TAIPEI STORY de R. F. Kuang

From R.F. Kuang, the acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author of Katabasis and Yellowface, comes a wryly humorous and profoundly moving coming-of-age novel that grapples with grief, language, and culture shock—all set against the backdrop of an unforgettable summer in Taipei.

TAIPEI STORY
by R. F. Kuang
HarperCollins, September 2026
(via Liza Dawson Associates)

College freshman Lily Chen is off to spend the summer in Taipei at an intensive language program like so many Chinese American students before her, hoping to connect with the culture she inherited but never fully understood. But a promising start quickly unravels. Her classes are grueling, her roommate is driving her insane, and a reckless trip to the hot springs with a guy she barely knows soon has her classmates viciously gossiping. She feels adrift, a foreigner in a country she thought would feel like home.

Then shocking news arrives: Lily’s grandfather has passed away. The loss forces her to grapple with now-unanswerable questions about her family history. As Lily grieves, she’s drawn into a journey of self-discovery—piecing together memories, stories, and silences over a series of hilarious and devastating attempts at connection.

TAIPEI STORY asks: What if the diaspora fantasy of homecoming never comes true? What if learning a language can’t bring you any closer to the people you’re trying to reach? What if you search for your family’s history, but your family doesn’t want to share? What if you wait too long to ask the right questions? As Lily struggles for answers, her summer becomes a poignant search for understanding—of herself, her family, and the meaning of home.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, Yellowface, and Katabasis. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.

CIRCUIT BREAKERS d’Anna Chambers

Neuroscientist Dr. Anna Chambers takes us inside a state-of-the-art brain research laboratory, showing us how scientists unpack the biological secrets that make headlines and save lives.

CIRCUIT BREAKERS: How Neuroscientists Get Inside Your Head
by Anna Chambers
Abrams Press, November 2026
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

In recent decades, neuroscience has revealed fascinating details about how the brain works in health and disease. But how do we know what we know?

In CIRCUIT BREAKERS, Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Anna Chambers pulls back the curtain to show us what happens in the modern brain research laboratory. Here, we learn how cutting-edge tools can manipulate memories, make neurons glow in the dark, and record signals at every level, from the whole brain to a single synapse. In the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience, unprecedented discoveries may be all in a day’s work. Through stories of the ‘science around the science’―all the daily problems a scientist must solve, like accessing a living brain encased in a skull, or figuring out how to coax unusual creatures like cuttlefish and bats into behaving naturally in a lab―Chambers invites us into spaces where few of us ever venture.

CIRCUIT BREAKERS weaves down-to-earth explanations of futuristic tools, like human brain implants and laser-controlled neurons, with candid interviews and stories from her own often-grueling journey as a researcher. Throughout, Chambers tells the little-known stories of these discoveries with equal parts humor and wonder. Through sharing this fascinating―and sometimes downright strange― profession with the wider world, Circuit Breakers is deeply committed to inspiring young neuroscientists, improving scientific literacy, and dispelling the many myths about the brain, the ultimate “black box.”

Dr. Anna Chambers is a neuroscientist who conducts research on memory, sleep and hearing. She is an Instructor of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a researcher in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital in Boston. She studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2015, and conducted postdoctoral fellowships in Germany and Norway. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two sons.

THE BURNING SIDE de Sarah Damoff

From the author of The Bright Years, the story of April and Leo, a couple on the brink of collapse. When their house goes up in flames, family secrets and thorny histories emerge as they are forced to decide what is worth salvaging.

THE BURNING SIDE
by Sarah Damoff
Simon & Schuster, May 2026
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

When April and Leo’s house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children and the quiet knowledge that the fire is not the only thing threatening their family. They retreat to April’s childhood home in Dallas, where her spirited parents and siblings provide both comfort and complication.

