EVERY ONE STILL HERE – Liadan Ní Chuinn

Wrapped in a shroud of mystery and intrigue, Liadan Ní Chuinn’s short story collection Every One Still Here (FSG Originals 2026 – First American Edition) has created a bit of a literary buzz. The main question? Who exactly is Liadan Ní Chuinn? The author of the collection has elected to go anonymous, opting for a pseudonym that translates to “Grey Lady, Daughter of Wisdom.” We know they were born in 1998, and they are from the north of Ireland. They don’t give in-person interviews, wishing to stay anon and let the work speak for itself. It doesn’t speak – it SCREAMS.

The slim volume of six short stories opens with “We All Go,” a heartbreaking look at generational guilt, grief, and trauma. Jackie’s grief over the death of his father and his anger and grief over The Troubles take center stage. The bloody and violent decades long conflict is at the heart of the volume, with each story bruised with the past. And the author, born at the end of The Troubles, without a name or face, has become the voice of a generation, and it is that voice that screams.

My favorites of the collection are “We all Go” and “Russia,” the story of adopted siblings and a protest of bodies on display at a local museum. The collection concludes with “Daisy Hill,” where real life victims of The Troubles are named and remembered.

Read this book.

KIN – Tayari Jones

“Your first word was “mother,” and I think it will be the last one I say before they put me in the dirt.”

While I own An American Marriage, Kin (Knopf 2026)is my first Tayari Jones novel, and I must admit to being disappointed. I love Jones’s writing – it is familiar and welcoming, a rhythm to the storytelling that makes it positively captivating. And I love the characters and the settings. Arguably, I should have loved this book because I love the pieces. But I am disappointed.

Kin is the story of two “cradle friends,” Annie Kay and Vernice “Niecy” from Honeysuckle, Louisiana. (That cover is absolutely GORGEOUS.) Annie Kay’s mother abandoned her as a baby, and she is raised by her grandmother. Vernice’s mother is killed by her father when she is a baby, and she is raised by an aunt. The two motherless girls are best friends their whole lives, but they are very different individuals with very different paths.

Niecy heads to Spelman College in Atlanta in search of a better life and Annie heads to Memphis in search of her mama. The novel alternates their experiences, which are so vastly different. Despite these differences, or perhaps because they’ve known since the cradle they were born to walk different paths, their friendship remains intact and preserved in letters.

I liked Niecy. I think her storyline is interesting, but I loved Annie Kay and felt she carried the novel. I wish there had been more Annie Kay, and certainly more Annie and Niecy together. I felt positively cheated when Niecy went to Memphis, and we saw so little of it.

Despite being disappointed, I would still recommend it because there are a lot of phenomenal pieces here.

A GOOD ANIMAL – Sara Maurer

“A strange grave, the lion and the lamb together. In the end, I thought, the dirt gets everything.”

I read Sara Maurer’s debut novel, A Good Animal (St. Martin’s Press 2026) and I have “feelings” about it. If you don’t want it spoiled, stop now.  Seriously.  I’m going to spoil the stuffing out of this one.

There are a lot of pretty words that make up a pretty horrible novel. Maurer can craft a beautiful sentence, but her character development is sorely lacking. That aside, I found the plot left MUCH to be desired. I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more negative reviews. Did we read the same book? Let’s just say I’m really glad I didn’t buy this one. (We all know how I’ve been burned lately on these BOTM picks.)

It’s the mid-90s in a Midwest farm town when a good ole farm boy falls head over heels for the dark-haired beauty who is counting the days to graduation so she can escape. It’s a classic boy meets girl, two different worlds, coming of age story. The sheep and showing in 4-H is something I wish Maurer had highlighted a bit more because there are a lot of life lessons embedded in there that our dear Everett should have learned but they get lost in the sauce.

As far as our protagonist, Everett Lindt is not a good guy. He’d like for you to think so. Most readers would probably think so.  But he’s not. He’s a hot-headed, irresponsible, irrational, selfish, horny boy. He says he cares about the livestock.  He says he cares about Mary.  But does he? I mean really? He consistently makes decisions to the detriment of the things he loves. I could get around that if there had been more character building, more reflection from the adult Everett, but that just didn’t happen. Then there’s the SA, which is what that was. While he wasn’t “stealthing” and she knew he wasn’t wearing a condom, he’d agreed to pull out. And he didn’t. At least subconsciously, he wanted to get her pregnant to trap her; an idea put in his head by his best friend.

