Johnson debuts with a deeply satisfying multigenerational saga of a Black family. Evelyn was brought up in 1940s Atlanta with the expecation that she succeed. As a young mother and widow in the 1970s, her success in academia comes at the expense of her daughter, Charlotte, who only feels her mother’s coldness and resentment. When Evelyn erupts at the news of 18-year-old Charlotte’s unexpected pregnancy in 1974, she flees home and builds a new life in rural Tennessee. Charlotte struggles with alcoholism and the effects of assorted bad decisions, which have an acidic effect on her daughter, Corinna, who doesn’t feel accepted by her mother. Searching for love, Corinna has a brief relationship with a high school football star and becomes pregnant at 17. She vows to provide her daughter, Camille, with the love she yearned for as a girl, but soon becomes overwhelmed and makes the difficult decision to send Camille to Evelyn, who is now a professor at Howard University. Johnson brings new life to the age-old theme of a family’s cyclical dysfunction, and the narrative is packed with stunning self-reflections, such as Charlotte’s reason for naming her daughter after the song “Corrina, Corrina” (“It had always made her sad, like looking at this baby”). This is a revelation. Agent: Susan Ginsburg, Writers House. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

McCann (All Different Kinds of Free) delivers an engrossing family drama stacked with secrets and regrets. In 1990 Phoenix, Ariz., community college student April Parson comes across a news article about a 35-year-old cold case that’s been reopened in Bitter Rapids, Minn., her father’s hometown. She shows the article to her father, Frank, and points out how the quilt wrapped around the body in the accompanying photo resembles one in a 1950s photo of him as a child with his mother, Evelyn. When Evelyn learns about these developments, she insists they return to Bitter Rapids, saying only that she wants to “set the record straight.” During the family’s trip to Minnesota, flashbacks to the 1950s reveal family secrets: Evelyn, who was widowed during WWII, had an abusive second husband, Art Specht; Frank had a baby brother, Denny; and Frank and Denny were once rescued from drowning by a Black Ojibwe convict named Maakade Carpenter, who was out on work detail. More revelations ensue about the relationship between Maakade and Evelyn, Art’s sexuality, Denny’s fate, and the identity of the body in the newspaper photo. The plot moves briskly, and the author adds in rich historical context, with references to Indian boarding schools and the Lavender Scare. There’s plenty here to hold readers’ attention. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Pitts (The Last Thing You Surrender) returns with the page-turning story of a family caught up in the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights movement. Adam Simon, a college student from New York City, arrives in Selma, Ala., to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march unbeknownst to his parents, Thelma, a Black attorney, and George, a white minister. After Adam is badly beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he winds up in the hospital and out of touch with his parents. His mother enlists her brother, Luther Hayes, with whom she witnessed their parents’ lynching 40 years earlier, to find him. When Luther unexpectedly encounters the man responsible for their parents’ killings, who happens to be residing in the same senior home as George’s father, he falls off the wagon, and his drunken antics bring more trouble to the family. The novel’s strength lies in Pitts’s atmospheric rendering of 1965 Alabama replete with scenes of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders marching with a “great procession” past the “shy, solemn” gaze of children and the “flinty” young Black men who show up to support them. Historical fiction fans ought to snatch this up. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

A Texas teen tries to rescue his crush from a Branch Davidians–like cult in Johnston’s gripping sophomore novel (after Remember Me Like This). In 1993 Waco, rebellious 14-year-old Roy, son of the local sheriff, meets California girl Jaye Carroll and falls hard. Jaye’s mother, Marie, brought her there after meeting Perry “Lamb” Cullen at a gun expo and agreeing to join his flock of disciples in Texas. Jaye, who’s now living with Marie on Lamb’s compound, is skeptical of his doomsday prophesies and unnerved by his stockpiling of weapons. When she tells Roy about the obsessive attention Lamb pays to her, Roy enlists his dad’s help to rescue her, setting the stage for a Shakespearean tragedy of star-crossed lovers. The propulsive plot, which builds to a violent raid on the compound following the sheriff’s discovery of Lamb’s arsenal, is juxtaposed with colorful excerpts from a present-day podcast called On the Lamb, featuring interviews with former cult members and their loved ones including Jaye’s father, who rails about the “pissant pedophile” who “cost me a family.” Amid the plethora of stories about cults, this stands out. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Frustrations large and small beset the Northern Irish characters in Carlson’s dry-witted and appealing fifth collection (after The Raptures). In “A Certain Degree of Ownership,” an unnamed woman encounters a family with a baby on the rarely used public beach she’s come to consider her own. When the baby begins to crawl, unnoticed, into the sea, the narrator thinks, “I do not want the baby to crawl into the sea. But I do not think it is my job to stop the baby crawling into the sea.” “Fair Play” centers on a Londoner staying on his wife’s family’s land in Ulster during the Covid-19 pandemic. He takes his two sons to Bouncy Bob’s, the Belfast equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese, and panics when they disappear in a tube slide and the attendants show no concern (“This place is hungrier than other places,” he thinks. “It will never let go of its own”). Other entries probe the region’s folk magic practices, as in “Tinged,” where a friend of the narrator’s family casts a spell to heal their ailing cow. Some stories end before making the most of their provocative premises, but for the most part Carson holds the reader’s attention with her singular observations and turns of phrase. This is worth a look. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

