Philly Chapbook Review publishes information on new literary novels and short story collections weekly (prose chapbooks will be covered in a monthly post). Every Tuesday, we publish an update about what titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Partita, Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime.
Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Red Ants: Stories, Kimberly Blaeser
Publisher: Counterpoint
Publication Date: October 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.
At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.
For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.
Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin poet laureate, is the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light, a 2026 National Book Foundation Science + Literature title; Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance; and Copper Yearning, winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. Other awards include the O. Henry Prize in fiction, Writer for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Blaeser is Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, who grew up on the reservation in northern Minnesota. She is an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts and a Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Learn more at www.kblaeser.org
Prairie Oyster, Sophie Robinson
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Pearl is a thirty-something filmmaker balanced precariously on the edge of an addiction-fueled breakdown. But when she is invited to interview her idol and crush, lesbian cult filmmaker Mitch Meyer, her stilted life restarts. Buoyed and seduced by Mitch’s interest in her and her work, Pearl swaps alcoholism for romantic obsession and London for a summer in New York with Mitch. All the while she is haunted by a project she has been toying with for years: a film about Veronica Lake, a 1940s film star who drank herself into obscurity.
Pearl is a thirty-something filmmaker balanced precariously on the edge of an addiction-fueled breakdown. But when she is invited to interview her idol and crush, lesbian cult filmmaker Mitch Meyer, her stilted life restarts.
Buoyed and seduced by Mitch’s interest in her and her work, Pearl swaps alcoholism for romantic obsession and London for a summer in New York with Mitch. All the while she is haunted by a project she has been toying with for years: a film about Veronica Lake, a 1940s film star who drank herself into obscurity.
Sophie Robinson is author of Rabbit. Her work has been published in Granta, The Guardian, Stylist, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, n+1, The Poetry Review, and The White Review. She runs Devotion, a radical and inclusive online creative writing workshop series, and publishes regular essays on her Substack, Feelings Almanac. She lives in Norwich, England.
Carrying, Samantha Josephs
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Meet Martha: perfect wife, perfect stepmother, perfect woman. She’s got an adoring husband who wants more kids with her, a loving stepdaughter who looks up to her, and a body to die for. She’s an absolute pro: Salon-quality blowouts at home? Done. Perfectly plated meals on the table every day? Effortless. Meticulously faked miscarriages so her husband won’t suspect the truth? Just hand over the Oscar now.
Martha is trans, so stealth even her family has no idea. She carved the woman she is out of the marble of a boy, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect what she’s built. When a mysterious chronic illness and its debilitating symptoms threaten to upend her existence, she starts experimental treatments and gives in to her surprising, unsettling cravings. She’s even more shocked to discover that she’s undeniably, impossibly pregnant.
With her body changing rapidly outside of her control and her choices dwindling, Martha struggles to maintain the life she’s fought so hard to live while preparing for the motherhood she never thought she’d have.
Samantha Josephs is a trans woman writer and semi-retired drag queen from New York City, now living in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s Writing for Screen and Television program, she’s written for podcasts, video games, apps, and erotica. Carrying is her debut novel.
The Case of the Caprice of Lost Time, Rune Christiansen, Kari Dickson (Tr)
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Two months following her mother’s death, Norma travels alone to visit her father, Torsten, with whom she has had a strained relationship since her parents divorced. Recently separated herself, Norma is at a crossroads in life and desperate to get away for a while. She views the chance to visit Torsten on the island where he now lives, in the family’s idyllic old summer home, as a much-needed retreat.
From the moment Norma steps off the ferry, a series of mysterious things begin to happen. While standing on the quay waiting for her father to pick her up, Norma sees the silhouette of a horseback rider under a twisted tree on a hillside. After an unknown woman visits Torsten in the middle of the night, it becomes increasingly clear to Norma that her evasive father is hiding something from her. Norma interprets each of these strange happenings as a sign and begins looking for answers to better understand herself and how her life has unfolded. With her beloved mother gone, only her emotionally distant father can provide them—unless the truth lies within herself.
Rune Christiansen is one of Norway’s most important literary writers and the author of over twenty books, including works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He has won many prestigious awards, including the 2014 Brage Prize for his bestselling novel The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life. Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest was shortlisted for the Brage Prize, and The Case of the Caprice of Lost Time won the French Transfuge Prize in 2023. Also a professor of creative writing, Christiansen lives just outside of Oslo, Norway.