If that isn’t enough, he injects her with a livestock drug because he can’t afford the abortion she wants and finding a responsible adult just isn’t a possibility. (This was a real life issue in the 2000s, I think, with teens using readily available cattle drugs to perform “at home” abortions.) To make matters worse, the drug he used on her is intended for his family’s livelihood – the sheep have to be flushed and rebred in order for the lambs to be ready for showing, which is where the family gets their money. But again, Everett doesn’t think.

Mary deserved better. Fluff deserved better. Katie deserved better. Everett’s mom (who had some of the best parts of the novel – her hands? Come on!) deserved better.

And I am in the minority here, but I don’t recommend this one.

GUNK – Saba Sams

Gunk (Knopf 2026), Saba Sams’s debut novel, is the sort of novel that will likely win prizes. It is also the sort of novel that I don’t find enjoyable. There’s nothing “wrong” with the novel. It’s well-written. It has a beginning, middle, and end. Sams clearly has talent. But it just never “clicked” for me, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about anyone or anything that was happening. I don’t hate it; I’m just indifferent.  Honestly, I’d almost rather hate it.

What I do hate is that cover.  I can get around the novel bearing the name of the sticky, booze-soaked and cocaine-laced student club that Jules’s ex-husband owns and she runs. But that cover? It makes zero sense.  The UK cover isn’t much better, tbh, but I don’t hate that one.

Quick and dirty summary (because I don’t care), Jules likes to “take care” of folks. She wants kids. She did not get pregnant during her five-year marriage to a drug addict, and, in a rather self-defeatist move, just assumes it’s because of her. (But she doesn’t actually see a doctor or seek options.) After the divorce, she still takes care of Leon, her ex, running his bar and doing exactly the type of “mothering” she thinks his own mother does too much of. Meanwhile, he hires young students to sleep with, does a lot of drugs, and hopes Jules turns a profit. When he hires 18-year-old Nim, Jules is drawn to her. That girl needs mothering. Nim sleeps with Leon, and, of course, gets pregnant. She doesn’t want the baby and offers it to Jules, who wants to be a mother. Not adoption or surrogacy. No. Nim doesn’t want a social worker involved. As a same-sex partner in name only. It’s an odd dynamic between Nim, Jules, and Leon. I just didn’t care.

There are some interesting things here about how we repeat the patterns of our parents and how we can redefine family, but again, I didn’t care.

Read this book.

Or not.

I don’t care.

But that cover?  Still hate it. (Would have LOVED it with a different story.)

I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR – Bsrat Mezghebe

“Women were at the mercy of those who sired them, those who married them, and those they birthed.”

Bsrat Mezghebe’s  debut, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For ( Liveright Publishing 2026), is a charming novel about three interconnected Eritrean women, now living in DC, in different stages in their lives.

Lydia is 13 and has no memories of Eritrea or her father, a freedom fighter who died during the decades long struggle for independence. Her world is turned upside down when she’s kicked out of her bedroom when her cousin, Berekhet, arrives from Ethiopia to follow his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. Her cousin’s father and her mother, Elsa, don’t much get a long but when he asked for her to make room for Berekhet, she did. Because that’s what family does.

Elsa is a former rebel fighter, one of the few women fighters now in the States. She, along with many other Eritreans, sells hot dogs to tourists. She works hard to give Lydia a good life, and she refuses to talk much about her past. When Lydia inquires about her father’s family, Elsa says little other than he was a brave man.

Mama Zewdi is the husbandless and childless matriarch of the Eritrean community in DC, and she cares deeply for Lydia and Elsa. After years of being stonewalled when asked about Lydia’s father, Mama Zewdi decides to take matters into her own hands.

With Eritrea on the cusp of independent, secrets refuse to stay quiet any longer.

This is very much a “time and place” novel, both in the May – August 1991 time frame and the DC Eritrean community. Despite a rather rushed (and predictable) and not as developed ending, I enjoyed it.

OUR NUMBERED BONES – Katya Balen

“I am failing. I want to go home. But not that home. Home to the past. I am so stupid that it burns. But not hot enough.”

“stories and soil change and stay the same”

Katya Balen’s first adult novel, Our Numbered Bones (HarperVia 2026), is a 237-page gut punch; the ache in the pages weeps and bleeds out, settling on the reader with the weight of loose dirt. This one got under my skin and in my bones. As someone who suffered from infertility and struggled mentally following a miscarriage, I felt like Balen had peeled my skin back to show those bones. It’s so well done, but man, did it hurt.

