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THE LOVE ELIXIR OF AUGUSTA STERN

Growing up in 1920s Brooklyn, Augusta Stern had two heroes. First, her father, Solomon Stern, a well-respected pharmacist. Second, her great-aunt Esther, who moved in with the Sterns after Augusta’s mother died and deals in medicinals in a less conventional way. Watching her great-aunt brewing healing concoctions in the kitchen in the middle of the night after seeing her father measuring out dosages and counseling patients in the back of his drugstore during the day, Augusta dreams of becoming

ASH'S CABIN

Ash has always felt like an outsider, and ever since Grandpa Edwin passed away, that feeling of isolation has only gotten worse. Their parents haven’t fully accepted Ash’s recent name change or newly shorn hair, and school isn’t much better. When Ash learns that their family plans to sell Grandpa Edwin’s old ranch, they come up with a plan: to find Grandpa’s secret cabin in the woods and stay there—forever. They earn money, watch online videos to pick up survival skills, and buy food, gear, and

WANDERING THROUGH LIFE

Leon’s approach to autobiography is pretty much the opposite of what readers may expect from the author of a successful series of whodunits. “I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I’ve done,” she announces early on, and then proceeds to illustrate this proposition by one charming non sequitur after another. After brief chapters on her family, she turns to more or less disconnected anecdotes and discussions—e.g., the tomato-selling sca

HOUSE OF BONE AND RAIN

After his mother, a low-level drug dealer named Maria, is shot in the face for encroaching on someone’s territory, her son, Bimbo, will stop at nothing to avenge her—including torturing and murdering people for information. Most of his close friends don’t want any part this. But after one of them, Xavier, is murdered and Gabe, the primary narrator of the book, barely escapes the killers, their outlook changes. Torn between loyalty to Bimbo and love of his girlfriend, Natalia, who tries to talk

PEGGY

Godfrey worked on this book for 10 years before dying of cancer in 2022; using the manuscript and notes she left behind, Jamison finished the book, immersing the reader in Godfrey’s vision of the intense and willful Guggenheim as she progresses from adolescence to womanhood: “I wanted a future of gangsters or poets; I wanted violence and beauty…” At 14, after her father—traveling with his mistress—dies on board the Titanic, Peggy, her mother, and two sisters must downsize, but they are still we

THE WAY OF THE BEAR

Still smarting from the rejection of her application for promotion to detective, Navajo police officer Bernadette Manuelito has accompanied her husband, Lt. Jim Chee, to Utah, where he plans to meet with Hosteen Desmond Grayhair and help persuade interested scientist Chapman Dulles to make a sizable donation to the Navajo Nation’s Fallen Officers Memorial Fund. On a solitary evening walk in the Valley of the Gods, Bernie is targeted by a truck that nearly runs her down shortly after she discove

THE BASTARD OF BEVERLY HILLS

The author, a film director, presents a brief but engaging and surprise-filled memoir of a man whose true identity was kept from him well into adulthood. The adopted son of Ray and Eleanor Moscatel, a Sephardic Jewish couple living in Beverly Hills, Moscatel was adopted after the tragic death of his parents’ natural son, Albert. Moscatel details how he had always been aware of the ambiguity of his origins (his parents at one point claimed was as a “test-tube baby”), and that it was only later i

GALLOP TOWARD THE SUN

Popular historian Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places, offers a kind of thought experiment at the outset: What might have happened if Tecumseh, the builder of a geographically extensive and ethnically diverse Indigenous confederacy, had been successful in keeping White settlers out of the Ohio River Valley and environs? After all, for a time, when he was a young war fighter, it looked as if the Native peoples might have been able to pull it off, having inflicted “the worst massac

COMEDY BOOK

“This is a love story,” writes Vulture senior editor Fox, invoking the famous quote from Season 2 of Fleabag. The author is a proud “member of the Seinfeld generation, a term I just made up to refer to the sort of millennial who grew up watching Seinfeld and, in turn, always knowing and caring about what goes into a stand-up’s comedy.” That passion for comedy led to this book, which “focuses on comedy made from 1990 through the early 2020s. This is the period in which millennials, and then Gen

HEAD FAKE

Mikey Cannon grew up in a racially diverse stretch of Los Angeles and played basketball in games where he was “the only white boy” (“I could set up plays like a pro”). Mikey was 15 years old when his mom died. A year later, he entered the Friedman Psychiatric Hospital suffering severe depression—a condition exacerbated by his dad’s tough love. His dad, a decorated high school basketball coach, considered Mikey his great disappointment. Now, at 25, Mikey has weathered two more hospital stints an

