A GOOD PERSON – Kirsten King

Kirsten King’s debut, A Good Person (Putnam 2026), opens with a bang: When I was ten years old, I nearly pushed a girl into a gorilla pen at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, Massachusetts. What follows is an unhinged first-person narration by a woman who, after being spurned by the man she was trying to make her boyfriend, drunkenly decides to hex him and ends up a suspect in his murder.

Make no mistake, Lillian is a narcissist with victim mentality and you don’t need the diagnosis to get there – the unreliable, unhinged first person narration readily points the way. The novel called Hooked to mind in how it dealt with obsession and also the role of social media.  (Lillian creates a fake profile to stalk and harass people.)

I’m not going to spoil it because it’s a fun, dark ride. Let’s just say I don’t want to be left alone with Kirsten King – she might frighten me. Ha.

SON OF NOBODY – Yann Martel

“You liked animals, too, Helen. They are dreams made of flesh.”

I loved Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. I read it while traveling to Cambodia back in 2003, and that paperback remains one of my most prized possessions. When I run my thumb over the red-dirt stained edges, I’m immediately transported back to when I read it. My memories bled into the story and have been stored there, and that makes my copy priceless.

I haven’t been nearly as smitten with Martel’s later works, but that didn’t stop me from eagerly anticipating his 2026 release.  In so many ways, Son of Nobody (W.W. Norton 2026) is a grown-up Life of Pi, and I loved it. It’s not like Life of Pi and it’s doubtful to have even remotely a fraction of the commercial appeal that novel had, but Son of Nobody is brilliant. Structurally, it’s similar to Life of Pi in that two stories are being told and that truth and fiction blend but the role of storytelling and narration in Life of Pi dealt with survival, whereas here, the blend of the two in the narration deals with loss. I also think Martel’s frequent use of animals in Son of Nobody isn’t just because the narrator is telling a story to his young daughter and “children like animals” – I think it’s a nod to Life of Pi and its roaring success.

Son of Nobody is set-up as a scholarly publication, with a “translated Greek epic” taking up the top half of the page and the story of the scholar unfolding in the “footnotes” at the bottom.  I really think this should be read in print to fully appreciate that setup.

Harlow Donne is our scholar, and he’s gone to Oxford where he is translating and interpreting an Ancient Greek epic about a commoner, Psoas, who leaves his wife and children behind to fight at Troy. Harlow has left his wife and daughter, Helen, to further his studies at the prestigious Magdalen College of Oxford University. (I studied Shakespeare at St. Edmund Hall of Oxford – perhaps that’s why this one settled in my bones as it did.)

As he translates the Greek epic, tragedy strikes.  Harlow begins to take certain liberties with his translation, bending a narrative that is so formed by grief, guilt, and his love for Helen. The outcome is a literary feat that has heart.  I would not be surprised if this novel sees a return of Martel to the Booker longlist.

ORANGE WINE – Esperanza Hope Synder

“Oranges can be sweet or sour,” I answered. “Like love.”

Country: Columbia
Title: Orange Wine
Author: Esperanza Hope Synder
Language: English
Translator: N/A
Publisher: Mareas Books 2025

Esperanza Hope Snyder’s Orange Wine was a bit of a disappointment. It opens with a bang – “While I was giving birth to Lucy, my husband, Alessandro, was lying in bed with my sister Isabel” – but it never really delivered. Ines is supposed to be partaking on a journey of “artistic  freedom and feminine awakening,” but she never seems fully developed enough for her journey to strike a chord. Despite all the pieces being there, they seemed a bit disjointed, and I never felt like I really saw Ines.

The novel is set in early twentieth century Columbia. Ines is clearly the pretty daughter, the doted-on baby of the family. The Catholic Church is a main character here, dictating much of what happens in Ines’s life, but again, there is just a disconnect with how the story is told. Ines marries a scoundrel who can’t keep it in his pants, and his relationship with Ines’s sister began before they were even married.  (I’d say the sisters are all awful here, but they’re painted with the same brush as Ines.)  Ines ends up with the man one of her other sister’s had her eyes on, despite being still married.  They begin a relationship.

There are some really good things here about the control over women by fathers, husbands, and the church, but the delivery just fall flat. What makes it even more unfortunate is that the novel was inspired by her grandparents.

Well. They can’t all be winners.  (But I am counting this on Tommi Reads the World!)

TAILBONE – Che Yeun

“The redness in her eyes reminded me of the lipstick she hadn’t worn in a while. I wanted to ask her out to the street vendors again, to eat skewers together, to become two jobless mindless dipshit girls wandering the city together. To feel how surely she took each footstep, how her heels smacked the ground. To be anything but who we were right now, shivering in our corridors and rooms so small that nothing ever got lost in them.”