This may be a spoiler, so you should stop now if you don’t want it spoiled. I don’t really think it’s a spoiler because I think it’s pretty apparent early on, but here’s your chance.

The novel follows Anna, a writer who is descending into madness following the stillbirth of her daughter. Following some light prodding by her editor and the encouragement of her husband, JP, she goes to a secluded cabin for a writer’s retreat.  While there, she stumbles upon two men who have uncovered a body. She is fascinated by the body, believing it initially to be a statue, and she wonders who buried it in the bog. It’s not a statue, but the body of a woman dated back to the Iron Ages.  She joins the team of archaeologists who are doing the dig, telling them she is a writer. They want her to tell the dead woman’s story.

That’s the crux of the storyline, but where this novel excels is in Anna’s rapid descent into madness. She becomes as obsessed with the woman as she had recently been with various ways to die. The novel is stabbed with prose often akin to ramblings of a woman who would tear the yellow wallpaper if there was any. (iykyk)

Anna is forced to face her past, including the death of her daughter and her mother’s dementia, in order to find her “story.”  The role of the archaeologist is a bit on the nose – we’re all relics, are we not?  The archaeologists even reference King on stories as artifacts. (The exact quote is: Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.”) But I did really enjoy that framework.

This is a novel that is best read in one sitting to best appreciate how Balen captures the grief and madness and makes the reader one with it.

Read this book.

SAOIRSE – Charleen Hurtubise

“The past can haunt someone else now, she thinks, and turns her hand back to this drawing of Daithi, back to the things in her new life which can be named.”

Saoirse (Celadon 2026) is Charleen Hurtubise’s US debut. A blend of domestic fiction and literary suspense thriller, the novel is told in shifting timelines, fragmented memories, and Saoirse’s art with Sarah/Saoirse trying to outrun a past that seems hellbent on tracking her down.

When Sarah Roy is a teenager, she steals the identity of an Irish nanny, Sarah/Sasa Walsh, and flees the United States. On her flight to Ireland, she meets Paul Byrne.  After a childhood of being used and abused by her stepfather and folks he owed money, Paul seems a welcomed relief. But Sarah quickly learns that there are many different ways men can hurt and control.

She falls in love with Daithi, a friend of the family and Paul’s biggest rival in school, but their relationship is stunted by the situation with Paul and Sarah’s past. It is Daithi who names her Saoirse, and the name sticks. Sarah Roy becomes Sarah Gagneux (her stepfather’s name) becomes Sarah Walsh becomes Saoirse Byrne. Each name brings another lie, another hurt, another something to run from. Saoirse, meaning freedom, is the only thing that is truly her’s, and Daithi gave it to her.

As with any thriller, I don’t want to spoil this novel. Suffice it to say, Paul is not a good guy, and the past never stays buried for long. Paul’s sister, Vivienne, may be one of my most hated characters of the year.

The novel is an extremely quick read, coming in at 243 pages, and it is well-paced despite covering several years.  The past being revealed through Saoirse’s art (the bottle of lavender, the chapstick, a bridge…) is pretty brilliant, calling to how we store memories and how we lock certain things away.

Definitely recommend this one.

EATING ASHES – Brenda Navarro (translated by Megan McDowell)

“I realized that there was no truth, just points of view.”

“…it seems that we copy ourselves and repeat the same patterns – I guess that’s what being a family is.”

Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Liveright Publishing Corporation 2026, first published in Mexico by Editorial Sexto Piso 2021) isn’t so much a gut punch as it is repeat jabs of grief and guilt, each section brief and landing with precision. Sometimes there is a disconnect in translated works – not here.  This book (and translation) is fantastic.

I don’t always love an unnamed narrator, primarily because sometimes it seems less intentional and lazy, and when it is intentional, it doesn’t always work. It is very much intentional in Eating Ashes and had the narrator been named, the novel would not have had the same bite. The novel opens with our narrator describing her younger brother’s suicide and how she had not seen the body fall.  This image (and sound( that she did not see (or hear) haunts her as she battles grief tinged with guilt and anger. Diego’s death forces her to confront trauma -generational, situational, cultural – a collective trauma that was unique to her and her brother that he left her alone to deal with.

The narrator and her brother are Mexican. Their mother leaves them with their grandparents when Diego is a baby, heading to Spain and promising to get the paperwork together to send for them. Years pass, and she never does. This sense of abandonment and a longing for home serves as the framework for the siblings’ interactions with their mother and each other when they get to Madrid. While the reader sees the loneliness of the narrator’s migration, we only get bits and pieces of the impact this had on teenage Diego.

