Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2026 Adult Fiction

COLD PLACES de Tom Baragwanath

In this follow-up to the award-winning Lorraine Henry thrillers Paper Cage and Lucky Thing, Tom Baragwanath delivers his trademark in-depth exploration of isolated communities, wild environments, and resourceful cops—and records clerks—under pressure.

COLD PLACES
by Tom Baragwanath
Text Publishing Australia, August 2027

When it’s time for a little rest and relaxation, police records clerk Lorraine Henry heads north to Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf to visit her colleague, constable Dion Warwick—but the island has something else in store.

After the bodies of two women wash ashore bound in rope, Lorraine and Dion must work with spiky veteran detective Mo Roche to uncover a hidden threat lurking in plain sight, even if doing so means confronting decades-long secrets. And for Lorraine, some of those secrets hit a little too close to home, putting her and her family in real danger.

Without her Masterton connections to draw from, Lorraine needs to find new ways to stay ahead of the danger waiting around every corner, navigating hostile locals, watchful neighbours, and an island commune that isn’t quite what it seems.

‘Wonderful, emotional storytelling with a fine protagonist—an Antipodean Miss Marple, but fiercer—makes this too good to miss.’ – Daily Mail UK on Lucky Thing

‘Lorraine Henry is a refreshingly different crime fiction protagonist.’ – Shelley Burr

‘Just the kind of dark, disturbing, gritty, and unusual treat thriller lovers are looking for.’ – Kirkus (starred review) on Paper Cage

Tom Baragwanath is originally from Masterton, New Zealand, and now lives in Paris with his young family. His first novel, Paper Cage, was the 2021 winner of the Michael Gifkins Prize. His second novel, Lucky Thing, is currently shortlisted for Best International Crime Fiction in the 2026 Ned Kelly Awards as well as being longlisted for the 2026 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

THE MASQUERADERS de Betty Shamieh

A suspenseful, historical murder mystery, The Masqueraders follows a cast of flawed and unapologetic women as they forge a place for themselves in a deeply divided world.

THE MASQUERADERS
by Betty Shamieh
Avid Reader Press, Spring 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

When we meet Leila, her husband Meir has just flown her from their small Palestinian village to France to tell her he is not who she believes him to be. He is a spy—and has been from the moment they met.

Decades later, their Americanborn daughter, Eve, stands over her father’s body, murdered by stabbing. She is meant to fulfill the role of grieving daughter, but instead her training as a forensic pathologist has her thinking about cause of death, suspects, and motives. Eve knows about her father’s past, and her first suspect might have been her mother had she not been long dead.

Across an ocean, Raphaella, one of the Israeli agents who recruited Meir, has also just learned of Meir’s death and has her own questions: is someone hunting her former operatives?

Inspired by the true stories of Israeli spies who married Palestinian women and fathered children while undercover in the 1950s, The Masqueraders asks: what are the limits of love? What betrayals can be forgiven? How far is too far?

Betty Shamieh is the author of the novel Too Soon and fifteen plays. She is the playwrightin-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic’s Picks. Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.

OFFSEASON d’Avigayl Sharp

A sharp, darkly funny literary debut about a disillusioned young woman teaching at an all-girls boarding school as she tries—and fails—to make sense of trauma, desire, family, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

OFFSEASON
by Avigayl Sharp
Astra House, May 2026
(via Neon Literary)

In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, OFFSEASON, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she’s vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, OFFSEASON reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

★ « Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish. » — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“One of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade . . . wild, raunchy, upsetting, and very much unpredictable.” — Vulture

“Intensely observant and ineffably askew. It’s a funny, sad, discomfiting, unabashedly weird book that I inhaled and haven’t managed to stop thinking about yet.” — NPR

“To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere—this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit.” — Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. OFFSEASON is her first novel.

SEA-MOUTH de Melissa Oliver-Powell

With a sapphic romance at its heart and evocative horror imagery along the way, SEA-MOUTH will appeal to readers who have been drawn to the atmospheric isolation and queer passion (with a touch of marine gothic) of Our Wives Under the Sea and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and the gritty disgust and body horror interwoven with everyday intimacies of The Lamb, Nightbitch and Woman, Eating.

SEA-MOUTH
by Melissa Oliver-Powell
Virago, Publication date TBD
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Vinia is a high-flying corporate solicitor for a London firm, where she spends her time defending the interests of GlauCo, a multinational oil and gas giant. Her life is upended when she washes up on a polluted beach following an accident on a luxury yacht, and is rescued by Laura, a PhD researcher monitoring the mysterious migratory patterns of silver eels.

While convalescing under Laura’s care, Vinia’s recovery is stalled by a horrifying physical transformation. What begins as an insatiable hunger for rotting meat and a strange coarseness on her skin soon escalates into a full-scale metamorphosis: she begins growing silvery scales, gills, and a dorsal fin. Additionally, feelings of anger and passion that Vinia has spent her life repressing also rise to the surface.

Through a blossoming relationship, Laura and Vinia learn to embrace the strange (and hungry) parts of Vinia that can no longer be ignored. But her newfound freedom is threatened by Matt Glauser, the heir to GlauCo, and she must choose between returning to the “civilization » that exploited her and the ancient, monstrous fury rising from her own blood.

Melissa Oliver-Powell is a senior lecturer in Film and Literature at the University of York and spends her time teaching students about feminist theory and queer studies and showing them weird films from the sixties. Melissa is widely published as an academic, with work on French, English, Senegalese and American film in several books and journals, including Feminist Studies and French Screen Studies. Her book, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969, was published with Berghahn Books in 2022. She is originally from Cambridgeshire, spent her twenties as a Londoner, and is now based in York, where she lives with her wife, Aimee. 

THE BOTTOM OF THE LIBRARY de Charlotte Idyllwild

A skewering of antihero tropes wrapped in a lush magical setting. For readers of inventive, maximalist fantasy in the vein of Robert Jackson Bennett, Josiah Bancroft, and T. Kingfisher.

THE BOTTOM OF THE LIBRARY
by Charlotte Idyllwild
Del Rey, Publication TBD
(via Liza Dawson Associates)

A historical fantasy set in a patriarchal, reality-warping magical library, following a brooding scholar who obsessively trails the mysterious adversary tampering with his books—and the tamperer herself, who might just be the hero of the story.

In an alternate 1746, the Russian empire is aggressively expanding, powered by the magics birthed in its reality-bending, subterranean Library. Nobody has seen the bottom—and if you venture too deep, you return warped, transformed, or not at all. To outsiders, the Library is horrifying. To Ivan, the Library is home. Ivan is the surly, brilliant son of the Library’s Provost—a nearly friendless outcast, selfish, prideful, insatiably curious. When a grove of trees appears in the depths of level twenty-three, he decides it’s too beautiful to banish right away. But when he discovers that a mysterious reader has been studying his book on the grove, on his personal desk, he becomes obsessed with discovering who it is. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Ivan and the most unlikely adversary he can imagine: a woman. He’ll chase her over edges, through mirrors, around herds of walnuts and the Procession of Cutlery, and across his own (tenuous) moral boundaries. Because Ivan isn’t the hero of this story—he’s the villain.

Charlotte Idyllwild is an engineer by profession and writer by passion. Other publications of hers include technical papers in industry journals, which typically involve more equations and fewer enchantments. She lives in California with her husband, two children, a player piano that is definitely not haunted, three cats, a dog, and whatever other creatures have managed to sneak in on any given day.