CLARE BEAMS is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Marrow (2025) Samantha Browning Shea "Samantha Browning Shea has given us a dark and delicious tale of mystery and witchcraft. Suspenseful and emotionally charged, Marrow is woven through with guilt and secrets, herbs and incantations, and - most powerfully - all the magic of coming into one's own power."
The Belles (2025) Lacey N Dunham "As I read this novel, heart in throat, I couldn't decide what was more terrifying: Bellerton itself, dripping with darkness, or the Belles, the girls who are both the school's victims and its most fervent acolytes. A gothic tantalizing fever-dream of a novel about the nightmares of class, power, propriety, and, under certain circumstances, girlhood itself."
Girls with Long Shadows (2025) Tennessee Hill "A poetic, haunting, haunted novel - as suspenseful as it is lyrical. Within a sisterhood that's more like self-replication, Girls with Long Shadows maps the shimmering contours of identity and unfolds the kinds of damage only our most beloved can do to us. Baby B and her sisters moved and unsettled me and worked their way deep under my skin."
Strange Folk (2024) Alli Dyer "A taut thriller threaded through with dirt and blood, honey and moonshine. Dyer roots her suspenseful tale so beautifully in this land and in this family that the novel becomes an interrogation of what rootedness itself means and is worth. I couldn't put this book down."
Mystery Lights (2024) Lena Valencia "Lena Valencia writes some of the best stories I've read in years, as sharp and finely honed as knives. Here are women who turn out to be powerful enough to meet the threats of their worlds in kind: their lives may cut them, yes, but they can cut back, and astonishing truths are laid bare in the process. Both bold and sly, in turns righteously angry and sinister, Mystery Lights offers a brilliant new vision of what it means to be a woman in this world."
Ghostroots (2024) 'Pemi Aguda "I loved everything about this book, which heralds a major and extraordinary new voice in fiction. . . . These stories consumed me. I'll be thinking about them for years to come."
The Divorcees (2024) Rowan Beaird "The women of The Divorcees captivated me: drenched in desert light, searching for themselves in every possible mirror. Their relationships to one another, gorgeously rendered, have an intensity fueled by self-discovery-these are connections full of deep understanding, shocking deception, devastating betrayal, and real love. Beaird is a wondrous new talent who has given us an unforgettable, lushly assured novel."
Annie Bot (2024) Sierra Greer "A brilliant and enraging exploration of ownership and love, and the way our creations have of growing far beyond us. Sierra Greer raises questions as current and pressing as our present-day anxieties about AI, and as ageless and enormous as the territory of Mary Shelley, about what constitutes humanity and what we owe to each other. Annie is a glorious creation-- and self-creation-- and I will never forget her, or this sharp and astonishing book."
King Nyx (2024) Kirsten Bakis "A magnificently unnerving dream of a book. I loved devoted, clear-eyed Anna, and watching her navigate a world in which reality slips toward symbol-full of images that might be pulled from the most gorgeous and haunting nightmare-genuinely terrified me. King Nyx is a marvelous novel."
The Invisible World (2023) Nora Fussner "Like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Nora Fussner's The Invisible World follows an investigation of the paranormal as it slips wildly from the investigators' control - into territory that terrified and thrilled me. Hauntings, in this acutely observed novel, are frightening because they're so personal, because they entwine so deeply with our innermost selves. I will be haunted, in the best way, by Fussner's ghosts for a long time to come."
In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel (2023) Genevieve Plunkett "In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel mesmerized me: the quicksilver music of its language, the keenness of its observation, the richness of its empathy. Plunkett has made her protagonist's interior world into a whole lush landscape and filled it with desire, loss, tenderness, humor, and tragedy. The result is a novel full of wild, irresistible life."
The Mythmakers (2023) Keziah Weir "A novel about ambition--art-making, self-making--and the ways in which, when questions of gender and desire and love enter the scene, lies and truths can tangle as intricately as the links of a fine necklace. THE MYTHMAKERS glitters with suspense, and it held me rapt. Keziah Weir has arrived."
Sidle Creek (2023) Jolene McIlwain "There's a subterranean wisdom threading through the ground of these stories, creating deep links, pulling stunning parts into a still more stunning whole. Jolene McIlwain gives us the kind of truths that can only come from knowing her subjects--people, animals, and landscape alike--entirely and truly, in all their darkness and light. An extraordinary debut from a writer of rare insight and lyric power."
White Cat, Black Dog (2023) Kelly Link "With White Cat, Black Dog, these stories delight and terrify us, and seem to say, Yes, this is the way the world works - haven't you been paying attention? I am now. What a glorious and bewitching gift this book is."
Elsewhere (2022) Alexis Schaitkin "Elsewhere is among my favorite novels of the last decade. There's an eerie, gorgeous magic to Schaitkin's vision that's related to the magic of Kazuo Ishiguro and Shirley Jackson but also entirely her own. I hadn't realized how much it would mean to me to witness an intelligence this fierce and singular, a capacity for feeling this deep, and a gift for language this extraordinary all trained on the subject of motherhood in all its wonder and strangeness."
Unlikely Animals (2022) Annie Hartnett "No one is better at heart than Annie Hartnett--in the best, most layered, most complicated, and deeply human sense--and still Unlikely Animals stunned me. In a book rich with miracles, it's this complexity and expansiveness of connection that feels most miraculous of all."
The Ophelia Girls (2021) Jane Healey "The Ophelia Girls is a novel saturated with beauty, menace, longing, secrets-- and with passions deep enough to drown in. It's a sinister, suspenseful page-turner that gripped me tightly and still hasn't fully let go."
The Rock Eaters (2021) Brenda Peynado "This book is a giant. What staggering reach and ambition Brenda Peynado's stories have: here are aliens, tortured superhumans, angels, sufferings literalized as stones, ritualized drownings, enchanted sleeps, the hauntings of home, all rendered with the kind of power that sweeps us effortlessly from exhilaration to despair and back again. The Rock Eaters is the work of an imagination that brooks no limits, that claims, masterfully, all territories as its own. I'm in awe of this book. It's one of the most thrilling debuts I've read in years."
In the Event of Contact (2021) Ethel Rohan "These characters long for connections that keep eluding them: they feel so much and yet can touch so little. Their tragedies and resilience are brilliantly various and individual--none alike, and none exactly like ours--but they speak to the universal through the particular as only art can manage. A tremendous achievement."
The Upstairs House (2021) Julia Fine "The Upstairs House is a terrifying jolt of a book. Here are all the openings-up of motherhood, and all the strains of its competing demands, taken brilliantly to their richest, most frightening extremes. I was riveted by every twist and turn of this story about the hauntedness of having a child."
