May 9, 2026
A grieving young woman in the 1980s Midwest longs to escape her life and complete her dead uncle’s unfinished computer game; another young woman dreams of avoiding the legacy of her political terrorist mother; Ecuadorian friends seek to break away from their lives by altering their consciousness at an Andean music festival; a San Diego housewife steps out of her life through an affair that turns deadly; and one of our most treasured writers begins afresh with a standalone novel that will capture your heart.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Things We Never Say
By ELIZABETH STROUT
Published by RANDOM HOUSE
Strout introduces us to new characters in her latest novel, but you will soon feel they are as recognizable as so many that came before. Take Artie, a well-loved 57-year-old Massachusetts history teacher whose life from the outside looks totally satisfying (good job, good marriage, etc.). Despite the jolly friends and comfort of his life, Artie begins to contemplate free will and how we fail to communicate. “All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes….” Soon, “he found himself living a double life.” Artie’s secrets begin to guide his path in this heartfelt story that becomes yet another marvel from one of our finest examiners of the human condition.
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A Little Bit Bad
By CASSANDRA NEYENESCH
Published by SUMMIT BOOKS
Neyenesch has written a cheeky debut featuring a seemingly normal San Diego housewife who tends toward the obsessive (she constantly watches true-crime mysteries) and falls for her neighbor’s roofer. Their mad affair presents more than a few problems. There is a fifteen-year age gap; Perdita is a pregnant social worker with two kids; Fernando, a Marxist, has a girlfriend. Three years into their affair, he is murdered in an alleged robbery. Perdita’s knowledge of true crime sends her on a mission to solve the murder. Her brother, battling addiction, is also thrown into the pot of swirling dramedy. This delightful page-turner ends in a twist, with lots of comic relief in between.
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Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
By MÓNICA OJEDA
Published by COFFEE HOUSE
Translated by Sarah Booker
Ecuadorian writer Ojeda has an impressive track record for garnering nominations—she was a Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction. She comments about her process: “My writing comes from fear and desire, and I write because I’m trying to understand how these two concepts are related.” She blends myth and folklore into what she has called “Andean Gothic.” Her new novel is set in the far future (the 5500s) with Guayaquilean protagonists, best friends Noa and Nicole. Psychological and psychedelic horror combine when the girls escape the violence of their home to attend the Solar Noise festival at the foot of a volcano. Their dissimilar reactions to the sensual hedonism and drugs unlock long-buried desires.
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The Hill
By HARRIET CLARK
Published by FSG
Suzanna, who is being raised by her grandmother, spends weekends at the prison where her mother is incarcerated, serving a life sentence for political crimes. Inspired by novels like Roth’s American Pastoral and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Clark’s debut explores familial bonds and the challenges of living between two worlds. The novel is based upon well-known real events. Clark’s mother, Judith, drove a getaway car in the 1981 Brink’s robbery, and was part of SDS and the Weather Underground, serving consecutive life sentences in a Bedford Hills facility. The novel manages to be both deeply serious and comically playful, and we voraciously follow these two women and their relationship as Suzanna grows up. It is superb.
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Homebound
By PORTIA ELAN
Published by SCRIBNER
Elan’s compelling debut spans time and place, at once earthbound, heavenly, and interstellar. We journey from 1983 in a Cincinnati suburb, where Becks inherits a pile of floppy disks from her beloved uncle, to 2078, where a biologist designs sentient humanoids, to 2576, when the world is flooded, to the galaxies in 2586, where a captain is trying to save the universe with a computer game. The story is reminiscent of books like Cloud Atlas and, more recently, The Ministry of Time, where the characters—human or humanoid—become found family as destinies interweave. Elan, a coder and gamer herself, has produced an impressive first novel that speaks to our desires to connect and to save our fragile world.
