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Contemporary Fiction Views: New books! [1]

['Nanny Ogg', 'Thom Hartmann', 'Black Kos']

Date: 2026-08-04  

It’s primary night so here are some of this week’s new fiction titles while awaiting results in races you’re concerned about. Links are to The Literate Lizard, online bookstore of Readers and Book Lovers’ Debtors Prison, and descriptions are by the publishers.

Also, today is the date on which Ray Bradbury’s story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is set.

Reading is resistance. Let’s do our part.

Kitten by Stacey Yu

Katie is far from home and fresh out of college, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, and all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend James make decisions for them both. It doesn’t help that she’s no longer speaking to her mother, who resents her for leaving Little Rock. Or that her roommate has abruptly moved out of their New York City apartment. But when James takes Katie on vacation to his family’s seaside house, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and Katie discovers a sudden, strange, and giddy sense of connection.

Silver doesn’t mind that Katie can’t seem to get a job, hold her own at dinner parties, or make amends with her mother. Silver, who gets to lie around all day, misbehave spectacularly, be cute, gross, and still get fed, seems to have the life Katie increasingly longs for. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack.

Etna by Paul Yoon

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette’s life is nothing like what she’d planned. She’s a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

Burnside by Devyn Defoe

The Bowl is a strange place: Surrounded by abandoned almond orchards filled with feral children and neighboring towns that keep burning down, the polluted, riverside city has a decades-old web of serial killers and missing people.

Our unnamed narrator, a bookseller at a used bookstore, and her roommate September, a waitress at a cowgirl-themed breasturant, spend their days avoiding their deadbeat boyfriends, commuting to class on the raccoon-infested ‘rat bus,’ and hanging out at wine bars with their friend Claudia Thursday. But after September has an encounter with a local homeless man named Burnside, she becomes terrified that he’s stalking her. Soon, the entire town has turned on Burnside, convinced that he is responsible for the violence, precarity, and wildfires that surround them.

Majestic Hills by Dawn Turner

Tired of the daily drama in his emergency room, Dr. Langdon Blaque is in search of a place where he can leave the world behind. He loves his job and has no delusions about the suburbs being perfect, but he wants peace and quiet. His wife Josephine, a lawyer, grew up listening to her father’s stories about the Jim Crow South, and sundown towns. She prefers the city. Still, she agrees to move with the caveat that they stay for a year and reassess.

The tight-knit, predominantly white group of neighbors in Majestic Hills initially welcomes them with open arms. But beneath the veneer of privileged harmony, tensions simmer. When a horrifying crime rocks the community, the illusion of safety is shattered, and Josephine and Langdon find themselves at the heart of a brewing storm that pits neighbor against neighbor, exposes deeply ingrained prejudices, and threatens to implode into violence.

Queen Mab by Emily McBride

There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?

Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.

Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?

Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?

Enough About Love by Herve Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter

Anna and Louise could be sisters, but they don’t know each other. They are both married with children, and for the most part, they are happy. On almost the same day, Anna, a psychiatrist, crosses paths with Yves, a writer, while Louise, a lawyer, meets Anna’s analyst, Thomas. Love at first sight is still possible for those into their forties and long married. But when you have already mapped out a life path, a passionate affair can come at a high price. For our four characters, their lives are unexpectedly turned upside down by the deliciously inconvenient arrival of love. For Anna, meeting Yves has brought a flurry of excitement to her life and made her question her values, her reliable husband, and her responsibilities to her children. For Louise, a successful career woman in a stable and comfortable marriage, her routine is uprooted by the youthful passion she feels for Thomas.

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver

A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.

The Seekers of Deer Creek by Thao Thai

Aside from the fact they are sisters, Vivi and Calla Nguyễn have little in common.

Vivi, the eldest, lives an orderly and predictable life. She works as an art conservator at a museum in Chicago, carefully preserving pieces of the past, all the while refusing to examine her own dark history.

Calla leads a much bolder, if occasionally reckless, existence. She’s an accomplished artist with a flair for the dramatic, charming and intriguing everyone she meets. She’s also a recovering addict, constantly causing Vivi to worry.

Months after the two fall out in the wake of their father’s death, Calla appears on the steps of the museum with a sketch and a letter she found in their father’s belongings. The sketch is an exact copy of Blue Mirror, a striking painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. Lý. In the letter, Lý writes about a mysterious lost work of art. Calla is convinced it is meant for their family, and that it was their father’s deathbed wish for her and Vivi to find it together. Intrigued yet reluctant to follow her capricious sister, Vivi must decide whether she’s willing to face or shut the door to the past.

Appraisals by Claire Boyles

Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado—a place where industrial farming reigns supreme—when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother Flora grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.

