MADDER LAKE de Katie Wu

Lush, thrilling, and inventive, MADDER LAKE is something utterly fresh in the romantasy space. It has the anonymous yearning of The Night Circus, the examination of the foreign student experience of Babel, and the use of magic to explore a sense of belonging and the definition of home of Starling House. But it also has a system in which magic and art are intricately intertwined, alongside a deep investigation of who gets access to that art and who serves as its gatekeepers.

MADDER LAKE
by Katie Wu
HarperVoyager, March 2027
(via Dystel Goderich & Bourret)

At Xenra, the world’s top magic painting university, blending art and the arcane is commonplace. But for Ayla, a homesick immigrant, commonplace isn’t good enough. Not if she wants to graduate with a lucrative patronage and afford treatment for her dying mother back home. When the school cancels her scholarship, she’ll do anything to stay at Xenra—including asking her privileged rival Constantine to team up for a painting competition that would guarantee her tuition.

Except there can only be one winner—she’ll have to beat him in the final round of the contest. Her only hope is a mysterious canvas she finds hidden in the school—a canvas that can turn anything painted on it into reality. With the power to change the art market (and perhaps the world), it’s the perfect way to stand out among her peers. But as Ayla investigates the canvas, she discovers that she’s not the only one working on it…

Constantine, desperate to rejoin his family after being disowned years ago, has found it too. They anonymously collaborate on it—and pass wordless confessions through its brushstrokes—all while butting heads on their joint project. As her mother’s condition worsens and Constantine’s powerful family threatens their shot at the competition, Ayla needs to solve the mysteries of the canvas and secure her win, once and for all. But unraveling century-old secrets risks the very fate of her people, so Ayla and Constantine must each decide if winning is truly worth selling out this magic—and each other.

Katie Wu is an author of swoony and strange books. Born stateside but raised in Shanghai, she then studied computer science and fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now based in NYC. You can find Katie Wu on TikTok/Instagram as @katiewuwrites. MADDER LAKE is her adult fantasy debut.

THE SEER de Samantha Jayne Allen

A suspense novel set in a small, high desert town in southern California, for fans of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River and Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places.

THE SEER
by Samantha Jayne Allen
St. Martin’s Minotaur, March 2027
(via Dystel Goderich & Bourret)

Told in alternating timelines, THE SEER is about a TV psychic who disappears after leading a search for a missing teacher, and the psychic’s daughter, who is now called upon by investigators for help reexamining her mother’s role in the decades-old cold case.

THE SEER is both a gripping mystery and a heart-wrenching story about the push and pull between family and the self, between cold truth and tantalizing fiction.

“Riveting and atmospheric, Samantha Jayne Allen’s THE SEER is a taut and brilliantly plotted mystery that gripped me from the start and held me captive through every twist and turn. Rich in character and full of heart, this is a book I won’t soon forget.” –Kimi Cunningham Grant, USA Today bestselling author of These Silent Woods & The Nature of Disappearing

“Like its titular character, THE SEER drew me in with just a crook of a finger, letting me go only when it had scoured my soul. Samantha Jayne Allen has written a rare breed of thriller: one with a mystery so compelling you want to race through to the ending to discover the truth, but written with magnetic, sensitive prose, enough to slow you down to taste the desert air of Tehachapi on your tongue. You won’t be able to put this down.” —Melissa Larsen, USA Today bestselling author of The Lost House

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. Her debut novel, Pay Dirt Road, won the Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, and the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, and her writing has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Common, and Electric Literature.

MEIN UNGLÜCK BEGINNT DAMIT, DASS DER STROMKREIS ALS RECHTECK ABGEBILDET WIRD de Saša Stanišić

Language – courage – magic: speeches against idleness, both delivered and undelivered.

MEIN UNGLÜCK BEGINNT DAMIT, DASS DER STROMKREIS ALS RECHTECK ABGEBILDET WIRD
(My Unhappiness Starts With the Fact that Electric Circuits Are Depicted As Rectangles)
by Saša Stanišić
Luchterhand/PRH Germany, October 2025

There’s nothing for it: we have to do something to counter hardship and human suffering, war, poverty, fascism and the rest of it. Each of us can do their bit. Everyone. Donate stuff, help out somewhere, that sort of thing. Take responsibility. If the world’s going down the drain, we might as well go down with dignity, goddamn it.

Hardly anyone takes literature seriously any more, and not just since mobile phones . Still, here you are holding a book in your hand and wondering whether to buy it. There are speeches in it. Which you think is stupid. Speeches are something you make, that’s all.