Our narrator returns to Mexico with her brother’s ashes and is forced to face another truth – the home she’d missed so much is no longer the same; not only is there no Deigo, the homeland she remembered is no longer safe.

Eating Ashes is a story of migration, sacrifices, guilt, grief, and the ties that bind.  It is well crafted, well translated, and extremely powerful.

Read this book.

REBEL ENGLISH ACADEMY – Mohammed Hanif

“First you get accused of something you haven’t done. Then you do it… He was called a rebel and then he rebelled.”

Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy (Grove Press 2026) is another novel I fully expect to see making the rounds during awards season. Hanif’s voice, the sharpness of that satire, renders this book as a big belly laugh with sharp, blood-soaked teeth; not only can it bite, it already has.  And that is attributed solely to Hanif’s storytelling, which is reminiscent of Heller’s Catch-22.  (With military satire, it’s hard to avoid the comparison. It would seem A Case of Exploding Mangoes boasts even more of a comparison.)

Rebel English Academy is set in OK Town in 1979, opening with the execution of Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. What follows is a violent period of corruption, martial law, and survival.  And it’s hilarious. Don’t misunderstand me – there are horrific things that happen in this novel, including rape, murder, and torture, but how Hanif presents them, how his characters navigate these experiences, is what makes this novel brilliant.  It’s survival and dissent wrapped in a wry humor that peels back your eyelids and says LOOK.

The novel follows a cast of interconnected characters. Sir Baghi, a former rebel, teaches English at the “Rebel English Academy,” a course of instruction praised for its successes. He is housed in the mosque where his childhood friend, Molly, is a popular religious leader. Baghi has promised the government that he will no longer be involved in politics. Sabiha, daughter of rebels and his former student, seeks safety at the mosque following her house being burnt down with her husband inside and speculation that she killed him. Captain Gul (a fake name because he’s a spy – there are three Guls in the novel by the time you reach the last page, making his character even more absurd)  has been sent to OK Town as a punishment for botching his job in the hanging of Bhutto. He is tasked with addressing the protests and rumors that Bhutto still lives, but he is frequently distracted by his sexual desires with Sabiha soon catching his eye.

The best sections are Sabiha’s “homework” sections. Baghi has informed her if she’s going to stay there, she should practice her English. Her story unfolds in “homework” essays, and it’s not an easy story. Sabiha brings a gun with her to the mosque, which Baghi quickly takes, scoffing about Chekhov’s gun theory. Spoiler – the gun is fired before the novel ends.

The novel tackles education, religion, politics, sexuality, and the power of all four all the while grinning at you with its bloody teeth.  I really enjoyed it.

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME – Ryan Collett

“You’re just a bunch of dust mites at the end of the day, so what if one of you flies through the window.”

I wanted to love Ryan Collett’s George Falls Through Time (William Morrow 2026), I really did, but I feel a touch misled. I thought the novel would be full of humor and whimsy, a warm hug of a story about a gay man who time travels from 2026 to the 1300 while walking dogs in Greenwich Park and falls in love with a servant named Simon who shows him how to love and be loved, and he slays a dragon because he’s named George, and the patron of Saint of England, Saint George, is kind of known for slaying a dragon. I thought it would be cute, and the blurb didn’t really alert me that this was not going to be cute and whimsical.

This is more introspective literary fiction than a whimsical time travel novel.  I was disappointed, and I am going to blame the cover. It’s well-written. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a perfectly fine book.  I just couldn’t stand one more page of self-loathing George; in either 2026 or 1300, he was insufferable in every timeline.

The most interesting part of the novel was the dragon and how he’d leave refuse from the future in his wake -microwaves, plastic bottles, parts of a car.  This and King Edward’s investigation into the dragon and George’s stories of being a time traveler are by far the best parts. The ending is rushed, but fully depicts that circular “history repeating itself” notion as well as the idea that nothing is ever new.  As the dragon says, there is no future – only the present and the presenter.

I liked Simon, despite his early aggression, and I felt he deserved much better.  I also liked the dogs, which might be why I disliked George so much – he gave zero shits about those dogs and honestly, that says a lot about a person.

Don’t read this book if you want fun and whimsy. If you want introspective, woe-is-me musings from a man so full of self-loathing that you’ll want to vomit, go ahead; at least it’s a quick read.