Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAGIC de Daniel Loedel

A professor’s mysterious death exposes the dark magic her students can’t escape.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAGIC
by Daniel Loedel
Algonquin, Spring 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Martin arrives at Brown as a freshman in 2008, feeling a bit of an outcast. As he struggles to find his footing and his people, he becomes engrossed in a class called “The Philosophy of Magic.” The dynamic professor, who clearly has her favorites and a bit of a cult following at the university, initiates Martin and five other “special” students with a particular and profound kind of magical gift, involving contracts signed in actual blood. However, as the novel opens, her body is found hanging from her ceiling fan in her apartment. And so we go back in time to learn what role, if any, her devoted students played in her demise, as well as how her death affects their futures indelibly, for better and for worse.

Daniel Loedel is the author of Hades, Argentina, which won the Prix du Premier Roman, was a finalist for the Prix Femina and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, and other publications. He was a book editor for twelve years, first with Simon and Schuster and then with Bloomsbury. The authors he has worked with have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and many other accolades. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner and four cats.



PEOPLE PERSON de Brad Gira

PEOPLE PERSON is as unrelenting as its anti-heroine; a summer-to-remember tale revitalized and made unforgettably new with chilly glee.

PEOPLE PERSON
by Brad Gira
Viking, Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

No one really likes Jodie, but no one bullies her either. She inspires too much apathy for the popular kids she reveres to bother.

As graduation approaches, Jodie accepts that she will never see her crush again: Caelab, the carelessly charismatic, sporty bad boy who would never recognize a girl like her. Then, on the night of graduation, Caelab dies drunk driving and Jodie’s chances of getting with Caelab plummet from implausible to impossible. In the aftermath Jodie crosses paths with Caelab’s various memorials and quickly nserts herself into the life of Caelab’s identical (albeit preppier) twin, Adam, who soaks up her seeming concern at a time of acute suffering.

Though strained and occasionally hostile, their summer fling moves fast, nudging Jodie up the social ladder she’d long watched from afar, even as the twins’ friends remain confused by her presence.

But by summer’s end a quiet suspicion takes hold: is Adam really the twin she’s been left with? The possibility of deception fills Jodie’s mind with both hope and dread. As she races to confirm that she has been with her true crush all along, her elaborate scheme backfires, putting herself (and the surviving twin) in grave danger.

What first appears to be a classic coming-of-age story of delayed jutice—an unfairly overlooked teen outcast finally gets her due—instead reveals itself as the eerie rise of an unremarkable young woman made increasingly terrifying by her determination to capture a taste of life among the admired, envied desirables. Brad Gira’s ruthlessly assured, stealthily profound debut charts this fraught affair from its grisly beginning to its grisly end.

Brad Gira is a playwright who was raised in Maryland and now lives in New York. PEOPLE PERSON is his very first novel.

GHOST BARN de John Verdon

Ex-homicide detective and puzzle-solving master David Gurney comes out of retirement to solve seemingly impossible murder cases. Blending hard-boiled noir fiction with the pleasures of classic “whodunit” puzzle- solving, Verdon has written a “hero for the ages” (David Baldacci).

GHOST BARN
by John Verdon
Counterpoint, September 2026
(via The Friedrich Agency)

The thrilling conclusion to the retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney saga.

Ghosts are returning from the past to trouble Dave Gurney’s peace as a local election sees a powerful real estate mogul with plans for a massive development face off against a librarian and ardent conservationist. When bodies start turning up and the local police turn a blind eye, Gurney suspects he’s the town’s only hope.

But involvement comes at a price. His last case early got his best friend killed, and it shattered his marriage. In the aftermath, he’s focused on breaking his reliance on police work in hopes of rekindling things with his wife, Madeleine. Can he ignore what’s happening and potentially let a murderer run amok, or will he once again dive into the darkness, giving in to his obsessive need to solve the unsolvable—even if it costs him Madeleine for good? One thing is clear: This harrowing, confounding case will be his last.

John Verdon is the author of the Dave Gurney series of thrillers, international bestsellers published in more than two dozen languages: Think of a Number, Shut Your Eyes Tight, Let the Devil Sleep, Peter Pan Must Die, Wolf Lake, White River Burning, On Harrow Hill, and The Viper.

OTTER MUSIC de Karen Joy Fowler

A love letter to the California Coastline, the creatures who inhabit it, and the stories we tell ourselves to find courage and hope—from the Booker shortlisted author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

OTTER MUSIC
by Karen Joy Fowler
Putnam, March 2027
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Lainey Miller is a reasonably happy, unmarried Marine researcher living in Santa Cruz, California, heading rapidly towards middle age. When her 11 year old niece points out that Lainey never actually has any FUN (not really) it sends Lainey spiraling down a reinvestigation of both her past—the conspiracist father who abandoned her in his misguided pursuit of « lizard people »—and her future, where most days it feels as if every effort to save and conserve the natural world is futile.

OTTER MUSIC is a story about how each of us must find a little patch of the world to save and tend to—even amongst the fires, and floods and cruelty—because it takes bravery to extend ourselves with love and determination into the awaiting world.

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Her most recent novel Booth was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, California

UNTRAVELLED WORLD de Martha Perotto-Wills

A heart-pounding, otherworldly adventure, mixed with the thorny, sexy lesbian dynamics of a Julia Armfield novel. For fans of The Ministry of Time and Annihilation.

UNTRAVELLED WORLD
by Martha Perotto-Wills
Random House, Fall 2027
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Ten years ago, the door opened to reveal a surreal, uncharted world adjoining our own: a terrifyingly beautiful expanse of glass which shifts at its own whims—every two hours, every two days—unpredictably gifting clear, flat planes or delivering dangerous crevasses hiding reality-bending hallucinations.

For Teddy, newly graduated and directionless, the era-defining mystery of the other world is merely an icebreaker, a conversation topic on dates gone cold. But then Adrian Clermont, an old family friend, appears in Teddy’s living room seeking funding for an expedition into the other world. Teddy, seeing a chance for purpose and an escape from her privileged, hermetic world, begs to join Adrian’s team.

When the Clermont party make it through the door, Teddy falls helplessly in love with both the landscape and with Jenny Cattaneo, a flinty meteorologist with a strangely deep connection to the other world. When Teddy makes a staggering discovery about a missing explorer, she is forced to reckon with the true cost of the life she’s built in the other world—the first real home she’s ever known.

Martha Perotto-Wills is a writer from London. She has a BA in History and an MA in Queer History. After spending several years as a bookseller and cataloguer in crumbling second-hand bookshops she moved into trade publishing, and now works as an associate agent at a literary agency. She lives in south London with her girlfriend and their cat. UNTRAVELLED WORLD is her first novel, partially born from her obsession with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir The Worst Journey in the World.