Idra Novey is the author of the debut novel Ways to Disappear. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil and New York. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into eight languages and shes written for The New York Times, NPRs All Things Considered, Slate, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the PEN Translation Fund, the Poetry Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America.
The Volcano Daughters (2024) Gina María Balibrera "Every character comes vibrantly to life in The Volcano Daughters. Every scene surprises with unexpected tremors of questions about the legacy of political violence, how social upheaval shapes sibling dynamics and haunts the psyches of children for the rest of their lives. Gina Maria Balibrera is a writer of tremendous imagination who draws on her knowledge of two languages to craft a first novel unlike any other I've read."
Alice Sadie Celine (2023) Sarah Blakley-Cartwright "Sarah Blakley-Cartwright subverts all kinds of expectations with this sharply drawn trio of strong-willed women. Vibrant, sensual, and full of irreverent humor, Alice, Sadie, Celine is an outstanding first novel."
Lost and Found (2022) (Vera Kelly, book 3) Rosalie Knecht "With Vera Kelly, Rosalie Knecht has resurreacted the dectective novel for the 21st century."
Saint Sebastian's Abyss (2022) Mark Haber "There is a refreshing lightsomeness to the writing in Mark Haber's new novel about art and the absurdity of academic life. The mix of love and hostility exchanged between the two art critics in this novel is both endearing and ridiculous at once. Their territorial battles over the same work of art, their willingness to upend their marriages and much of their lives over a single painting, made me laugh aloud with recognition. An absolute delight, and Haber's love of writing comes through on every page."
Appleseed (2021) Matt Bell "Matt Bell's Appleseed expands in the most entrancing manner to encompass everything from the hidden hoofs of fauns to the pending doom of the planet. What a sui generis feat of imagination and scope this novel is."
Infinite Country (2021) Patricia Engel "What a breathtaking novel this is, about family, forgiveness, and love while contending with the terrifying unknowns of being an immigrant in a merciless era. There is mercy, however, in every scene of Infinite Country--the kind of profound, understated mercy that manifests in exceptional works of fiction. Patricia Engel is a tremendous writer, and Infinite Country is her best novel yet."
American Delirium (2021) Betina González "Betina Gonzalez writes with tremendous verve. What a sharp, audacious novel about the escalating delirium of our current era. Heather Cleary's translation recreates the quicksilver scenes of American Delirium with superb artistry."
Leave the World Behind (2020) Rumaan Alam "Alam has a tremendous talent for bringing the complexities of family tensions to life. In the confined space of a single home, this remarkable novel takes on some of the hardest questions of our time about class, race, and who we become in moments of growing uncertainty. In every eloquent scene, Alam reveals something new about what being a family means in the twenty-first century."
True Love (2020) Sarah Gerard "In the aching pages of TRUE LOVE, Gerard holds nothing back. What’s at stake in this frank, ferocious novel is the brutal, ever-elusive salvation of oneself. A smart, tender, startling work of brilliance."
Survivor Song (2020) Paul Tremblay "Brutality spreads in this novel as swiftly as the wild epidemic Tremblay has invented. A daring, terrifying work packed with horror, but also with larger questions about what meaningful survival might be."
The Margot Affair (2020) Sanaë Lemoine "An extraordinary, gorgeous novel . . . With exquisite precision and insight, The Margot Affair builds to an unexpected heat."
Shiner (2020) Amy Jo Burns "With prose as potent as the moonshine it evokes, Amy Jo Burns shows how ferociously Appalachian history keeps it hold on the present. Beautiful and unsettling, Shiner pulled me in with its first startling scene and wouldn't let go."
St. Ivo (2020) Joanna Hershon "St. Ivo has an unexpectedly strong undertow. I didn’t realize how forcefully this novel had pulled me under each successive wave of revelations until suddenly I was on the last twenty pages and it was well after midnight. With glistening insight reminiscent of Tessa Hadley, Hershon exposes the tensions that inevitably form in long relationships and grow ever larger until somebody finally admits them out loud."
A Luminous Republic (2020) Andrés Barba "Barba conjures the primal impulses of childhood with terrifying precision. In its questioning of violence as both threat and seduction, A Luminous Republic is both a rapturous fable and a ruinous forecast of the havoc that comes from civic inaction."
Hurricane Season (2020) Fernanda Melchor "Melchor wields a sentence like a saber. She never flinches in the bold, precise strokes of Hurricane Season. In prose as precise and breathtaking as it is unsettling, Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence everywhere."
Braised Pork (2020) An Yu "What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I’ve read before."
Mother Country (2019) Irina Reyn "Mother Country maps the emotional geography that forms between parents and children living in drastically different realities. Shifting between Ukraine and New York, Irina Reyn finds the moments of connection that transcend even the most complex of separations."
99 Nights in Logar (2019) Jamil Jan Kochai "As alive to the present as to the past, Jamil Jan Kochai has crafted a first novel of tremendous promise. 99 Nights in Logar unfolds with complexity and inventiveness, revealing the many ways each generation must contend with the decisions of the generations before. An auspicious debut that captures with great urgency what awaits the generation coming of age now."
My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) Oyinkan Braithwaite "Sly, risky, and filled with surprises, Oyinkan Braithwaite holds nothing back in this wry and refreshingly inventive novel about violence, sister rivalries and simply staying alive."
Sip (2017) Brian Allen Carr "For a novel about domed worlds devoid of light, Sip has no shortage of luminosity. The precision of the images in this novel illuminate every scene like the water around a lighthouse. A fable about shadow addicts and sealed-over inaccessible domes feels eerily prescient for the increasing volatile divide in the United States."
