Ply by Hernan Diaz
A woman steals electricity from the last grid in a collapsed city, and an old physicist in a museum basement wants her to steal all of it at once. Hernan Diaz follows Trust with a novel about power in both senses of the word.
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw
A megachurch First Lady spends eighteen years perfecting her disguise, then learns who her father was. Deesha Philyaw's debut novel is a comic performance built on top of a crime, and the footnotes carry what the narrator cannot say aloud.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee
A spoiler-free review of American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee: fifteen years in the life of one Korean family across Seoul, Sydney and Orange County, and the private tutoring industry that carries them, bankrupts them and finally employs them.
Little Monsters by Máire Roche
A spoiler-free review of Little Monsters by Máire Roche: the March sisters reimagined as foster kids in modern Salem, where Meg's claws come out when she is anxious and something is tearing up the neighbourhood henhouses.
Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy
A spoiler-free review of Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy: three Miami cousins, a clay pot that opens onto a sea of time, and a single day in 1862 that connects the American Civil War to Cinco de Mayo.