Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2026 Adult Fiction

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.

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.

WHEN THE WOODS CALLED US HOME de Rachel Griffin

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Griffin comes an atmospheric and haunting adult debut in which a disappearance rattles a small town, forcing one woman to confront her fate and unravel the dark secrets of the past—perfect for fans of Once There Were Wolves and The Unmaking of June Farrow.

WHEN THE WOODS CALLED US HOME
by Rachel Griffin
Atria, February 2027
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

In the rural town of Bone Creek, Emma Pierce has devoted her life to caring for the wind-battered trees of the rugged Washington coast, feeling more grounded one hundred feet up than with both feet planted firmly on land.

When she’s climbing, Emma can almost convince herself that the curse claiming the Pierce women’s lives is nothing more than hollow gossip. When she’s climbing, the changes in her sister don’t seem so alarming.

But when her boyfriend Eli’s brother goes missing, not even the trees can calm the dread in Emma’s gut. Both Eli and her sister fall under the town’s suspicion, and Emma throws herself into the search for answers. Soon, she discovers that the town is holding onto secrets—and so too is her own family.

Forced to confront what the people she loves most are capable of, Emma must uncover her forgotten memories from the night her mother died. A generations-old feud has been simmering beneath the surface of Bone Creek…and it’s coming to a lethal boil in the very woods where Parker vanished.

Rachel Griffin writes novels inspired by the magic of the world around her. She is the #1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of atmospheric, spellbinding books for teens and adults. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Rachel has a deep love of nature, from the mountains to the ocean and all the towering evergreens in between. When she isn’t writing, you can find her wandering rain-soaked forests, reading by the fire, or drinking copious amounts of coffee and tea. She lives with her husband beneath the moody skies of western Washington.

MAKESHIFT de Peter Rock

An uncompromising act of good faith, a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.

MAKESHIFT
by Peter Rock
Soft Skull Press, August 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Abandoned on a remote island known as Makeshift, three sisters—Ari, Heiko, and CeCe—believe they’re the last humans on Earth.

These three, left alone after a band of foreigners slaughtered their entire community, must learn to fend for themselves. They fish and forage in the shallow waters of their protected cove, salvage useful treasures from the rusting hulks of ships that ran aground on its offshore reefs, and entertain themselves with half-remembered tales from their time before.

But when they stray beyond the island into a wider, broken world, they find that life may not be as they believed. And upon their return to the island, they face further revelations that strain their bonds, hint that secrets may be everywhere, and affirm their need for one another in the face of a perilous future.

MAKESHIFT is a singular novel of hope and survival set on a small rock-bound island in the coastal Pacific Northwest, and a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.

Peter Rock is the author of eleven previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and John Dos Passos Prize, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.