Archives par étiquette : Dystel Goderich & Bourret

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.

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.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY d’Elizabeth Heider

Fast-paced, evocative, and steeped in the tension of moral compromise, CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY explores the thin line between hope and illusion in a city where every choice carries a price.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY
by Elizabeth Heider
Penguin Books, February 2026
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

Some cities feed on secrets. Naples is ravenous.

A peaceful evening mass at the historic Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo is shattered when a young au pair is killed in one of the cathedral’s quiet chapels. The daughter of the US Ambassador sees it happen–but she’ll speak only to one person: Nikki Serafino.

Shaken by betrayal in her last high-profile case, Nikki has retreated from the relentless vigilance that once defined her work as liaison between Italian police and the US military. Withdrawn and mistrustful, she works her shifts, cares for her aging family, teaches self-defense classes, and avoids entanglement. But this case threatens her self-imposed invisibility–drawing her into a web of lies and resurfacing old wounds and buried loyalties. The murder investigation leads Nikki and her friend, Naples officer Valerio Alfieri, into a shadow architecture of power: built to protect the guilty and hide their secrets at any cost.

Can she and Valerio—each carrying dangerous debts—resist the undertow of corruption that swallows truth whole?

Set against the chaos of modern Naples—the city of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—where grace and corruption share the same narrow streets, Nikki and Valerio navigate a landscape where even the most principled must confront the cost of survival.

Elizabeth Heider is the author of May the Wolf Die, named a New York Times Best Crime Novel, a Washington Post Best Mystery, and one of Publishers Weekly‘s best books of the year. Her short fiction has been recognized by the Santa Fe Writers Project and New Century Writer Awards. She holds a PhD in physics and most recently worked as a program manager for Microsoft’s AI4Science and as a scientist in the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program. She’s authored original scientific research, a patent, analytical reports for the US government and military, and coauthored a journal article with astronaut Thomas Pesquet. She lived and worked in Naples, Italy, as a civilian analyst embedded with the US Navy’s mission in Africa, where she deployed aboard US and European naval ships. Originally from Utah, she now lives in The Hague, where she’s working on the next Nikki Serafino novel.