Crown (2025) Evanthia Bromiley "This is a book of poetry, every sentence offering up gifts. It is also a book built of deep suspense, a survival story of the first order. An evicted mother must leave her two children alone in the world while she goes to the hospital to give birth, and through the crucible of this crisis, each voice in this novel comes alive with ferocious originality and tenderness. Evanthia Bromiley writes at the intersection of poverty and motherhood better than almost anyone I know. Crown is an astonishing, revelatory first novel."
The World With Its Mouth Open (2024) Zahid Rafiq "Violence runs riverlike beneath Zahid Rafiq's gorgeously restrained sentences: these are visionary tales shot through with longing and grief. Rafiq writes with gentle humor and profound grace, showing such compassion for the ways we are, all of us, so shabbily and persistently human. An utterly exquisite debut."
The Nude (2024) C Michelle Lindley "C. Michelle Lindley's The Nude is as seductive and sensual as it is haunting. Set on a Greek island, wrought in a delirium of desire and loss, The Nude looks unflinchingly at the violent contestation of the female body - as artifice and art, and object and agent alike. This is a book that I swallowed hungrily and that has stayed with me long afterward. Exhilarating, terrifying, and brilliant."
Reptile Memoirs (2022) Silje Ulstein "This book is a shapeshifting marvel. I found it compulsively readable, and not just for the unexpected paths by which it unpacks its secrets. Silje Ulstein writes about snakes in ways that made me feel I've never really seen them before: In language that is as seductive as it is prickly, she pries open the boundaries between reptiles and humans, adults and the children they once were, and criminals and victims. An uncanny, unsettling, and totally immersive read."
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (2022) Hannah Lillith Assadi "The Stars Are Not Yet Bells is a heartbreaking and profoundly visionary book. Hannah Assadi movingly renders the kaleidoscopic nature of memory - revealing not only one woman's disordered heart and mind, but the way our consciousness recombines shards of memory to create a glittering, prismatic view of a life. I wanted to stay in Assadi's shimmering sentences for as long as I could."
The All-Night Sun (2020) Diane Zinna "Diane Zinna carves her sentences on the page. This book is compulsively readable because no scene or paragraph goes to waste; each nuance of thought and feeling gets traced with generous intensity. Zinna renders all the vivid saturations of grief, but not just that: She also traces the complicated fretwork of young friendship. This book shows how coming-of-age and elegy can be the same story."
Open Me (2018) Lisa Locascio "An evocative and compelling remapping of Bluebeard’s Castle for our times. In Open Me, Locascio offers a daring, unapologetic, and vital exploration of female desire."
Red Clocks (2018) Leni Zumas "In bristling sentences that strike with stunning efficiency, Leni Zumas shows girls and women defying the excruciating restrictions imposed by both law and culture. This is not only timely but necessary fiction?uncannily prescient, unabashedly political, and fiercely humane. We so desperately need books like this."
