First Novel Friday: Liar's Dice, Abundance, and Odessa

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Friday, 6:00 pm EDT May 1, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Members of The Center for Fiction receive free tickets to First Novel Friday and early access to registration. Become a member today. Already a member? RSVP here.

On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from exciting new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. (If auditorium seating reaches capacity, guests will be invited to watch the livestream of the readings and conversation on a large screen in our Members Lounge.) The party continues with book signings and signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month, we are pleased to welcome debut novelists Juliet Faithfull (Liar’s Dice), Hafeez Lakhani (Abundance), and Gabrielle Sher (Odessa). All three featured books portray families torn apart by forces beyond their control, as well as the interplay between grief and illness across decades and continents. Naeem Murr, award-winning author of Every Exit Brings You Home, will join us as the evening’s moderator. We hope you’ll support our featured authors by buying their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers. Please note that tickets do not include books; we encourage you to order in advance online or purchase copies at the event.

Featuring

Juliet Faithfull

Juliet Faithfull

Juliet Faithfull is a Spanish-British-American writer who grew up in Brazil. Liar’s Dice, her first novel, was a winner of the 2024 Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She was awarded a Pauline Scheer Fellowship by GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, in Boston, and her short stories have been published in the Bellevue Literary Review and Urbanus magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Smith College School for Social Work, Juliet works as a trilingual psychotherapist and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her two sons.

Photo Credit: Sharona Jacobs
Hafeez Lakhani

Hafeez Lakhani

Hafeez Lakhani was born in Hyderabad, India, and raised in suburban South Florida. His fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, Exposition Review, Salt Hill Journal, Tikkun, the Cortland Review, and the Southern Review, among other publications. He has received fellowships from PEN America and The Center for Fiction, has been recognized twice with a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Photo Credit: Sheena Chakeres
Gabrielle Sher

Gabrielle Sher

Gabrielle Sher attended Hamilton College, where she earned the Rosenfeld Chapbook Prize for her novella Bowerbird. She received her MFA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her first novel, Odessa, originated as part of her doctoral dissertation titled “Who Made Us Monsters? Narrative Psychology and The Female Jewish Gothic.” She currently lives and writes in New Jersey with her husband Jamie and dog Bo.

Photo Credit: Tyler Stab
Naeem Murr

Naeem Murr

Naeem Murr is the author of four novels: The Boy, a New York Times Notable Book; The Genius of the Sea; The Perfect Man, which was awarded The Commonwealth Writersʼ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and Every Exit Brings You Home, which was just published by W.W. Norton. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, among his awards are a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University.

Featured Books

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Liar's Dice

By Juliet Faithfull

Published by Random House Publishing Group

PURCHASE

Dolores and Mita grow up in rural Brazil, identical and inseparable. But Mita develops a mysterious illness that challenges the family. One day, Dolores wakes up to find her sister gone—sent to a hospital in their father’s native London. There is no Dolores without Mita. And now Mita is gone.

When the family moves to Rio, Dolores’ parents act as if Mita never existed. Lonely and grief-stricken, Dolores struggles to learn to read and write at the stodgy British School—until she meets Andrea, a headstrong, streetwise girl from the dangerous part of town. Andrea shows Dolores a new side of Rio—and how to survive it. As the dictatorship cracks down on dissenters, and people disappear, Dolores begins to wonder if her sister is dead, and her parents are lying. Determined to uncover the truth, Dolores is willing to do whatever it takes—lie, gamble and steal—to get her sister back.

Liar’s Dice captures the precarious intensity of coming of age in a volatile time—when repression and silence are the fabric of everyday life—and the cost of family secrets. Heartrending and tender, Juliet Faithfull’s debut novel is a testament to the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.
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Abundance

By Hafeez Lakhani

Published by Catapult

PURCHASE

In suburban Miami, sixty-year-old Sakeena—co-owner of a Dunkin’ franchise along with her husband, Ramzan—has nine months to live unless she consents to an organ transplant. Thirty years ago, at Ramzan’s behest, she left her beloved Rawalpindi, India, for the United States. In the years that followed, she compromised her belief in naseeb, the Muslim notion of destiny, and acquiesced to fertility treatments. This time, she is adamant that she should live as intended—without medical intervention. As her health deteriorates, Ramzan desperately seeks to reunite their grown children with the hope of convincing Sakeena to extend her life.

But there are complications. Eldest daughter Fareen is consumed by an important business deal that, if successful, will land her a highly desired (and lucrative) promotion. Meanwhile, youngest son Adnan is living abroad and unable to return to the States due to his own unscrupulous business practices, a pattern stretching back to his adolescence. If they have any hope of saving their mother’s life, the siblings must take extraordinary action to wrestle with their life choices, actions that reveal the always-present tension between ambition and fate.

Brought to life by prose that captures the spirit of contemporary Miami as effortlessly as it conveys the challenges of running a Dunkin’ franchise, Abundance is a beautiful, moving read from an exciting new American voice.

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Odessa

By Gabrielle Sher

Published by Little, Brown and Company

PURCHASE

Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother’s anxiety, her father’s rules, and the path that’s been laid out for her, she craves freedom, the edges of which she doesn’t know. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.

Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned—but although she looks the same, she is not the girl she once was. Yetta senses there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl―something that may be of her father’s making, and a being that has plans of its own.
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Every Exit Brings You Home

By Naeem Murr

Published by W. W. Norton & Company

PURCHASE

As a financial crisis looms, Jamal “Jack” Shaban is trying to save his neighbors from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really? For his flight attendant colleagues, he’s an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor does Dimra know about Jack’s attraction to Marcia: an angry single mom new to the building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life.

A man of many sides—adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and the novel’s present—Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is utter darkness.

A gorgeous blend of gentle comedy and poignant tragedy, of blasted hopes and one man’s indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, Every Exit Brings You Home is a book to love and never forget.

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