I get it. But anyway, here’s a list of what you’d miss out on:

• The word « unlikely », about twenty times
• my great uncle Stevo, who got six numbers right in the lottery in the late 1990s and promptly drowned (along with a trumpet player)
• a chair in a back yard
• language, courage, magic
• the sentence « Doing is the opposite of death »

Saša Stanišić, born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, has lived in Germany since 1992. His novels and stories have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous awards, including the 2019 German Book Prize (for Herkunft) and the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for Vor dem Fest), as well as the Eichendorff Book Prize, Schiller Prize and Hans Fallada Prize. He lives in Hamburg.

EROTIC SEASONS de Kimberly Ann Johnson

From author of The Fourth Trimester, this is a guide for women of any age who feel out of touch with their body and their true desires but know that their sexuality holds untapped power.

EROTIC SEASONS: Tuning into the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality
by Kimberly Ann Johnson
St. Martin’s Essentials, November 2026

Women experience so many crossroads at the different stages in our lives—these might include exploring sexuality, beginning a relationship, becoming a mother, trying to get pregnant, losing a baby, being in perimenopause or menopause, leaving a marriage. At these thresholds, our bodies change, our relationship to sexuality changes, and our desires can become mysterious. Most of us don’t have the language, information, or courage to communicate about these changes, so we are left feeling confused, lost or broken.

Kimberly Ann Johnson, sexological bodyworker and Somatic Experiencing practitioner, has helped thousands of women connect with their bodies and desires and put their pieces back together. In EROTIC SEASONS, she offers profound insights to women at all stages. Johnson guides women toward a revolutionary reckoning with sexuality. Grounded in understanding the female body in our monthly, seasonal, and lifetime rhythms, the book guides readers to locate themselves in their own anatomy and nervous system patterns. Kimberly reframes the archetypes of the female lifespan—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—for women today and shares powerful stories of women across generations, helping readers orient to the realities and mysteries of each life stage. Then, with this knowledge, women can experience sexuality that allows us to become more present, awake, and alive throughout our lives.

Kimberly Ann Johnson is a sexological bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, postpartum advocate and culture worker. She works at the intersection of birth, sex and trauma helping women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. She is the author of Call of the Wild as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester. She has taught courses on women’s sexuality and spirituality, nationally and internationally for the past fifteen years.

USE YOUR BRAIN d’Erica Dhawan

A provocative, story-driven guide to reclaiming your mental edge in a tech-dominated world. Dhawan’s previous book, Digital Body Language, has been a go-to title for navigating the digital workplace with rights sold in nineteen territories.

USE YOUR BRAIN: How to Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot
by Erica Dhawan
St. Martin’s Press, January 2027

We have trained ourselves to surrender pieces of our agency to technology for decades; GPS tells us where to turn, search engines tell us what to know, and smartphones make constant availability feel normal. With the dawn of AI, the age of hyper-speed is here whether we like it or not. These new tools don’t just support our brains, they outsource them to machines that don’t feel, don’t doubt, and don’t care. But the future doesn’t belong to those who blindly follow algorithms or trends—it belongs to those who outthink them.

USE YOUR BRAIN is a practical playbook for nurturing, not abandoning, your critical thinking skills in an era defined by speed and automation. Author Erica Dhawan conducted a years-long intensive study of people across five continents and all walks of life—from CEOs and artists to students and scientists—and the leaders who are thriving aren’t dependent upon new technology; they’re able to use it to their advantage while refusing to compromise their own judgment.

Packed with entertaining stories and concrete advice, USE YOUR BRAIN is essential reading for getting ahead in modern life, whether you’re an executive navigating scale, an employee trying to stay relevant, a parent raising independent thinkers in a world of instant answers, or someone who just wants to remain mentally sharp and fully human. Anyone who wants to succeed in today’s world must understand a baseline truth that runs counter to everything Silicon Valley is selling us; that speed is not the same as wisdom, automation is not the same as judgment, and efficiency is not the same as progress. They will be the ones who know when to challenge it, when to trust their own reasoning, and when to step back and think for themselves.

Erica Dhawan is a globally-recognized expert on leadership and teamwork. She is regularly named as one of the top fifty management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and a top fifty keynote speaker by Real Leaders. She speaks on global stages ranging from the World Economic Forum at Davos to TED, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR, among others. She has degrees from Harvard, MIT Sloan and The Wharton School.