July 4, 2026
Three of our fiction selections this week are from some of our favorite smaller presses who consistently discover indispensable writers for indie bookstore shelves, like Jacqueline Harpman who passed away in 2012. Two others are novels from much loved writers: a Yugoslavian-born author and a Pulitzer Prize finalist you will want to put on the top of your TBR pile.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Country People
By Daniel Mason
Published by Random House
Mason manages to follow his perfect novel with another set in New England (you’ll find hidden references to that previous work here). The main characters are transplants from California—Kate has been offered a plum teaching position and her husband Miles figures it is time to finish that tardy PhD about Russian folktales while watching over their son, daughter, and truffle-hunting hypoallergenic dog. As Miles becomes enmeshed in the eccentric community, he goes down a rabbit hole (almost literally) researching tales of a nearby 19th-century underground kingdom. This comic romp about a family relocated to an unfamiliar rural environment moves into supernatural territory, giving the novel an added layer of fun.
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We Were Forbidden
By Jacqueline Harpman
Published by Transit Books
Translated by Ros Schwartz
Last published in English in 2022, Belgian writer Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is a post-apocalyptic feminist novel. It became a viral sensation, and an instant contemporary classic. The latest to be translated, also post-apocalyptic, is a collection of three novellas. A woman trudges through the forest with other survivors of an unnamed war. A teenage girl rails against restrictions at a strict Casablanca school. In “The Broom Closet,” an ominous title, we follow the wife of a Belgian bourgeois man. Harpman, whose family fled the Nazis when she was a child, eventually became a psychoanalyst—evident in her insightful women characters and their struggles to achieve freedom.
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Bone Horn
By Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
Published by Soft Skull Press
This delightfully absurd detective novel joins Deborah Levy’s recent fiction in bringing Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas back to the literary forefront. Our narrator is a first-time investigator who lost her female partner and, in her grief, fills the void by visiting a London sperm bank. She is now raising a little boy and is short on cash. She receives a mysterious call (“the voice on the line was an overdone egg turning solid in boiling water”) asking her to locate Toklas’s infamously rumored horn (Picasso often teased her about hiding it beneath her ubiquitous hat). Her voluminous research takes her to Toklas’s former haunts like Paris and San Francisco in a droll, sexy, smart debut.
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The Shampoo Effect
By Jenny Jackson
Published by Dorman Books
Another entry in the ‘friends reunite years later’ genre—and an enticing one. Jackson effortlessly fine-tunes her characters in the fictional seaside Massachusetts setting, not dissimilar to the town where she grew up. (Also look for little Updike nuggets.) The group has spent many summers here together and are a tight gang marked by long friendships. These WASPy, well-to-do companions are now adults, some with children, still very close. But this summer there is an interloper, smitten with the irresistible Van, and the invisible bonds and unspoken rules of their circle get disrupted. Then a surprise pregnancy throws everything into turmoil. Hand me the sunscreen…
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A Real Animal
By Emline Atwood
Published by Catapult
As the title suggests, Atwood’s debut touches upon the animal nature of a young woman navigating her twenties. Lucy is rather like a caged animal, ready to explore the world after enduring a sexual assault on a trip abroad. In the coming decade, there is heartbreak and violence alongside joy and awakening, as Lucy journeys through relationships, jobs, and parental concerns. Atwood has described her book as exploring “what it means to live within a traumatized body” amid “the overwhelming tyranny of choices.” This impressive new novelist takes a difficult subject and injects a fresh and startling power.