Soft Spots by Leila Renee

After miraculously securing a teaching job at a dysfunctional high school, loner Robin moves to South Bend, Indiana, where she’s paired with an eerily perfect roommate: Naomi. Freshly estranged from her abusive parents, Robin obsesses over two absurd goals: to be the best teacher at the school, despite never having taught, and to become best friends with Naomi, who could not be more her opposite. Meanwhile back home, Robin’s brother must decide between being loyal to his sister or their parents.

Just as Robin grows closer to her students and Naomi, she receives earth-shattering news from her brother. Desperate to cope, Robin redoubles her efforts to befriend Naomi, spiraling even deeper into obsession and self-sabotage. Everything comes to a head when one of Robin’s many bad choices come back to bite her, and she must confront the limits of forgiveness, the weight of memory, and the true cost of estrangement.

Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley

Mary has started remembering things that she knows aren’t real—but the events feel exactly like her actual memories. Who is she, if she can’t be sure she knows her own past? A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they’d really happened to her. But she knows they’re too wild to be possible. Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.

Yñiga by Glenn Diaz

One woman’s reluctant trek through a forest of ghosts and the aftermath of empire in modern Philippine life.

Yñiga Calinauan leads an ordinary life in Manila—until the day a retired army general wanted for the murder of peasants is captured across the street from her house. Days later, her unassuming neighborhood is burned to the ground in what some whisper is retaliation. With nowhere else to go, she returns with beloved cat Jestoni to M—, the small fishing village of her childhood and her best chance at regaining the quiet life she lost. But the terror Yñiga thought she escaped in the city still stalks her, forcing her and Jestoni into the nearby forest of both trees and trauma that has long haunted her family. For Yñiga, there is no escape, only resistance.

Whyteface by A. Igoni Barrett

Four years ago, a young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass. Now well established with a good job, going by Frank Whyte and living in a nicely appointed house in the capital city of Abuja, he is ready to set off on a real vacation—his first trip outside Nigeria.

As Frank travels to Amsterdam, Oslo, and Milan, he finds himself, for the first time in years…blending in. His skin is not in the least remarkable. In Amsterdam he befriends his Airbnb host, a well-meaning but often misguided liberal Dutch woman. He also meets a Nigerian expat living in America whom he is both delighted to see but who vexes him. In Oslo, he intervenes when a charismatic Kenyan writer is the victim of a racist taxi driver. In Milan he comes upon a possibly distant relative, who has survived a treacherous migrant’s journey. He quickly realizes that he feels most Nigerian when he is outside of Nigeria, and he begins to wonder what it might take to be treated, simply, as human.

Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!” is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved.

Memorial de Ayres by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been hailed as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, a progenitor of modernism and a masterful ironist known for his inspired critiques of nineteenth-century Brazil. Memorial de Ayres is his final novel, released just two months before his death in 1908.

In your hands is the diary of Counselor Ayres, a retired diplomat now dedicated to chronicling his day-to-day happenings during the waning years of the Brazilian Empire. Ayres will be the first to tell you that he lives a simple life: the most eventful part of his week is lunch with his sister Rita or a visit to their family cemetery.

But a new love interest—and a bet with Rita—pushes Ayres from the confines of his quiet routine into the cheery home of the Aguiars, an older couple who, like him, are childless. Soon, the merriment is permeated by whispers that the power of the empire is fading—the end of slavery draws near. As Brazil’s well-to-do ponder the momentous changes afoot over card games and afternoon coffee, Ayres finds himself suddenly unsure of his place in the shifting milieu: “Everything in this world goes in fashions, except for the stars and me.”

Site Fidelity: Stories by Claire Boyles

Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse.

Slums of Paradise by Samiha Hoque

In 1970s Sylhet, eleven-year-old Sumaya is the daughter of a wealthy Bengali aristocrat who lives unaware of the Liberation War against West Pakistan and the cost of independence she will soon pay. In the same city, fifteen-year-old Murshed lives without hope for the future, knowing that his father’s religious and political stance has painted his family as razakar—traitors—a death sentence if West Pakistan loses the war. Then, one day, their paths cross and a single encounter upends both their lives forever.

Forty years later, Sumaya’s third daughter, Hinna, and Murshed’s eldest son, Burhaan, lock eyes at a family gathering. The two, reunited flames, live vastly different lives: Hinna has grown up in America, far from the chaos of the war but stuck in an endless cycle of tradition. Burhaan has lived his entire life in Sylhet, attempting to start over despite the never-ending vengeance against razakar families. But drawn to each other as they are, they soon find out that plans for Hinna’s future are already in motion.

Connected by the far reaches of tyranny and tradition, these families discover what’s found and lost—dreaming of a Bangladesh free from dictatorship and holding the silent hope of paradise.

On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis, translated by Katharine Halls

In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.

Serenade for Nadia by Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is asked to look after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university’s invitation. He is charming yet distant at first, but Maya gradually learns of the terrible circumstances that brought him to Istanbul sixty years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him.

Inspired by the 1942 Struma disaster, in which a shocking betrayal by Allied forces led to the deaths of nearly 800 refugees fleeing the Holocaust.

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