October 18, 2025
Aliens and cults; adultery; short fiction from a Big Sky Country master; murder in a Puerto Rican community; and a memoir from a beloved NYC chef and writer. Two will be featured at our November First Novel Friday event. These books all deal, in various ways, with families and the inevitable dramas that arise from too much love, too little love, and the messy complications that follow.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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A Wooded Shore
By Thomas McGuane
Published by Knopf
McGuane’s memorable fiction is studded with short stories about oddballs—often amid the awe-inspiring Montana landscape. Though their protagonists are frequently in crisis, each story contains sharp observations laced with dark humor. This stellar collection includes nine pieces. The title novella alone—a tale of an unraveling family—is worth the price of the book. McGuane can catch a character with one simple sentence: “Peggy’s [golf] game never improved because she didn’t like being told what to do…” The mordant tone makes his work particularly effective, as his characters squirm and yearn and try to overcome their flaws.
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Next of Kin
By Gabrielle Hamilton
Published by Random House
Hamilton’s bestselling memoir arrived when it was hard to get a table at her East Village restaurant, Prune, which reigned from 1999 to 2020. With her customary caustic and vivid prose, she now presents a more intimate story, turning to personal family matters and attempting to untangle those complicated relationships. The story begins with her (estranged) aging mother and includes her brother Jeff, who killed himself at fifty-seven; her also-estranged sister; another brother who dies suddenly of a stroke; and her cruel, detached father. The brutal-but-honest account avoids sentimentality and is written with the same hard-hitting yet lyrical style that makes her work irresistible.
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The Ten Year Affair
By Erin Somers
Published by Simon & Schuster
There have been many excellent recent books about marital crises (see Miranda July). Enter Somers’s latest fiction. A 2016 alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, she has produced a delicious, witty novel about adultery. In addition to recounting a love affair, we are privy to Cora’s rich fantasy life: “Two vectors ran parallel through Cora’s existence. One was what you might call reality, with bills and an ant problem in the kitchen and her marriage, which was mostly good. The other was her affair with Sam, technically fictional, its lies and illicit meetings, the racing pulse of infatuation.” These two aspects add an extra punch to a very smart story about two ordinary married people with a magnetic attraction.
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The High Heaven
By Joshua Wheeler
Published by Graywolf Press
Izzy is a young girl growing up in a doomsday cult in the Southwestern desert near a NASA test site that sent monkeys into space. On the night of the first Apollo space mission, there is a tragic encounter with the law that leaves her an orphan. Taken in by a local rancher, we follow her trajectory through her obsession with the space race and involvement with scams in Texas and New Orleans. Woven into her journey is the fictional B-movie, High Heaven (think Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High), that expands this ambitious debut’s scope to mash up several genres: Western, speculative, and even Southern Gothic fiction. He pulls it off beautifully.
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This Is the Only Kingdom
By Jaquira Díaz
Published by Algonquin
If you have not read Díaz’s extraordinary memoir, it’s a treat. If you have, you’ll be especially eager to read her first novel. Longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, her debut has the pulse of her father’s salsa records. “The first thing that occurred to me was that I needed to […] use music as a theme,” she has said. This is a family portrait following a daughter who becomes a single mother in a poverty-stricken Puerto Rican barrio and then gets caught up in a murder investigation. The author is concerned with family dynamics, race, queerness, and both the good and bad that come from growing up in an insular community.