Kari Dickson is a literary translator. She translates from Norwegian, and her work includes literary fiction, children’s books, theatre, and nonfiction. Some recent literary translations include Rune Christiansen’s Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest and The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life, and Mona Høvring’s Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day that I Was Born, co-translated by Rachel Rankin.She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature, and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and the National Centre for Writing. Dickson lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Something That Helps, Mona Høvring, Kari Dickson (Tr)
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Laura is in her late teens, living in a small coastal town in Western Norway, the summer before her final year of school. Haunted by the death of her mother by suicide, she has a strained relationship with her fisherman father and feels the absence of her brother and closest friend, both of whom have moved away. Equal parts lonely and bewildered, a lack of guidance has made her independent, determined, and vulnerable.
When Laura meets the older, more experienced Vivian Koller, the encounter sets in motion a series of events that will come to define her and her future. Crucial influences converge, pushing the simultaneously childish and adult protagonist into dark places—and eventually toward the start of a new life.
Mona Høvring is an award-winning Norwegian author of many acclaimed books, including eight poetry collections and six novels. She has been nominated for and won various prestigious awards, including the Unified Language Prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and the Dobloug Prize. Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day that I Was Born, translated into English by Kari Dickson in 2021, won the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature, was a finalist for the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, and was included on numerous best of the year book lists. Høvring lives just outside of Oslo, Norway.
Kari Dickson is a literary translator. She translates from Norwegian, and her work includes literary fiction, children’s books, theatre, and nonfiction. Some recent literary translations include Rune Christiansen’s Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest and The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life, and Mona Høvring’s Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day that I Was Born, co-translated by Rachel Rankin.She is also an occasional tutor in Norwegian language, literature, and translation at the University of Edinburgh, and has worked with the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and the National Centre for Writing. Dickson lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Interval Ownership: New Tales from Edisto, John Lane
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Thirteen owners rotate through a beach house on Edisto Island, South Carolina, four weeks a year, one week each season. They share a kitchen, a pool, a view of the ocean, and a set of storage lockers that nobody can agree on. John Lane’s Interval Ownership gives each owner a story. A singer-songwriter buries his mother and loses his father’s approval in the same afternoon. A therapist buys back his favorite chair from a thrift shop and gives away the replacements to a passing kid on a bicycle. An old man appears at a hedge and asks, again and again, if the pool is public. A couple races back to the island to find a missing ring. Two college friends hunt fossils on a winter beach and meet a fisherman who turns out to be Jasper Johns. These are comic and melancholy stories about what happens when people pour their lives into a place they only partly own. Lane writes about marriage and money, fathers and sons, faith and skepticism, race and belonging, memory and erosion. The island endures. The owners come and go, and somebody always leaves the Old Bay seasoning open.
John Lane is the author of two novels, Fate Moreland’s Widow and Whose Woods These Are. He has also published several dozen books of poetry and nonfiction. A cofounder of the Hub City Writers Project, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest, Alejandra Kamiya, Daniel Hahn (Tr)
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
In 12 stories of exquisite compression and perfectly-formed images, Japanese-Argentine writer Alejandra Kamiya conjures absences, shadows, and all that must remain unsaid.
As dawn breaks, a woman goes to the market in search of ingredients to make a perfect breakfast for her husband and son, while a subtle note of disquiet grows louder. A Japanese prisoner of war resolutely obeys a command as precise as it is inexplicable: he must dig a pit in a precise location until he receives another command, which never seems to arrive. 2 girls discover themselves through electrically charged games, which they will recall in letters for the rest of their lives.
In prose that is at once serene and shot through with disquiet and mourning, Kamiya creates a fictional world with its own rhythm, where preice, minimal phrasing reveals vast emotional landscapes. Enigmatic yet sharply clear, The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is a book of quietly shattering epiphanies from a unique voice in international fiction.
Revered in Argentina, where her diamond-sharp stories are championed by a legion of booksellers and readers, Kamiya has a strikingly clear and subtle style that will delight fans of Claire Keegan, Yuko Tsushima and Yiyun Li.
Alejandra Kamiya is a Japanese-Argentine writer. Born in Buenos Aires, she has published three collections of short stories and won numerous awards for her writing, including the Horacio Quiroga Award and the Konex Award. The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is her first book to be translated into English.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with around a hundred books to his name. His work includes translations from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. He is the winner of the 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.
