Archives de catégorie : Fiction

SURVIVAL NOTES de Michelle Haines Thomas

What happens when an influencer couple, famous for their ‘free-range parenting’ let their nine-year-old son and his friend sleep overnight in the bush… and the boys don’t come back?

SURVIVAL NOTES
by Michelle Haines Thomas
Text Publishing, January 2027

When nine-year-old Freddie and his friend go missing in the bush, their parents scramble to blame each other. Why did they let the boys camp out alone? And why did the boys disappear? In the small hinterland town, the online backlash against the adults is brutal.

The terrifying threat of a bushfire accelerates the race to find the children. The editor of the local newspaper, single-mother Justine, has her own secrets to protect. Then her elder daughter goes missing, too. As everything implodes around Justine, her past comes back to haunt her. How far will she go to rescue the children?

Michelle Haines Thomas takes us into the hearts and minds of characters confronting their worst nightmare. SURVIVAL NOTES is a superlative heart-in-your-mouth literary thriller, with commercial overtones.

Michelle Haines Thomas has been writing novels most of her life, in between her work as a journalist and raising a family. She is the recipient of a residential writing fellowship at Varuna, has a MA in Writing from the University of Technology in Sydney, and has published or broadcast fiction and reviews in a range of publications. Michelle now works in marketing and lives with her family on the NSW Central Coast.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES de Jim Shepard

Twelve compressed masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, hideously mismanaged wars, gargantuan wildfires, and apocalyptic storms.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES
by Jim Shepard
Knopf, September 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.

“Jim Shepard is a fantastic writer—compassionate, funny, and fearless—[whose work] does what great writing always does: inspires us to look more closely at life, and be more caring.” —George Saunders

« A deft, audacious artist. » —Norman Rush, National Book Award-winning author of Mating

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. He also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He previously taught at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife Karen and two beagles.

KASKADEN de Louise K. Böhm

An electrifying novel about a formative, all-consuming friendship that refuses to be categorised.

KASKADEN
by Louise K. Böhm
Penguin Verlag, July 2026

If Jojo could erase her past, she would. At uni, she is constantly scared that someone will find out that she doesn’t belong there, and even her parents don’t really understand what she’s doing in her lab all day. When her former best friend Yara gets back in touch, Jojo thinks back to her sheltered youth in a dreary suburbia she couldn’t wait to leave, and radiant Yara, her only anchor in this confusing world – Yara in those green trainers of hers, who had an answer for everything and protected Jojo from a world that didn’t value girls. Jojo still doesn’t understand why Yara ghosted her after high school.

But just as Jojo is about to lose herself in her memories, a flirtation with her tutor and money troubles force her to focus on the here and now. How much power will she let the past wield over her?

Smart and light as a feather, « Cascades » is a brilliant debut about friendship, love and everything in between – about marginalisation and belonging, about opening up and the strength that true friendship can give us.

For fans of Paradise Garden by Elena Fischer, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

Louise K. Böhm, born in Berlin in 2000, studied media, creative writing, and cultural journalism and policy before starting a career in the music business. Her writing has appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. On social media (@louschreibt_), she writes about books, gives insights into her life as an author and talks about classism in the culture sector. KASKADEN is her first novel.

MAGGIE MAYBE de Stephanie Webb

A coming-of-middle-age novel about two women who get a second chance to rewrite their lives—only to discover that their real stories were never flawed, just unfinished. For readers of Emma Straub and Catherine Newman.

MAGGIE MAYBE
by Stephanie Webb
Gallery, Summer 2027
(via David Black Agency)

When thirty-nine-year-old Maggie Mabey reads the opening of a novel-in-progress by her favorite author Savannah Greenstem, she is stunned to find her own life playing out on the page. She passes out and wakes up in an alternate reality where all her professional aspirations have come true: she’s a bookstore owner and a successful author, just as she’d always dreamed of being. The only problem? Her kids don’t exist. And her husband? He’s never heard of her.

Even though sixty-two-year old Savannah Greenstem has written dozens of books, she’s barely typed a word since the death of her late husband five years ago. But her writers block isn’t due to a broken heart; instead, she’s wrecked by the realization that she was never really in love with him in the first place. Years ago, she’d given up the great love of her life—Wilder Sinclair—to become the successful writer she was destined to be. Although she doesn’t exactly regret her choices, she does long for the life she might have had. But now, in this alternate world she’s found herself in, she and Wilder are together and it’s so much better than she could have imagined.

Desperate to return to the life she had before, Maggie finds Savannah and tries to convince her to rewrite her story. But Savannah doesn’t want to leave her own fantasy, even if it means keeping Maggie here against her will. As Maggie’s and Savannah’s fictional lives unravel—and entangle—in unexpected and delightful ways, they each must confront what they’ve been running from, ultimately discovering that the stories we tell ourselves can either trap us or, if we pay attention, give us the insight we need to remake our lives.

Stephanie Webb is a graduate of The Book Incubator and works as the marketing director for the program alongside authors Mary Adkins and Rufi Thorpe (who will certainly blurb). She earned her BA in English Literature and her MS in Holistic Nutrition. She was a finalist for the Women’s Fiction Writers’ Association Rising Star Award and has a growing social media platform with almost 14,000 Instagram followers.

CRAZY NORMAL de Marissa Matteo

A life-affirming novel about family trauma and what happens when a wealthy Manhattan family takes a cross-country trip in an RV and realizes that grief is messy, but healing is messier.

CRAZY NORMAL
by Marissa Matteo
Crown, September 2027

When Phoebe Fields was six, her older brother Alexander died by suicide. Twenty years later, her wealthy Manhattan family still refuses to talk about it.

On the anniversary of his death, the Fields family—along with Phoebe’s boyfriend, their nanny, and their cook—set off on an ill-advised RV trip to California for a wedding. What begins as a chaotic journey quickly becomes a reckoning, as old wounds resurface, secrets unravel, and long-suppressed grief begins to demand a voice. As Phoebe tries to piece together who her brother really was—and why he chose to leave—she must confront the emotional silence that has shaped her life. But in a family where love is loud, messy, and often misguided, healing doesn’t come quietly.

Marrying commercial appeal with literary sensibility, CRAZY NORMAL, is a voice-driven intimate portrait of a family that learns you can outrun the past, until you’re trapped in an RV with it. It is perfect reading for fans of The Wedding People and the film, Little Miss Sunshine.

Despite earning an MFA from the University of Miami, a second MFA from UCLA, and telling her parents she would be the next Joan Didion, Marissa Matteo has worked as a celebrity ghostwriter and television writer for the last two decades. She has ghostwritten eight books, including three New York Times Bestsellers. She worked as a writer/producer on the CBS drama Bull for five seasons and has developed shows with 20th, HBO, Hulu, Showtime, Sony, and Warner Brothers. Marissa lives in Manhattan Beach, CA with her husband and their two children. CRAZY NORMAL is her first novel.