General Fiction
15 Summers Later.
By RaeAnne Thayne.
June 2024. 304p. Canary Street, paper, $17.99 (9781335009333); e-book (9780369748027).
Madi, self-conscious about her physical differences resulting from a brain injury, is nonetheless working full speed to make the no-kill animal shelter she has established in a small Idaho mountain town sustainable. She feels betrayed by her sister, Ava, who wrote a book detailing their captivity and harrowing escape as teenagers when their widowed father joined a survivalist cult in the wilderness. Madi is horrified and furious that Ava’s book, an international best-seller, is exposing the worst time in her life to not only her community but the whole world. Ava’s husband has left her, hurt and angry that she had never shared her traumatic past with him. Their escape and the tragic death of a rescuer linked the sisters to the Gentry family for life. Veterinarian Luke Gentry provides medical care for the animals at the shelter, and his sister is Madi’s best friend and roommate. Readers can always depend on Thayne (Cafe at Beach End, 2023) to provide a compelling story with lots of heart, featuring endearing characters and serious real-life issues. —Diana Tixier Herald
Beautiful Days.
By Zach Williams.
June 2024. 240p. Doubleday, $28 (9780385550147); e-book (9780385550154).
The days depicted in Williams’ first story collection are hardly beautiful. Instead, they tilt toward baffling or bizarre. Some protagonists helplessly drift through life. Others are paralyzed by fear or failure, tormented by loneliness and regret. In “The New Toe,” a two-year-old grows an extra toe. Shockingly, his father amputates the superfluous digit with wire cutters then flushes it down the toilet. “Mousetraps” describes a man’s bewildering experience at a small hardware store. In “Return to Crashaw,” a 74-year-old tour-guide driver must cope with some disruptive passengers on a visit to mysterious megaliths in the desert. Other tales feature a man who finds his elderly neighbor dead in her armchair with the presence of a silent stranger in the room, an analytics firm receiving troubling emails, a secluded cottage where the flow of time is jumbled, and a mother who “buries her teeth when they fall out: six little funerals.” Williams’ characters are troubled, their predicaments provocative. —Tony Miksanek
Blessings.
By Chukwuebuka Ibeh.
June 2024. 288p. Doubleday, $28 (9780385550642); e-book (9780385550659).
Chukwuebuka Ibeh enters the literary world with a searing debut about self, family, and community. Obiefuna is his mother’s miracle child, but an intimate moment with his father’s apprentice lands him a ticket to seminary school, where violence is currency, and his sexuality a sin. Despite his best efforts, Obiefuna cannot change who he is, not for his father, his classmates, not even for the laws of his country. In the tradition of the great Nigerian writers who have come before him, such as Buchi Emecheta and Wole Soyinka, Ibeh expresses a quiet, transcendent truth. Although the prejudices toward the LGBTQ+ community in Nigerian culture and politics create a big part of the tension of the novel, the beauty of Obiefuna’s journey is his challenge to accept himself. The same can be said of his mother, who failed to meet societal expectations of her gender during her 10-year struggle with infertility followed by her failure to protect her son. The parallels of mother and son speak to a deeper problem in societal biases that go beyond its persecution of LGBTQ+ people. Blessings is gripping, multifaceted, and poignant. —Enobong Tommelleo
A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories.
Ed. by Becca Rothfeld.
June 2024. 224p. Catapult, paper, $16.95 (9781646222636); e-book (9781646222643).
Marking the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, the 10 absurd tales in this multiauthored collection aspire to be Kafkaesque. They tangle with themes close to Kafka’s heart—alienation, fate, guilt, loneliness, suffering, unbearable bureaucracy. Although none of these offerings matches the weirdness and emotional withering of Kafka’s foremost short stories (“The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor”), coming closest is “The Hurt.” A viral contagion hits humankind hard, causing episodes of excruciating pain and panic, with the suffering filmed and shown online. Notions of beautiful agony and performance art grimly echo Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” “Headache” recounts a 30-year-old woman’s escalating helplessness culminating in a bizarre hospital detention. “The Board” describes a strange showing of an underground apartment. Two stories are silly, one about punctuation marks in a typesetter’s cabinet that bicker and lament their misuse, the other narrated by a genuine Neanderthal who inhabits an enclosed exhibit in a museum. Additional tales feature machines that become self-aware and build a mysterious tower, painted red lines of unknown significance, and a creepy landlord. —Tony Miksanek
The Coast Road.
By Alan Murrin.
June 2024. 320p. HarperVia, $28 (9780063336520); e-book (9780063336537).
Irish writer Murrin’s debut novel offers a page-turning portrait of life in Donegal—often called the “forgotten county.” It is 1995, and Ireland is on the verge of overturning a ban on divorce. Poet Colette Crowley has returned to town after leaving her comfortable marriage for another man. She rents a cottage, tries to earn money by holding writing workshops, and regrets her irreversible ruin. Not one to shy away from making controversial friends is Izzy, a politician’s wife with provincial taste but a sharp wit. There’s also Dolores, young wife to a philandering husband, whose fourth pregnancy makes her feel more trapped than ever, and Ann, a waitress in love with Colette’s jilted husband. Throughout, Murrin dangles the mystery of a house fire alluded to early on, yet the true center is the question of a woman’s agency. What value does life hold when the state bars so many choices? Through these women, Murrin explores a fascinating community on the verge of liberating change. —Annie Tully
The Coin.
By Yasmin Zaher.
July 2024. 240p. Catapult, $27 (9781646222100); e-book (9781646222117).
A wealthy young woman drifts through New York in a stupor of designer clothes and high-end beauty products. Though stunningly unqualified, she teaches (barely) at a private school for “underprivileged” boys while mocking
