Archives de catégorie : Fiction

NYPMH de Sofia Montrone

NYMPH pairs Call Me by Your Name with the precise, elevated prose of Elena Ferrante. Sofia Montrone’s debut revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood, set to the backdrop of rural Lombardy.

NYPMH
by Sofia Montrone
Avid Reader Press, publication date TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious leftbehind detritus from guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. At night, she gathers the stories that flow from her father’s lips—liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. When an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up.

Years later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same. Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. When she meets Dolores, an American girl, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into.

Sofia Montrone is as an adjunct assistant professor in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program, served as Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review and the Director of Columbia Artist/Teachers.

DISCIPLINE de Larissa Pham

As slim and combustible as a match, NBCC finalist Larissa Pham’s debut novel DISCIPLINE is an astonishment.

DISCIPLINE: A Novel
by Larissa Pham
Random House, Spring 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Christine is a writer on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers and past lovers and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. What she discovers is both terrifying, and beautiful.

Opening in a seemingly Cuskian mode, DISCIPLINE soon reveals itself to be a delicately explosive high-wire act more in the vein of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. With a fierce aesthetic eye and elegant, charged prose (as Christine remarks at one point: “I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in a line but as in an arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which one of us holds the bow, and which one of us faces the arrow”), Pham’s novel is a taut triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Nation, the NYTBR, Bookforum, Aperture, Art in America and elsewhere. Her essays and short fiction have been anthologized in Kink (edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, Simon and Schuster, 2021), Wanting: Women Writing on Desire (Catapult, 2023), and Critical Hits, an anthology of writing on video games (Graywolf, 2024). She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Previously, she worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, where she focused on messaging and education around the systemic underpinnings of bias-motivated and intimate partner violence, and received training on disability justice and vicarious trauma. She paints occasionally, and currently teaches at the New School’s MFA in creative writing. DISCIPLINE is her first novel.

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE de Vanessa McCausland

A small-town mommy blogger kayaked across the lake each morning at dawn, snapping selfies in the early-morning sun. Everyone obsessively watched her document a picturesque life on Instagram. But when an ominous, brooding image is posted to her account and the next day she is discovered drowned, immediately everyone wonders – suicide or was her online persona a façade?

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE
by Vanessa McCausland
Crown, June 2025

Paige has always lived a picture-perfect life, now documented closely on her social media. The world she has curated exudes an old-fashioned, wholesome lifestyle set against a quaint, lakeside town in Australia. Her page is littered with breakfasts lakeside with her daughter, sunny afternoons in the family van, and romantic picnics with her husband.

Jane was one of Paige’s childhood best friends, but left her and their small town behind to pursue a bigger life in Sydney. When Paige’s death makes national news, Jane, a journalist, finds herself reluctantly traveling back to where it all began. Struggling with the morality of covering her friend’s death, and forced to come back to her childhood home, Jane must confront the friends and family she abandoned, and the secrets she left in her wake. But one thing Jane is sure about? This was not a suicide.

Readers will fall in love with Vanessa McCausland’s THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE, told through Paige’s perspective from the beyond, Jane’s present-day narration, an anonymous voice that watched Paige each morning, and flashbacks to Paige and Jane’s high school days, all leading towards a shocking, gasp-worthy ending.

“Compelling, haunting, and beautifully written, THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE is a clever, page-turning modern mystery as well as a thoughtful exploration of female friendship, family dynamics, and the complex impact of social media on self-identity. You’ll be thinking about it long after you turn the last page!” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Vanessa McCausland studied English and Australian literature at Sydney University and graduated with honors in theatre and performance studies. She worked as a journalist for nearly twenty years, including as a news and arts journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and her writing has appeared in numerous other publications. She’s published four novels in Australia, and now lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter.

INTO THE STORM de Cecelia Ahern

A storm lies ahead of her. Freedom lies beyond it …

INTO THE STORM
by Cecelia Ahern
HarperCollins UK, October 2024
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Enya is driving home on a dark and rainy night in the Dublin mountains when she stumbles across an accident. As a fierce storm rages, a teenage boy her own son’s age lies between life and death. A doctor, Enya provides life-saving CPR. But soon the police are asking her about the accident, the taxi driver first to the scene is stalking her at work and at home, and her soon to be ex-husband is wondering why she was on those Dublin mountain roads in the first place.

Fixated on the teenage boy who now lies in a coma, Enya leaves her husband and takes a temporary physician’s gig in a small rural village. Her life spiraling, she hopes to anchor and empower herself again in a new community. But as the wheel of the year turns and she tries to reconcile her past and forge a new future, the secrets that drove her from Dublin begin to rise, and Enya is faced with an inevitable choice that could lead to the destruction of life as she knows it.

“A terrific story! It had me completely gripped from the very first page.” —Karin Slaughter, NYT Bestselling author of Pretty Girls

Cecelia Ahern was born and grew up in Dublin. Her novels have been translated into thirty-five languages and have sold more than twenty-five million copies in over fifty countries. Two of her books (Ps, I Love You and Love, Rosie) have been adapted as films and she has created several TV series. She and her books have won numerous awards, including the Irish Book Award for Popular Fiction for The Year I Met You. She lives in Dublin with her family.

DOLL PARTS de Penny Zang

The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You with a dash of the horrors of Nightbitch in this debut suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring girls they attended college with decades ago.

DOLL PARTS
by Penny Zang
Sourcebooks Landmark, August 2025

For Nikki and Sadie, life at Loch Raven College was supposed to be filled with poetry and days spent trying on thrifted clothes. But there’s a dark story that plagues the school halls – that of the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the death of multiple Sylvia Plath adoring girls, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the stories, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. To satiate her obsession, Nikki begins to dig into the deaths, and she soon suspects there’s more to the story than just a tragic group of sad girls – a suspicion that will lead to a tragedy of its own, one that will tear her and Sadie apart.

It’s been twenty years since Sadie saw her estranged friend. Now, Nikki is dead. And when Sadie ends up pregnant with Nikki’s grieving husband, she finds herself stepping into her seemingly perfect life. But Nikki’s eerily preserved home seems to hold clues for Sadie from beyond-the-grave, and soon, she’s spiraling into a deep obsession that will make her question her own reality. Because it seems Nikki never stopped looking for answers about what happened to the girls of the Sylvia Club, and she may have been its latest victim.

A provocative and irresistible debut, DOLL PARTS is at once an exploration of the dark chasms that break apart friendships, an ode to the aching beauty of girlhood, and a sharp portrayal of grief that can physically haunt you.

Penny Zang is from Maryland and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and Superstition Review, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She lives in South Carolina, where she teaches English at a two-year college.