Che Yeun’s Tailbone (Bloomsbury 2026) aches with anger, grief, want, and hunger – a bildungsroman that is as fragrant and bitter as a clementine peel.  Set in Seoul in 2008, the novel is framed by a growing financial crisis.  The novel follows an unnamed teenage girl who runs away from her alcoholic and abusive father and her compliant and backboneless mother. She escapes into the night, intent on disappearing, another girl lost to the bowels of Seoul.

Our unnamed narrator ends up at a cheap boarding house – full of single girls who work the streets and can’t afford anything nicer. She meets Juju, a decade older than her, and the two build a family of sorts. Our unnamed narrator craves connection and physical contact, and “tailbone to tailbone,” she gets this from Juju. When Juju finds her eating out of the trash, she insists a change be made. She teaches the teen how to take out loans in her mother’s name. Our narrator knows this action will but her mother at risk but the survival instinct is stronger than her guilt. The texts to her mother go unanswered.

The relationship with Juju is the most beautiful thing in the novel, particularly in the unspoken ways they care for each, the way they see each other, and the way they are lost together. I think we’ll see this book pop up on some longlists this year.

As a final note, this cover is absolutely perfect for the novel.

PYTHON’S KISS – Louise Erdrich

“Flesh would become stone and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird.”

Louise Erdrich’s Python’s Kiss (Harper 2026) is a collection of short stories written over the last 20 years, with a number having appeared previously, in slightly different form, in numerous publications. The thirteen stories each have an individual illustration done by Aza Erdrich Abe, making this truly a mother-daughter masterpiece.  I’ve said countless times before that reading Erdrich is like having coffee with an old friend – her writing is so familiar – and while short stories are not my favorite, that familiarity exists here as well.  If someone is interested in exploring Erdrich, who is quite possibly America’s greatest living author, this collection is a good starting point. Each story is inherently Erdrich.

My favorites of the collection include “Wedding Dresses,” a woman recounting her past loves through the dresses she’s stored; “Borsalino,” a ghost story of sorts; and “Amelia,” the story of a young girl’s relationship with an older man and his mysterious sister.

The collection has heart – marked as usual by Erdrich’s mastery at the mundane and the spiritual. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear it hiss and rattle.

Erdrich will forever be a recommendation here.

YESTERYEAR – Caro Claire Burke

“This is the last day of the life I imagined for myself.”

Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (Knopf 2026) is certainly one of the buzziest books of the year. Buzzy books can be hit or miss for me, so I was already approaching it from the standpoint that it probably wouldn’t live up to the hype. Then I read a scathing review that said it was horrible, and only middle-aged women would enjoy it. I guess I am indeed a middle-aged woman because I thoroughly enjoyed it; this is a book that begs for scholarly articles to be written about it AND a book that would make a fantastic poolside summer read. I literally read it in one sitting. What Burke accomplishes in her character development of Natalie and in the political, religious, and social commentary in this satirical thriller about a “social media influencer” more than elevates this novel into the lit fic realm, while also clinging to a familiar, commercial lit element. I can’t believe this is a debut. Burke is extremely talented or extremely lucky – either way, I’ll likely read her next novel.

Natalie is a tradwife influencer whose life isn’t exactly as she depicts on Instagram. (She has nannies and a producer, and there are workers on the farm.  I’ve not read interviews, but I have to think the drama around Ballerina Farms tickled Burke’s muse.)  One morning, Natalie wakes up in what seems her house, just different. She finds herself truly living the “olden days” way of life she had depicted on social media, with children she doesn’t really recognize (to be fair, she often didn’t recognize her children before she wakes up in the past) and she’s convinced she’s either been kidnapped or is being filmed. (Think The Truman Show but darker.)

I don’t want to spoil the novel, and you’ve likely seen summaries everywhere you turn, so I’ll just say that the book 100% lives up to the hype.  Don’t feel bad if you don’t like Natalie – you’re not supposed to.  If you’re going to read a buzzy book this summer, make it this one.

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF DUPREE – Nikesha Elise Williams

“Everything don’t need to be voiced. Everything don’t need to grow wings, ride the air, and visit folk you don’t know with stories they got no stake it.”

“She knew some deceptions deserved the dirt.”

In the vein of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois comes Nikesha Elise Williams’s The Seven Daughters of Dupree (Scout Press 2026) , a sweeping multigenerational, matrilineal epic. Jumping around in time, the novel travels from 1860-2024, following the matrilineal line of an enslaved woman named Sarah by her captors; her true name remains a mystery, her story before the slave pen mostly unknown, another stolen life, but for the root magic and the braids of shells and seeds that remained.

The woman bore the child of the white man who purchased her that day, a child named Emma that would be raised by Evangeline, a childless “mammy” who served as a midwife for Zephaniah Foster Dupree’s plantation. When Dupree dies, he leaves everything to Evangeline and Emma, death and guilt finding him at the same time. And so begins the Dupree line, the name of the slave-owner a mark forever a reminder.

