In Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster, 2025) Konstantin Duhovny’s father died when he was young, and his mother is too anguished to raise him, so he raises himself, but not very well.

Sarah Cartell, who grew up in a White Supremacist family controlled by a violent grandfather who preaches hate and violence, learns from books and a kind librarian that there’s another way to see the world.

As the Sami community (Norway) struggles to protect ancestral lands from the building of a damn in 1979, Oslo detective Hans Sorensen arrives in the north of the country to investigate sabotage on a damn.

After finishing her teaching degree in Israel, Leah emigrates to the U.S. for a teaching position that she thinks of as temporary. She ends up staying for 5 decades.

Simone Lerrante is a Belgian orphan whose memory is damaged by the trauma of her father being shot by Nazis and her subsequent escape to England.

Mona’s Eyes (Europa Editions, 2025) is an enchanting debut novel written by art historian Thomas Schlesser. It tells the story of a 10-year-old girl living in Paris who briefly loses her vision.

The Beauty and the Hell of It and Other Stories (Guernica, 2025) conjures up images of women who struggle through difficult transitions, unpleasant encounters, or ghastly boyfriends and husbands.

Rose Janowitz is surprised to get a production job with a radio soap opera and stunned to fall in love with the show’s African American leading man.

The Dime Museum is a novel told in stories that span from the 1920s, when Dime Museums were a way for people to gawk at human differences, through 2020, during the ravages of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Port Anna tells the story of a quiet town on the Maine coast that has attracted the attention of wealthy investors seeking a picturesque, windswept summer cottage overlooking the ocean.

Theo Sterling is eleven when his grandfather kidnaps him, just for the afternoon. He learns that his father had shed his Jewish identity, married a very Catholic woman from Mexico, and stopped talking to either of his parents.

Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The novel twists and turns through the lives of an artist and his wife, a teenager forced to attend a horrifying boarding school, the artist and his wife’s lonely daughter after their deaths, and a divorced art appraiser studying the works of the dead artist.

Memory Feather, who was born with a misshapen hand and was able to communicate with animals, looks back to when she was a child living with her newly divorced mother in a dilapidated hotel far from home.

Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution.

After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children.