June 6, 2026
We celebrate the beginning of the summer season with five novels that explore the meaning of life. One is a twisted take on a long-ago fable, updated for today’s political climate; another is a mind-boggling journey into the unknown in a Dublin where present, future, and past entwine; and we have an examination of the art world by two friends who wish to overturn its outdated rules. There is also a novel we will launch at The Center about a young girl in Calcutta who appears to be reincarnated; and we round out the list with an irresistible frolic in Tuscany with a group of delightfully deluded residents. Each character here is looking for answers to life’s unending puzzles, armed with heart, wit, intellect, and fierce curiosity.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Villa Coco
By Andrew Sean Greer
Published by Doubleday
Pulitzer Prize-winning Greer offers another indelible, hapless protagonist—an American who applies for a job in Tuscany to archive the contents of a wealthy widow’s dilapidated villa (with questionable bathroom facilities). He arrives knowing no Italian and, like a fish out of water, flops around as he gets the lay of the land among a group of extremely eccentric and entertaining characters. Friends come in and out: the aging Lisbetta (Coco)—unreliable, but good company; Oscar, who ‘our young man’ is attracted to (though he has sworn off affairs with men); a bohemian princess; along with various others who are straight out of central casting—and one problematic marten (a ferret-like animal)—in this delightful farce.
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Ghost-Eye
By Amitav Ghosh
Published by FSG
“…very strange things happen in this world… And that’s what the beauty and miraculousness of this world consists of,” Ghosh declared recently. In ’60s Calcutta, three-year-old Varsha asks her parents for fish for lunch, but, being Jain, they are vegetarians. A psychotherapist, Shoma, is brought in to determine if Varsha’s unusual ‘memory’ of eating fish refers to reincarnation. A half-century later in Brooklyn, Shoma’s nephew searches for Varsha. His ward Tipu intends to harness the powers of people called ghost-eyes—who see the interconnectedness of things—to fight corporate malfeasance. Ghosh’s story fluidly combines spirituality with environmental activism, linking two periods and places in his strange and miraculous new novel.
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Contrapposto
By Dave Eggers
Published by Knopf
Eggers’s new novel features two main characters. Cricket is an eight-year-old Indiana-born budding artist who comes to Chicago to study. He meets, and is mesmerized by, Olympia, a fellow artist who, at nine, encourages him to follow his passion. As they grow up and older (65 years are covered here) and travel the globe, their friendship solidifies and morphs. “Cricket and Olympia want to reinvent themselves over their lives, but they also know they can’t pull one over on someone who’s known them since they were eight.” It is a charmingly complex romance and a love letter to art, beauty, the study of classicism, and the passion it provokes that affects each person in its own way.
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Dooneen
By Keith Ridgway
Published by New Directions
The worlds of Beckett and Kafka are evoked in Ridgway’s mesmerizing novel. It takes the form of Bartholomew (Mew) Port’s letter to his lover Mahmoud (Mootie) as he journeys from their home in London to an imaginary Dublin filled with soldiers and beasts, tunnels and cellars, fields and seas. He is traveling with several others, all trying to avoid sure death. But is Mew actually alive? Is this a fever dream? Or a brief passage to the other world? His brain churns with memories and minefields. It is a dizzyingly clever, though disturbing, novel that is hard to put down, told in a flow of consciousness with various episodes of confusion and beauty.
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Rabbit, Fox, Tar
By P. C. Verrone
Published by Catapult
Verrone spins a fable based loosely on the infamous African American folktale, “Tar Baby,” about a young Black woman who appears in a Midwest town and shakes everything and everybody up. Baby claims to be the niece of Eugene Fox, the white former member of the city council. Lucky, who is Black and won the last election, falls hard for the mysterious Baby and, when the new campaign brings Fox out of retirement, trouble begins between the former Black community (whose homes were bulldozed to make way for a highway) and the white residents of Original Hill. Peronne mixes racial politics with African folklore in a captivating novel with a beguiling protagonist in Baby, reminiscent of Catherine Lacey’s Pew.