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES

Alma Cruz has had a successful career as a novelist and professor. Upon retiring from academia, she vows she’s done with writing as well. She wants most of all to return from the U.S. to her family’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and live quietly. But what to do with those boxes full of notes and manuscripts for the books she didn’t get around to writing? Alma buys a plot of land in a working-class neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. Before she builds a casita to live in, she builds a c

THE GOOD DAUGHTER SYNDROME

The author writes that her tumultuous relationship with her mother inspired her to write this book, which aims to help others “break free, guilt free” from dysfunctional dynamics. She defines a “Good Daughter” as a deferential woman with poor boundaries and little confidence and a “Difficult Mother” as a controlling, critical figure who’s impossible to please and may have a personality disorder or addiction issues. Difficult Mothers, she says, may have experienced shame and trauma that perpetua

BIRD NERD

Nyla Braun, unkindly dubbed “Encyclopedia Braun” by her classmates, is taking the spring birding tournament between Anderson Elementary’s City Birders and Penn Elementary’s Burb Birders very seriously. She’s determined to count the most birds and learn all the bird songs and calls, allowing her to leave Anderson “on a high.” Becoming obsessed with her interests isn’t new—but this time, she also wants to improve her social status by leading the City Birders to victory. Nyla’s dreams start to com

PONY CONFIDENTIAL

Twenty-five years after 12-year-old Penelope Marcus rode into the woods with Frank Ross, the owner of High Rise Farms, newly revealed evidence suggests that she bashed him to death. She’s arrested, extradited from California to New York, and uprooted from both Laus, her estranged husband, and Tella, the daughter who struggles with mental health issues. After her arrest, we meet the beloved pony she had been riding on that fatal day, who’s gone by so many names over the years—Houdini, Sequoia, O

WHISKEY TENDER

Taffa, a member of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the editor-in-chief of River Styx magazine and director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Like many Native people, she and her family have faced a concerted effort to remove them from the land, customs, and culture that are their inheritance. In the 1970s, the author’s parents made a pointed, if tortured, decision to leave their Quechan family to pursue economic security and some level of assimi

INSOMNIACS AFTER SCHOOL

Nakami’s high school’s now-defunct astronomy club is the subject of rumors involving unrequited love, tragic deaths, and subsequent hauntings, but Nakami doesn’t believe in ghosts. He just wants to find somewhere quiet to nap—he’s stuck in a cycle of insomnia that’s leaving him exhausted and bad-tempered. But since he isn’t scared of the supposedly haunted observatory, he’s pushed by his classmates to fetch some supplies from a storage cupboard located there. In the process, he discovers that i

MY PARENTS' MARRIAGE

The first novel for adults from author Brew-Hammond, set in the early 1970s, opens with 22-year-old Kokui Nuga celebrating the Christmas holiday at a hotel in Accra, Ghana. It is there that a server first catches her eye; when she comes back on New Year’s Eve, the two talk, and he introduces himself as Boris Van der Puye, who will soon head to the U.S. to attend a community college in Buffalo, New York. Despite the fact that his days in Ghana are coming to an end, the two date and fall in love,

WHAT WE'VE BECOME

In April 2018, 29-year-old Travis Reinking, “another angry white man with a gun,” drove from his home in Illinois to Nashville, where he opened fire on the late-night patrons of a Waffle House, most of them young, working-class Black and Latine people. Four died in the shooting, and Reinking eluded capture for a couple of days. When he was caught, it was revealed that he suffered from mental illness and had acted in a threatening manner before. Metzl, a Nashville-based doctor and sociologist an

THE WOOD AT MIDWINTER

In an afterword, Clarke tells readers how this story began as a BBC Radio 4 broadcast. Or, rather, she explains how her father’s neurodivergence, her beliefs about the consciousness of trees, and the music of Kate Bush begat a tale in which a young woman sees her future during a walk in a snowy forest. The author also explains how she was certain that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004) contained a footnote describing the city where her protagonist lives, but that it’s gone now—probably remo

QUEEN OF THE COURT

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Blais, author of In These Girls Hope Is a Muscle and other books, presents a vividly complete portrait of Alice Marble (1913-1990), one of the first celebrity champions in women's tennis, who also happened to be an actor, singer, writer, and civil rights pioneer. The author deftly shores up inconsistencies in the two memoirs that Marble penned while also utilizing that material and her own thorough research to form a definitive story. Blais includes a fascinati