Fiction

A grandfather clock in a 1660 house stops every night at 3:41. Nobody can fix it, and nobody will explain it. Freida McFadden's dual-timeline thriller runs a 1692 witchcraft trial alongside a present-day haunting, and the second reveal turns on an object you have been staring at since chapter four.

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.

Twenty-three years after The Time Traveler's Wife, Niffenegger hands the disorder to Henry and Clare's daughter. Alba has two husbands, a safe house she has owned since 1947, and a stepsister made of code. The result is warm, unhurried and structurally unruly, and the machine turns out to be the most interesting person in it.

Jazz Bashara checks her bank balance every day like it might have grown on its own. She needs 416,922 slugs. Not four hundred thousand, not half a million. That precise figure. She will not tell anyone why, and the answer, when it finally arrives, is the best thing in the book.

A famous novelist orders his wife's dinner without asking. The first wife tells him never to do that again. The second wife thanks him for being thoughtful. Constantine builds an entire novel out of the gap between those two women, and the gap is where the danger lives.