The Furrow, Valérie Manteau, Claire Foster (Tr)
Publisher: Invisible Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
First published in France to major acclaim, The Furrow follows a French writer living with her lover in an Istanbul caught in the turmoil of Erdoğan’s rule. As the city around her strains under the weight of disorder and conflict, she discovers the story of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist whose life and assassination become a catalyzing force for Turkish resistance writ large and for the narrator’s own writerly ambition. Manteau’s singular rhythm and sinuous prose deliver a novel that stretches the seams of historical memory and personal narrative. As the narrator’s voice disintegrates into the tangled language of her community, Manteau asks us to question who is telling what story and why. At once a feminist reading and fervent defence of democracy, Manteau’s second novel—and first work to appear in English—galvanizes the reader to inhabit the feeling of collective resistance.
Winner of the Prix Renaudot, The Furrow arrives at a critical time in the contemporary zeitgeist, as authoritarianism becomes an ever greater presence across the world and collective action an ever more urgent imperative.
Valérie Manteau is a French writer and editor based in Marseille. Her novel The Furrow won the 2018 Prix Renaudot and has sold over 100,000 copies in France. She is also the author of Calme et tranquille (2016) and Entre chiens et loups (2025), and she was formerly a contributing editor to Charlie Hebdo.
Claire Foster is a writer, bookseller, and literary translator from French. She is the translator of Pierre Clémenti’s 1973 memoir, A Few Personal Messages (Small Press, 2022). Born and raised in Ohio, she lives and works in Toronto.
The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires, Will Dowd
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
When a vision disorder stole his ability to read, Will Dowd found himself exiled from the world of books—until he discovered an unusual path back through the landscape of dreams. Armed with an experimental dream-inception device from MIT, Dowd embarked on a yearlong odyssey into his own unconscious.
The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires chronicles twenty extraordinary dream narratives born from this first-of-its-kind experiment: A service dog navigates grief after his owner’s death. A time-travel tour guide loses tourists across centuries. An alien researcher falls in love with Earth despite himself. The stories in this collection emerge from a mind at its most unguarded, each one intimate, strange, and deeply human.
Part literary experiment, part exploration of consciousness, The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires reveals how dreams, like books, can become portals to other worlds—wild, untamable places where the impossible is married to the everyday and even exile can become a form of homecoming.
Will Dowd is a writer and artist based outside Boston. His debut book, Areas of Fog, was named a Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read.” He is an editorial cartoonist for The Boston Globe, a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine, and author of the widely read newsletter The Lunar Dispatch.
Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table, Mohammed Husayn Alnaas, Sawad Hussain (Tr)
Publisher: HarperVia
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Milad has always found comfort in the rituals of the kitchen—the steady rhythm of preparing meals, the warmth of fresh bread, the quiet satisfaction of caring for those he loves. But in a society where a man’s worth is measured by entirely different standards, he fails to live up to his father’s expectations of a man.
It’s only after marrying his childhood sweetheart Zainab that he can embrace being himself, performing domestic household duties while she becomes the family breadwinner. But while the unconventional arrangement suits the couple, Milad earns his village’s scorn and a series of tragic events are set into motion.
Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Mohammed Alnaas’s explosive debut is an unflinching but deeply compassionate novel about love, belonging, and the cost of defying what’s expected of you.
Mohammed Alnaas, a novelist and freelance journalist, was born in 1991 in Tajoura, Libya. He writes about gender roles, freedom of speech, social norms, cinema, and other marginalized aspects of life in his country. In 2022, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which was awarded to his debut novel Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table. Alnaas is an editor at alpheratzmag.com.
Sawad Hussain is an Arabic translator and litterateur with a particular passion for bringing narratives from Africa to a wider audience. Her work has been recognized by English PEN, the Anglo-Omani Society and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, among others. She has been a judge for, inter alia, the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award, and has run translation workshops under the auspices of organizations as varied as Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. Her most recent translations include Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table (HarperVia) and Asad’s Secret (Levine Querido). A former co-chair of the Translators Association in the UK, Sawad has been the Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation (2022), Wasafiri (2024-25) and Princeton University (2025). In a past life, she lectured at the IAIS at the University of Exeter, and taught Arabic (KS3 & KS4) in Johannesburg and Dubai. She lives in Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and her oeuvre can be further explored at www.sawadhussain.com.
The Thrill of It, Mandy Beaumont
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In March of 1989, Emmerson Kerr is alone.
