Archives de catégorie : Fiction

GAME OF VEILS d’Eva Chase

The Selection meets Catherine the Great in this why choose? romantasy about an ambitious princess, betrothed to a ruthless emperor, who plots to overthrow him with help from sexy courtiers.

GAME OF VEILS
(The Royal Spares Series, Book 1)
by Eva Chase
Ink Spark Press, September 2024
(via JABberwocky)

As the secondborn princess in a kingdom under the thumb of a brutal empire, Aurelia never had high hopes for her marriage prospects. But she is delighted when she is bethrothed to the son of the emperor himself.

Determined to earn better treatment for her country, she sets out to play her part as a loving wife. To her horror, she arrives at the emperor’s decadent palace only to discover the proposal was conditional. The emperor and his heir expect her to compete with several local noblewomen in a series of humiliating trials to prove their devotion. The winner will receive the heir’s hand in marriage; those who fail will be executed.

If facing marriage with a man she reviles and fending off sabotage from her scheming competitors wasn’t enough, her presence has caught the attention of the emperor’s princely wards who are forced to live in the palace as punishment. As far as they’re concerned, Aurelia is a traitor for trying to win the prince’s devotion. And she’s the perfect target for their bottled rage. They’ll do whatever they can to distract her, unsettle her, ruin her…and if they get to cuckold her future husband at the same time, even better.

For all their sharp words and heated glowers, they might be just the allies Aurelia needs. She isn’t merely going to land an emperor-to-be and wheedle minor concessions out of him once he ascends the throne—she’s going to win the entire empire. Over his dead body, if need be.

Eva Chase is an Amazon top 100 bestselling author of urban fantasy and paranormal romance. She grew up on a steady diet of magic, mayhem, and romantic angst, and brings plenty of all three to her stories. But no need to fear the dreaded love triangle—Eva’s heroines never have to choose. You can visit her online at www.evachase.com.

SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME de Bora Lee Reed

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko meets Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing in this powerful story of family separation and reunion, as well as love and war from a Reese’s Bookclub LitUp Fellow.

SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME
by Bora Lee Reed
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster, July 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

North Korea, 1950: Oksoon believes that the war is finally over in Pyeongyang. The Americans are here to stay, she’s told, but her father and eldest brother have gone south and she anxiously waits for their return. When the Chinese army unexpectedly attacks, Oksoon must flee with her mother and second brother in search of safety and to reunite their family. Journeying from freezing winter in the rural north to the seedy back alleys of Seoul during the summer, Oksoon and her family fall in with an unlikely group of miscreants – a prostitute, a baduk gambler, an opportunistic ferryman – and question how far they’ll go, and what moral boundaries they’ll cross, to find their missing relatives.

Meanwhile, far to the south near Jinju, Oksoon’s close cousin Junho flees the war to find refuge at the Lord’s Beloved Home for Children. As the orphanage struggles to keep its doors open, Junho is put in charge of drafting letters to rich American benefactors, convincing them to send money to Korea. But when the enigmatic orphanage director brings her aristocratic niece to stay at the Home – a beautiful young woman harboring a secret – Junho finds himself caught between his impulse for survival and his growing affections, which put him at risk of being expelled from the only safe place he knows.

As Oksoon and Junho make their way towards each other and eventually unite, they fight to save themselves and hold their family together, even as the war threatens to tear everything apart. Told in alternating points of view, SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME highlights the tension between personal dreams and duty to family, the power of resilience, and how choices made in a brief moment have consequences that reverberate for lifetimes. Combining the intergenerational scope of Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Mountains Sing with the coming-of-age focus found in Asha Lemmie’s Fifty Words for Rain, SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME tells a powerful story about what it means to build a life for yourself and your family against all odds.

Bora Lee Reed was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. She grew up in Southern California, among a vibrant Korean immigrant community. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has been awarded residences from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and UCross. Bora, a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow, now lives in Berkeley, CA, where she works as the director of communications for UC Berkeley’s public policy school.

LOCA d’Alejandro Heredia

If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA would be their firstborn.

LOCA
by Alejandro Heredia
Simon & Schuster, February 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

LOCA follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

“In this remarkable debut, Alejandro Heredia traces young lives from the streets of Santo Domingo to the streets of the Bronx, capturing the heartbreak of queer youth, a woman’s rebellion against the confines of motherhood, and, above all, the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America. It is the most generously written novel I have read in a very long time, and that generosity is a beautiful thing.” – Adam Haslett, Pulitzer Prize and National Award Book Award finalist for Imagine Me Gone and You Are Not A Stranger Here

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. LOCA is his debut novel.

THE TROUBLE UP NORTH de Travis Mulhauser

An atmospheric, haunting novel about a family of bootleggers, their troubled history, and the land that binds them.

THE TROUBLE UP NORTH
by Travis Mulhauser
Grand Central, March 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and crannies of the rivers and highways that flow in and out of Canada. The hidden routes are the family’s legacy.

But today, the Sawbrooks are deeply fractured, and the money that’s sustained the family is running out. Edward, the Sawbrook patriarch, is dying from cancer, and his wife, Rhoda, is bitterly disappointed in her three adult children. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will; the middle son, Buckner, hasn’t been the same since he came back from the army suffering from alcoholism; and the youngest daughter, Jewell, is wasting her potential as a card player and bartender.

When Jewell is asked to commit a crime for a major insurance payout, she agrees, eager for the cash, but too late, she realizes that that the boat she torched wasn’t empty…

Together, the Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old, familial ways and the new, shifting world, and face each other—and their pain-filled past—to smuggle one more thing through and out of their land to safety.

Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan. His novel, Sweetgirl (Ecco/Harper Collins), was listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, an Indie Next Pick, and named one of Ploughshares Best Books of the New Year. He is also the author of Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories. Travis received his MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro and is also a proud graduate of North Central Michigan College and Central Michigan University. He lives currently in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children.

ANIMA RISING de Christopher Moore

From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, two psychiatrists and an undead woman’s empowering journey of self-discovery.

ANIMA RISING
by Christopher Moore
William Morrow, May 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in Vienna, finds a young woman floating in the Danube canal, who has no idea of who she is or where she came from. He names her Judith, after the Hebrew heroine who beheaded an Assyrian general and thus saved her people. Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse, Wally, tend to the girl, but she is almost feral, blurts out nonsense in a variety of languages, and generally scandalizes Viennese café society.

With help from famous psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Judith recalls being stranded in the arctic one hundred years ago, locked in a crate by a man named Victor Frankenstein, being kidnapped by an enormous patchwork monster, before he murders her for trying to escape him and then finds herself with the gods of the Inuit Underworld. She is of course, the bride of Frankenstein.

But how did she turn up in Vienna more than a century later? And why are so many people keen to find her, including Geoff, the giant croissant-eating dog who also shares her superhuman strength, endurance and immortality?

Welcome to Anima Rising, Christopher Moore’s most ingenious and most hilarious novel yet.

With a body of work that boasts some of the most outlandish plots and outrageous characters ever to make it onto the printed page, Christopher Moore has made a name for himself as the clown prince of contemporary fiction. He is the author of The Serpent of Venice, Second Hand Souls, and other novels. He lives in San Francisco.