As the family reckons with the aftermath—grief, guilt, logistics, and memories scorched and intact—the fire exposes the cracks already forming in April and Leo’s marriage. The novel unfolds in alternating perspectives: from April, who feels the crushing weight of motherhood, marriage, and self-blame; from Leo, a high school history teacher shaped by a lonely, fractured childhood; from Deb, April’s generous and no-nonsense mother who has to contend with her husband’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis; and from flashbacks that trace April and Leo’s relationship from its earliest days of connection to the devastating decisions that led them here.

A family saga suffused with humor, longing, and heartbreak, THE BURNING SIDE is about what we inherit and what we choose, about forgiveness and the ache of being known. It is, above all, about the meaning of home and the costs of long love.

Sarah Damoff is the author of The Bright Years, which was a USA TODAY bestseller and is being translated into twelve languages. She lives with her husband and children in Texas, where she has been a social worker.

WILL AND ATTENTION de Meghan O’Gieblyn

In her exquisite memoir of secret drinking, fragile recovery, and the deep pull of religion, award-winning essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn seeks to understand why it is so hard to sustain the difficult work of personal change.

WILL AND ATTENTION
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Doubleday, October 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

After leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late-thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns — to organized religion and to alcohol — felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles. She was forced to reckon with her inner doubleness, a self “who both wants and wants not to want,” as she puts it.

In WILL AND ATTENTION O’Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she turned to a series of spiritual texts— by Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, the Desert Fathers—and began putting them in conversation with her life. She set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature. Beautifully written, intellectually sparkling, wryly funny, this memoir from a beloved essayist explores a fundamental question of being human: the mystifying nature of our power over ourselves.

THE PARATHA PROJECT de Priya Krishna

A memoir and also a rallying cry and how-to for having difficult conversations with your parents by New York Times bestselling author and NYT food reporter, former restaurant critic and video host.

THE PARATHA PROJECT:
A Radical Experiment in Talking to My Parents
by Priya Krishna
Little, Brown, Spring 2028
(via the David Black Agency)

In her highly-anticipated debut narrative nonfiction book, Emmy-nominated New York Times journalist and bestselling author of Indian-ish, Priya’s Kitchen Adventures, and Cooking at Home (with David Chang), Priya Krishna turns her incisive eye and her reporter’s mic to the untold story of her own parents. Despite all of the public-facing closeness, a family crisis made Priya realize she never really knew her parents at all. She will do what for many of us would feel impossible and even radical: ask the uncomfortable questions to get to the real answer. In The Paratha Project, Priya challenges every assumption she ever made about her parents’ story—one she always believed was a straightforward trajectory of hardworking immigrants coming to the States, finding professional success, and achieving the American Dream. Question by question, a more complex and revealing history emerges.

As Priya reexamines her family’s past, the book engages deeply universal themes of intergenerational misunderstanding, parental expectation, grief, and the search for belonging. It speaks to anyone who has ever felt both close to and distant from their family. Through explorations of legacy, assimilation, and, of course, food, Priya’s search for truth about her parents becomes a search for truth about herself.

Both a deeply personal narrative and a rallying cry, The Paratha Project invites readers to initiate paradigm-shifting conversations with their own parents before it’s too late. With humor, insight, and emotional clarity—and an addendum of 22 Questions To Ask Your Parents designed to spark expansive, surprising dialogue—the book offers a compelling story and a practical framework for forging deeper intergenerational connection.

Priya Krishna is a food reporter, former restaurant critic, and video host for the New York Times. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of three cookbooks, Priya’s Kitchen Adventures, Cooking at Home (with David Chang), and Indian-ish, the latter of which has sold over 145,000 copies. Prior to working at the Times, Priya was a popular member of the Bon Appetit test kitchen and played a pivotal role in the reckoning on racial injustice at the magazine in 2020. Her work has been nominated for a James Beard Award and an IACP award, and her reported essays have been included in the 2019 and 2021 versions of The Best American Food Writing. She has been nominated for an Emmy for her work hosting the NYT video series “On the Job,” which spotlights the unseen labor of the food industry. Through speaking engagements across the country, her built-in platform of the NYT, and her 500k social media followers, Priya is a definitive voice on food, culture, and identity.