One morning listening to her Walkman, a newsreader’s words stop her dead. ‘A warning to our listeners that this story is graphic in nature. The body of an 84-year-old woman has been found in the foyer of her apartment building on Sydney’s lower North Shore … ‘
Emmerson stood, held in place like an anchor, like a nail in wood, like the breath of a frightened woman alone in her home. She listened to the details and remembered back to that day, twelve years before, in her grandmother’s Paddington studio. The 1977 murder of Marlowe Kerr – Sydney’s art darling and socialite, a woman known for her lavish parties and her world-famous designs, but known to Emmerson as her colourful, loving grandmother – never solved.
And now, years later, a terrifying string of crimes against older women will begin, will force ageing female residents to lock themselves inside their homes. They will be in a state of constant fear. And, as the killer’s reign of terror escalates, and Emmerson starts to unearth her beloved grandmother’s shady past, she becomes increasingly convinced that the same person who killed Marlowe is also responsible for the depravity that is now unfolding in the city she has always called home.
Could Emmerson be the link to solving Marlowe’s murder and help catch the killer before they kill again?
Mandy Beaumont‘s debut novel The Furies was longlisted for the prestigious Stella Prize and shortlisted for the MUD Literary Prize as well as the Queensland Literary Awards Fiction Book of the Year. Her collection of short stories, Wild, Fearless Chests, was shortlisted for the Richell Prize and the Dorothy Hewett Award. Stories from the collection also won the MOTH International Short Story Prize and were shortlisted for other notable awards. She was a convenor in creative writing and communications at Griffith University for over a decade, and holds a PhD and a Research Masters in creative writing. She is also a regular feature writer and book reviewer for The Big Issue.
The Names of the New World, Kawai Strong Washburn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
A ferocious superstorm strikes Minneapolis, obliterating swaths of the city in minutes. In its wake, three people forge an unlikely bond that will shape their lives for the next twenty-five years: Naomi, a lawyer and an amateur MMA fighter, is a Pacific Islander transplanted to the Midwest for her less-than-satisfying career; Amaré, an investment banker, has grand designs for all the money he’s about to make; and Raheem, a diesel mechanic, is nearly paralyzed by the storm and struggles to save his business.
When Naomi recognizes that energy companies are responsible for the climate-induced superstorm—and the many more to come, potentially dooming her island homeland—she initiates a bitter legal battle, one that culminates in her appointment to a powerful political office in DC with the potential to prevent future tragedies. Yet her rise risks a burgeoning romance with Amaré, whose own ambitions test Naomi’s ethical limits, while Raheem’s fate as a small business owner depends on the couple’s growing power.
Following his much-loved debut, Kawai Strong Washburn turns his gift of mythic sight to the oceans and landscapes we so often overlook in the name of progress. Ranging from the American Midwest to the nation’s halls of power to islands across the Pacific, The Names of the New World is a startling, energetic, and optimistic vision of how we’ll live in this era of overwhelming change.
Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors, his first novel, was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award.
The Fourth Wall, Sorj Chalandon
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
The International Literary Sensation – half a million copies sold globally. Beirut, 1982, at the outbreak of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the young French activist George has been tasked by his old friend Samuel – a Greek Jewish resistance fighter and theatre director – with staging a performance of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone in the Lebanese city. With a cast composed of those on all sides – Palestinian, Christian, Druze, Jewish, Shiite, Sunni, Chaldean and Armenian – and a stage caught amid the chaos and destruction of the approaching war, Georges and Sam hope that this radical act of art may spark the beginnings of peace and reconciliation. Their aspirations, however, are soon confronted by the brutal realities of the conflict and the true price of violence. Profound, harrowing and as urgently relevant as ever, The Fourth Wall is a stunning literary novel, informed by the author’s own experiences as a journalist in the Middle East. Winner of the Prix Goncourt des lycéens and le Choix de l’Orient.
Sorj Chalandon was a reporter for Libération from 1974 to 2008, during which time he was awarded the Albert Londres prize for his writing on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his reporting on the trial of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie. He went on to work for Le Canard Enchaîné. He is the author of a dozen novels, all originally published in French by Éditions Grasset. His numerous literary awards include Le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, le Prix Médicis, and le Prix du Style. His 2013 novel Le Quatriéme Mur won the prestigious Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the Goncourt de l’Orient, among other accolades, and has been adapted for stage and screen, and translated into 10 languages. The novel was translated into English by Cheney Crow in 2026 as The Fourth Wall.
Huckleberry Jim, Adam Nelson
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
A darkly funny 1991 road novel about two actors touring a stripped-down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America-publishing during Banned Books Week, in the year of America’s 250th. For readers of Percival Everett’s James.