The women are cursed by the woman Dupree called Sarah, cursed to bear only one girl child – no boys will live. Despite all the efforts to appease Spirit, she takes the boys. Emma has Jubilee, a woman who grows up and crosses the tracks, white passing until she gives birth to a child dark as the woman they called Sarah had been. Her husband kicks them both out, pretending to bury them and erasing them from the white side of town. Jubi names the baby Ruby. Ruby gives birth to Gladys, the pale skin returning to the line. Gladys gives birth to Nadia (before breaking the curse) and Nadia births Tati. It is Tati who tells the story of their line.

The emphasis on root magic, especially as related to the women’s “crowns” is beautifully done. Additionally, the use of braids as a map to freedom is depicted extremely well here, even with its horrific outcome for the woman they called Sarah.

It’s a remarkable novel, especially in how the secrets unfold and overlap and scream.

Read this book.

THE FOUNTAIN – Casey Scieszka

“She touches the barrel to her chin, to her temple, back to her chin. She braces herself for the shock of it. She hopes for the thousandth time, millionth time, for some relief.”

Emma Straub called Casey Scieszka’s debut novel, The Fountain (Harper 2026), “like Tuck Everlasting for grown-ups,” and that perfectly sums up this delightful novel.  It’s an easy read, a comforting familiarity in the story-telling that is reminiscent of books, including Tuck Everlasting, that framed my child and young adulthood. It’s the type of book that reminds me that I will always take a good story over literary tricks and books that think they are “smarter” than they are.

The year is 2014, and Vera Van Valkenburgh has returned home after 188 years. Something happened to her, her brother, and her mother when Vera was 26 and now, they cannot die.  She hasn’t seen her mother in decades, and she only speaks to her brother once a year at this point. Vera has returned to her family’s homestead to find the source of their immortality in the hopes of reversing it.  Imagine her surprise when her brother and another immortal who had known her brother’s wife show up as part of Fountain of Eternal Youth, LLC. They are also looking for the source, but not for the same reasons.

The book has whispers of a thriller that made me unable to put it down, but it’s the family and mortality of it that gives it its heartbeat.  The pacing gets a bit off at the end, with a rush to action and quick resolution, and there are certain “twists” that are spelled out plainly long before the twists, but I still loved everything about this book except for the cover (I like the cover – just not for THIS story.)

Read this book.

PARADISO 17 – Hannah Lillith Assadi

“Sufien had always been afflicted with this desire – no, it was a call, a call to fly, a call to fall.”

Recently longlisted for the Women’s Prize, Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 (Knopf 2026) is a beautiful portrayal home, family, and exile.  While the second half seems a bit more rushed and distant than the first, the writing is absolutely beautiful.  Based on the author’s note, she was inspired by her own father’s story, and we see that relationship loosely structured in Sufien and Layla.

Sufien’s story starts in Palestine in 1948. He spends the rest of his life trying to get back there, to go home to a place that only exists in his dreams and in death. 

This is Sufien’s story, but it is also the story of those that weave in and out of his life.  There are jinn and ghosts the venture forth with wisdom or beauty or hope. The women who come to meet him when he dies, the character of Tarique… it’s just so well thought out and beautiful. There is a lovely scene with Sufien recalling how his mother had brushed his forehead with her hand when he was ill – a familiar gesture that was recreated between him and Layla, and between Layla and her children.

I’d recommend this one.  I think it would be a fantastic book club book.

NONESUCH – Francis Spufford

“Tell me where all past years are…”

Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch (Scribner 2026) was one of my anticipated releases of 2026. I really enjoyed Light Perpetual (a novel that rewrote history, allowing five children killed in the 1944 London Woolworths bombing to survive and live through the 20th century), and I was looking forward to another “historical” novel. Spufford delivered and then some. I didn’t realize Nonesuch was the first of a duology until the last page, but I’m not mad about it – I want more Iris. Beginning in 1939 and going through the London Blitz, Nonesuch follows Iris Hawkins, a financial secretary who loves sex, pretty things, and the economy. She’s sarcastic, shrewd, and wicked smart. Often underestimated because she’s a “pretty girl,” not much slips by her unnoticed. Through a series of events, she ends up at a party where she meets Lall Cunningham, a beautiful, blonde fascist. The two have a near instant dislike for each other, which only grows when Iris leaves the party with Geoff, the young man previously enamored with Lall.  The decision to leave with Geoff ultimately leads to Iris being tasked with thwarting  a plot by magical, time-traveling fascists to change history to serve their purposes. With all the men rounded up, the Order is led by none other than Lall and these two women keep crossing paths. Meanwhile, Iris is also fighting falling in love, keeping her employer afloat during the chaos, and working as a firewatcher to protect the buildings as the Germans continue to bomb the city.

Nonesuch is a fantastic bit of historical literary fantasy, and I couldn’t put it down. At 481 pages, I was sad to see it end – that is until I saw “to be continued…” The follow-up, Arcady, is rumored to be published in 2027.

Read this book.