Riggs’s lusty first novel follows an aspiring singer-songwriter in Nashville’s booze-soaked music scene during the mid-2000s. Shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan, Alison “Al” Hunter takes a job working the door at a hip Nashville club called The Venue. On the surface, she seems to be having a good time scoring drinks, drugs, sex, and guest list spots, but underneath she’s full of melancholy. Her old college flame Nick, lead singer of a buzzy new band, has pretty much moved on from her, and she’s struggling to write songs after a disastrous open-mic performance a month earlier. The plot thickens when Nick shows up at The Venue one stormy night, though it leads to a predictable denouement concerning Al’s determination to find her own voice. Riggs is best in her sardonic depictions of her protagonist’s milieu, delineating Nashville’s desperate strivers, hipster know-it-alls, and slick industry insiders, all of whom are outnumbered by the huge crowds that show up for cover bands (“People are suckers for nostalgia, for the VH1 days, for getting drunk with a purpose on an otherwise dreary night”). Music lovers will devour this. Agent: Andrianna deLone, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

In Dyer’s rich debut, a woman reckons with her family’s legacy of Appalachian mountain magic. After Lee Carnell splits from her husband, Cooper, she and her adolescent children, Meredith and Cliff, return from California to Craw Valley, the homestead she left 20 years earlier. Under the guidance of her grandmother Belva, who is respected by many of the locals as a witch woman, Lee reacquaints herself with “the power of the land,” which her family and others have channeled for healing purposes. The magic has a vengeful side, too, as Lee learns after Belva casts a spell meant to thwart the lust of a man named Joseph Hall who was caught ogling Meredith’s friend. After Joseph is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Lee confronts her estranged mother Redbud for answers about the scope of the magic’s power. Dyer raises the stakes further when Cooper shows up to try to lure the kids away and Lee rekindles a high school romance. The ease with which Lee and others master the magic feels contrived, but Dyer fortifies the tale with a well-timed surprise and gratifying reconciliations between her characters. It’s catnip for fans of homespun tales of rural America. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA. (Aug.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that the story takes place in the Ozark mountains.

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

In the muted second volume in a projected pentalogy (following Aubrey McKee), Pugsley depicts his 20-something protagonist’s new life in Toronto, where he’s moved from his native Halifax to begin graduate work in inorganic chemistry. Drama ensues when Gudrun Peel, a vivacious poet Aubrey met at a book party, shows up drunk at his apartment, slumps onto his couch, and unloads her fear that if she lands the book publicist job she’s just interviewed for, she’ll turn into a corporate drone. She accepts the job offer despite her reservations, and the two begin dating. As Aubrey tags along with Gudrun to book launches, he considers a literary life of his own and starts writing plays. The novel has an inventive structure, beginning with a short story set sometime in the future about Aubrey working as a writer on a sketch-comedy show and ending with a play by Aubrey about his wealthy friend Quincy, who’s described as the “hero in this period of my education” but is only briefly mentioned earlier in the narrative. Unfortunately, the substance of Aubrey’s education never quite materializes amid all the formal pyrotechnics. It’s Knausgård lite. Agent: Jennifer Hollyer, Jennifer Hollyer Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

A grieving 20-something woman struggles to work her way up the ranks of a late-night comedy show at the height of the #MeToo movement in Shook’s endearing sophomore effort (after If We’re Being Honest). Presley Fry, an assistant talent booker, enjoys chatting with her work crush Adam about romantic comedy tropes and the city’s stand-up scene, even though he often talks about other women. Though Presley has a toehold in her dream career, she makes minimum wage and has little prospect of a promotion or raise. She got the job through her late mother’s friend Susan Clark, whose husband, Tom, is an executive at the network. After Susan’s life is upended by allegations that Tom sexually harassed his colleagues, she reaches out to Presley with an invitation to dinner, and the two women begin an unlikely friendship. Some of the plot turns are predictable, but readers will find it easy to root for Presley as she tires of being in the friend zone with Adam and pounds the pavement in search of a comedian whose rising star she might hitch her wagon to. This charms. Agent: Andrianna deLone, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink

This vibrant collection of new and selected works from Watson, who died in 2020, showcases the author’s wry humor and taste for the bizarre. “Dying for Dolly” follows an ex-con who releases a novelty song about Dolly Parton and scores a spot opening for the singer. “The Zookeeper and the Leopard” concerns a zoo manager who sets a leopard free to antagonize the town’s chief animal control officer, whom he suspects of sleeping with his wife. Both stories draw sharp portraits of men in over their heads, while “Eykelboom,” written in third-person plural from the perspective of a close-knit Southern town, depicts the travails of a boy who moves there from “some crude and faceless Yankee state” and struggles to fit in. The title story begins in the register of a clinical report on a family’s car accident, which killed the father and maimed the teenage daughter, before swerving into an intriguing stew of gossip and speculation about the fate of the mother, who disappeared from the scene of the crash and may have been driving. In “Terrible Argument,” previously collected in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a couple’s pet dog observes their incessant bickering. This accomplished volume puts Watson’s impressive tonal and stylistic range on full display. It’s sure to satisfy fans and newcomers alike. (July)

Reviewed on 05/17/2024 | Details & Permalink