband and daughter, Sarah drives east into the Mojave desert as she runs from an uncertain future and toward an unexpected journey of self-discovery, reckoning, and most pressingly, reconnection with her decades long, sexually explosive situationship, the charismatic JP, who’s never quite let Sarah go…

Alternating between Sarah’s present and key moments from her past that flash before our eyes like the best kind of Greatest Hits album, WE ARE FINE is singer-songwriter Gretchen Lieberum’s propulsive, darkly comic, emotionally honest embrace of a novel about life and death, grief and lust, limerence and the true meaning of love.

Gretchen Lieberum is a Los Angeles based singer-songwriter. In 2013, she co-founded Prince tribute band Princess with actress-comedian and SNL alumni Maya Rudolph, performing everywhere from the Hollywood Bowl, to Carnegie Hall along with D’Angelo and Elvis Costello, to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. In addition to playing with Princess, Gretchen has written and recorded four albums of original music, both independently and with the support of Lakeshore Records in the US and Nomadic records in the UK. Gretchen’s latest project, an album of reimagined jazz and pop standards titled “This May Only Be A Dream,” was produced by BAFTA award winning composer and musician Keefus Ciancia (True Detective, Killing Eve). Gretchen graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in American Literature. She is a married mom of two and a breast cancer survivor.

HEART OF GLASS de Jennifer Hillier

A serial killer recants his long-ago confession regarding a small-town high school girl—and her then-best friends are forced to confront what really happened that night and what’s happening now.

HEART OF GLASS
by Jennifer Hillier
Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press, August 2026

Twenty-five years ago in Seaside, Washington, a charming drifter named Sam met three inseparable teenage girls at the local amusement park. Days later, one of them was found dead, her body surfacing in a flooded cranberry bog not far from where she was murdered.

Barb and Nicolette were shocked to learn that the man they all met at Wonderland was the Carnival Killer. After he’s arrested for the murders of five young women – one of whom was their best friend, Lorelei – Nicolette moved to the city to pursue her dreams of being famous. Barb stayed behind in Seaside, eventually becoming a reporter for the local paper. Their past safely behind them, they’ve both moved on with their lives.

But when the Carnival Killer recants his confession and a new body washes ashore on the eve of Wonderland’s grand reopening, the secrets that Barb and Nicolette have worked so hard to bury begin to resurface, threatening to destroy everything in their carefully constructed lives.

Instant New York Times bestseller

« Jennifer Hillier is the master of suspense. » —Freida McFadden

« Amazing dialogue, complex characters and a dazzling plot. Never has betrayal seemed so fascinating. . . No one maps the valley of fear that exists in the hearts of her characters better than Jennifer Hillier. She doesn’t just write thrillers, she creates epics that take you beyond the event horizon where what we think we know breaks down and we just hold on for dear life. Not to be missed! » ―S.A Cosby

« Hillier delivers another knockout thriller with compulsively readable prose and sly, subtle twists. A must-read. » —Booklist (starred review)

Jennifer Hillier was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and lived in the Seattle area for years before returning home to Toronto, where she now lives with her family.