Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care.

It’s 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can’t bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to blows, and the roller-ski team races up and down the winding paths. Injuries can occur, hips and backs not being what they were, but everywhere you look, these women are living large.

Sidney and Ida Whipple are living the suburban 1950s American dream, complete with two children and a white picket fence, which didn’t seem possible when they first met at the height of WWII in France. Reveling in the present, they can almost convince themselves that their past is behind them. But when their neighbors show off a newly purchased Man Ray photograph, Ida comes face-to-face with the person she loved and lost in the war: Arlette.

Elise Hahnfeld is the "perfect", obedient, high-performing office worker. She’s been a doormat for so many years it felt second-nature, but she’s growing exasperated at the drudgery of her normal life, her job that’s taken more from her than she can afford to give. If only someone was there to show her a different path, one where the unknown can be exciting instead of terrifying. Someone who could distract her from the mundane. When Elise loses everything, desperation drives her to do something unthinkable.

Reeling from her father’s death, Zara Pines accepts a ghostwriting gig for celebrity chef Jane Bailey. Jane, star of the wildly popular cooking show 30 Bucks Tops, insists that Zara spend the summer with her in her East Hampton home.

Is it really ever too late to be happy? That’s what young attorney Alex Harris finds herself asking while married to her bartender wife, Beth. For several years, Alex has resigned herself to a mediocre relationship, feeling doomed by the marriage vows she’s already taken. But everything changes when she walks into a small café one afternoon and meets Michelle Masters. As their friendship flourishes, Alex’s marriage crumbles around her, and she’s forced to question the only life she’s ever known.

Your Body of Water is an interweaving of autofiction with hydro-feminist mythologies, exploring via the emotional landscapes of four rivers and four "tragic feminine characters" (Ophelia, Leda, the Lady of Shalott, and Sappho) the author's own real life journey, with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor—through coming out in Australia, an abusive relationship in Berlin, and navigating queer love in the context of a world literally burning around us—and finding hope for the future in the stories of her ancestors before her.

Inside Half Moon Bay, a sparkling California coastal town, Ester Prynn is dulled and diminished by struggles with work, money, marriage, her senile father, a troubled teenage son, and old guilt she can't assuage. When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, he upends her fraught life and propels her toward passions buried, like singing; desires discovered, like a same-sex infatuation; and wrongs righted, like bringing the violent assailant to justice.

Fresh off the boat from Roaring Twenties Paris, Henrietta “Henri” Adams lands in New York in the midst of the Queer Craze that is taking the city by storm. An art critic by day and lady lover by night, she ventures into the clandestine worlds of speakeasies and drag balls, which free her from the tyranny of the gender binary. Fun-loving slummers crash the party, flocking to see queer performers at the Astor Hotel and the Cotton Club. Broadway stars rub elbows with Harlem Renaissance luminaries at the Hamilton Lodge Masquerade Ball. But the revelry can't last forever.

For as long as she can remember, Barbara Spiel has always found solace in books. Born in Germany and having come of age in a tumultuous era, she flees her home country as the Nazis rise to power in the early 1930s. Her destination? Madrid. There she's determined to realize her long-held dream of opening a bookshop and creating a safe haven for young idealists and independent thinkers to come together to transform the world. Yet Spain isn't immune from its own troubles.

Inspired by the real-life female snipers and interpreters in the Red Army during World War II, The Night Sparrow is a portrait of friendship, resilience, courage, and sacrifice under extraordinary circumstances.

When George Allenby is put in charge of building a lake in the grounds of an imposing Irish manor house, he intends to do the job as swiftly as possible and return to Belfast. Allenby is still wrestling with his time as an officer during the First World War, burdened by the many things he could have done differently.

On the surface, my life is a flawless performance. I stay home, keep the house spotless, and play the role of the devoted wife. It doesn’t matter that behind the curtains, the truth is darker than anyone could imagine. I’ve mastered the art of concealing the bruises, spinning lies to explain the tears, and burying the horrors of what happened behind closed doors. Until her.

Head peace officer Anya Savelova believed her people, living on a hostile planet in the ice-bound city of Novayarkha, were the last of humanity. Until the day she learned they weren't. When a starship from an Earth thought long dead appears in orbit over her world, Anya imagines an explosion of possible futures, offering her people the freedom to transcend the limiting environment of the planet they'd thought was their last refuge. In the starship's crew, Anya finds creativity, diversity, innovation–all things the colony has had to inhibit to survive.

In New York City, 1925, twenty-two-year-old Penny Fox has a lot on her plate. After her father's untimely death, she's just inherited his cabaret club—The Primrose—complete with a speakeasy in the basement, made possible by local mob boss Sonny Hargrove. By night, she's managing her father's business while being hounded by a greedy crime lord, and by day, working as a private investigator at her agency called The Sly Fox to help women flee abusive partners and catch their husbands affairs.

In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B. A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot—the one woman in their midst who never got her due—and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life.