Literary Fiction

A spoiler-free review of Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason: a festival sound technician, newly and unwillingly single, falls privately in love with a famous novelist she has never met.

A spoiler-free review of Under Story by Chloe Benjamin: a grieving mycologist takes a dishwashing job at McMurdo Station, a dome of pink light appears over the ice, and the physicists arrive.

A spoiler-free review of Blacktail by Scott Hawkins: ten years after The Library at Mount Char, a half-wolf walks south to wake a sleeping god, and the whole novel is told from inside the heads of animals who mean every word.

A spoiler-free review of Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour: twenty-one years of a Creole painter's life from New Orleans to Watts, told in a present tense that refuses hindsight and counts what concealment costs.

Juniper Castillo can hold her pulse at eighty while somebody hits her. Her mother taught her that. Nine years later she is twenty-two, sober, ferociously prepared, and about to spend a press tour explaining her own history to strangers with recording devices. John Green's first adult novel is about what the machine takes.