Archives de catégorie : Literary

IN RESIDENCE de Jessica Widner

A literary ghost story in the vein of Pola Oloixarac’s Mona with a Shirley Jackson twist, for fans of Jordan Peele.

IN RESIDENCE
by Jessica Widner
Mariner, Fall 2027
(via Wolf Literary Services)

When Eva and Elliot receive a vast inheritance from Elliot’s mother, it is as welcome as it is troubling. Middle aged, without children and already leading a comfortable middle-class life in Edinburgh, they decide to use the money to launch a fully funded residency for emerging artists.

Yet, as soon as the money arrives in Elliot’s account, a strange atmosphere converges around the couple. It follows them to the Yorkshire Dales, where they renovate a large countryside property ahead of the inaugural residency. They each begin dreaming of a presence, a dark and inescapable creature, and whispers seem to linger in the air even after they wake.

When the first batch of guests arrives – a dancer from Busan, a mixed-media artist from Los Angeles and a writer from Toronto – they too are caught up in the increasingly terrifying happenings. Tensions escalate as they all suspect each other of foul play, but the true culprit is a legacy that extends far into the past, surfacing to remind Eva and Elliot of the full extent of their inheritance.

Perceptive and piercing, Widner examines the small compromises we make with ourselves every day, spinning a story of patronage, privilege, class, and complicity until its dark heart emerges.

Jessica Widner is a writer and literary scholar. She is a lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.

THE SQUATTERS de Saba Brelvi

Two families collide in this provocative debut about motherhood, migration, and the distance between who we are and who we want to be.

THE SQUATTERS
by Saba Brelvi
The Dial Press, November 2026
(via Writers House)

How far are you willing to go to help someone in need?

Surrey is a quiet, affluent area just outside of London, replete with tree-lined streets, great schools, and friendly neighbors. But among them, Dalia Waheed has never quite felt like she belongs. Though she and her husband embody second-generation immigrant success, Dalia can’t shake the sense that she is destined for something other than her carefully constructed suburban life.

While volunteering at a local nonprofit called Refugee Resettlement, Dalia meets the very pregnant Hajira and her husband, who have fled their home country to seek asylum in the U.K. In Hajira, Dalia feels a kinship she can’t quite explain. So, when Hajira asks for help finding an alternative to their squalid government housing, Dalia knows she will not ignore her plea. Helping a soon-to-be mother find a place to live is the least she can do.

What begins as a simple act of kindness spirals into something far more treacherous than Dalia could have ever imagined. Suddenly, she finds herself in a political firestorm that threatens to engulf everything she holds close: friendships, community ties—even her marriage. With the pressure mounting on all sides and the situation teetering closer to real danger, Dalia is forced to confront a terrifying question: how much is she willing to risk—for her ideals, her family, and for a woman who has already lost everything?

Gripping and unflinching, THE SQUATTERS lays bare the fractures of belonging, the costs of conviction, and the tensions that simmer beneath even the most idyllic communities.

“A beautiful, timely novel . . . Saba Brelvi has written a haunting story about the oft-forgotten human face of the refugee experience, the frailties and illusions of the perfect life, and the true cost of moral courage.” —Patmeena Sabit, author of Good People

Saba Brelvi is a Muslim American writer from California. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University and has spent more than two decades working in the nonprofit sector. She currently resides in Abu Dhabi with her family. The Squatters is her debut novel.

THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA de Sheila Heti

From “one of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today [and] one of our best living authors” (The Washington Post) comes a deeply delightful seafaring adventure and a brilliant group portrait of female adolescence.

THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Photo credit: Luis Mora

To escape the dangers of wartime bombings, the girls of St. Alwynn’s have been evacuated by their headmistress to a ship on the high seas. Yet instead of being safe, they find themselves plunged into a different kind of chaos. Trapped in a floating pressure cooker of teenage anguish and rivalry, their isolation is penetrated by just one thing: the weekly arrival of the mail bag, bearing letters from a distant boys’ ship.

Through the perspectives of the passionate Dani, the high-minded Lorraine, the sensitive Flora, and the beautiful Yvonne, THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA creates a dramatic and vivid mini-society. But as their ship sails onward, westward, or perhaps just around in circles, the girls find themselves in ever more peril. Will they never reach home? Is their headmistress okay? And what if they’ve completely misunderstood each other―and themselves?

Hilarious, moving, and taking on some of the biggest questions of life, THE ST. ALWYNN GIRLS AT SEA delivers the absorbing and wondrous pleasures of childhood reading while inventing an entirely new category of narrative pleasure, anchored by the psychological incisiveness Sheila Heti is known for. It is as though she has gone back in time and returned to the present with a lost modern classic in hand.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and the New York Times Bestseller, Women in Clothes (edited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton). She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, n+1, The London Review of Books, and more. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Toronto.

OPPO de Christopher Beha

From National Book Award–longlisted Christopher Beha, a gripping, twisty novel that pulls back the curtain on who really tips the needle of politics and updates the great political thrillers of the past—those from Graham Greene, John LeCarré, and Robert Stone—for our own fractured, tumultuous era.

OPPO
by Christopher Beha
Tin House, May 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

When tech billionaire Romulus Rice buys the Washington Star, the paper’s journalists celebrate, thinking they will finally have the resources to compete with the new media giants and return the Star to its glory days. With a lawless president—Rice’s fellow tech oligarch, Mario Adrian—having seized power through questionable means, the country has never needed their work more. But Rice installs a former tabloid hack with a worryingly friendly relationship to the president as the paper’s new editor, and the staff is left with a choice: stick around to fight the good fight, or jump from a sinking ship.

One of the Star’s hottest young reporters, Keith Reece, chooses to jump—joining a prominent opposition research firm run by former Star reporter Tony Greenstone. His colleague—and work wife—Colleen McDormand stays behind, becoming the paper’s White House correspondent. From their different perches, Colleen and Keith each stumble on a dramatic conspiracy that will ultimately implicate not just President Adrian but also Greenstone and Rice. As they tussle professionally and personally, the pair comes to question how much they can trust each other—or anyone else.

Taking place over the course of a single, crucial election season, OPPO builds toward a startling climax in which Colleen and Keith are both forced to question who and what they’ve been working for all along, and whether they are rebuilding their world . . . or destroying it.

« Oppo is everything a political thriller needs to be: smart, sharp, and incisive—without being cynical. I couldn’t put it down.” —Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

“Cannily conceived and fetchingly populated, Beha’s Oppo is a subversive delight. Our politics and news media have given us little thrill of late—but this wonderfully plotted novel is an exception!” —Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ayad Akhtar

Christopher Beha is the author of two memoirs, The Whole Five Feet and Why I Am Not an Atheist, and three previous novels, Arts & Entertainments, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, and The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES de Jim Shepard

Twelve compressed masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, hideously mismanaged wars, gargantuan wildfires, and apocalyptic storms.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES
by Jim Shepard
Knopf, September 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.

“Jim Shepard is a fantastic writer—compassionate, funny, and fearless—[whose work] does what great writing always does: inspires us to look more closely at life, and be more caring.” —George Saunders

« A deft, audacious artist. » —Norman Rush, National Book Award-winning author of Mating

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. He also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He previously taught at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife Karen and two beagles.