A darkly funny road novel about two actors touring a stripped-down Huckleberry Finn through a hostile America – publishing during Banned Books Week, in the year of America’s Semiquincentennial, and the 150th anniversary of Tom Sawyer. Inspired by real events.
Axel Emerson isn’t chasing a dream – he’s running from a body. After the sudden death of his estranged father, and the detective’s calls that follow, a washed-up casting agent offers him an exit: tour the schools as Huck Finn in a stripped-down, two-man stage version of the American classic.
It’s 1991, and the country is cracking open.
His co-star is Moses Morton, a fifty-five-year-old Black actor cast as Jim, and from the first moment, Moses sees straight through him. As the two-man company drives from one school gymnasium to another, performing Twain’s text to American children in the year of Anita Hill, the Rodney King brutality, and the height of the culture wars, the road between them becomes a slow reckoning with race, performance, fatherhood, and what it costs to play another man’s part.
When performance and reality finally collide, there’s no script left to hide behind.
A Publishers Weekly BookLife Editor’s Pick, Huckleberry Jim is a reckoning with race, guilt, and the bedtime stories America tells itself to sleep at night. For readers of Percival Everett’s James and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.
Adam Nelson has lived at the intersection of performance and American storytelling for more than three decades – as an actor, filmmaker, and founder of Workhouse, the New York public relations agency he has run since 1999, representing filmmakers, artists, and cultural institutions. A professor at the New Jersey Film Academy, he is a merit winner of the Writer’s Digest International Screenplay Competition. His debut novel, Huckleberry Jim – a BookLife Editor’s Pick, longlisted for The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Prize in the top 3% of submissions – draws on his own 1991 tour performing a two-man Huckleberry Finn for schools across the Northeast. It publishes October 6, 2026, during Banned Books Week, with the audiobook simultaneously from Blackstone Publishing.
Life Out of Order, Audrey Niffenegger
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Alba DeTamble has never lived a life in order. Born with the same rare Chrono-Displacement Disorder as her father, Henry DeTamble, Alba is an involuntary time traveler: she slips unpredictably through decades, carrying the weight of futures she can’t understand and pasts she cannot change. Yet she strives to maintain a normal life: as a gifted violinist, Alba finds refuge in her music, as well as her tight-knit community of rebels, artists, and activists who fight against the forces of a world teetering on the edge of collapse.
As she dips in and out of an increasingly fraught and unstable future, Alba is haunted by secrets she must keep from those she loves most, including Zach, her safe, supportive anchor in the chaos. Her journey takes her from the riots of Chicago’s streets to the eerie refuge of the Yellow House – where she meets Oliver, a fellow time traveler and handsome musician – to the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls, a virtual sanctuary of forgotten memories and lost artifacts. Curating the museum is Isadora, Alba’s secretive stepsister and an increasingly unsettling presence in their family – whose fate may be intertwined with Alba’s in more dangerous ways than she knows.
At once intimate and sweeping, Life Out of Order is a kaleidoscopic tale of love, resilience, and hope amid our fractured world where time itself is the greatest adversary. With every leap through the years, Alba is forced to reckon with the choices that define her, the people she cannot let go of, and the question that haunts every time traveler: can you ever truly belong to the present?
Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist. She has published two novels, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, and many illustrated books including The Night Bookmobile, The Three Incestuous Sisters, and Raven Girl. She received her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University. Her art is in the collections of the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University, among others. She has spent much of her life in or near Chicago, where she helped found the Center for the Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and served on the faculty of the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College until 2015. She splits her time between Chicago and London.
Patchwork in White, Jana Bodnárová, Isabel Stainsby (Tr)
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
For more than three decades, Jana Bodnárová has been one of Slovak literature’s most distinctive voices, writing with a lyricism that is at once tender and unflinchingly harsh. Patchwork in White is a brief yet powerful novel that stitches together fragments of lives bound by intimacy, difference, and care, set against the social fabric of Czechoslovakia from the mid-1950s to the present.
At the center of the novel are Ota and Andrej, a couple whose shared memories unfold through shards of childhood, marriage, and parenthood. Their lives are irrevocably shaped by the decision to adopt albino twins—children marked by abuse and exclusion because of their otherness. As these fragments accumulate, the novel becomes a meditation on motherhood, femininity, love, and the quiet imminence of death.
Poetic, restrained, and brutally honest, Bodnárová’s prose finds resonance in what is left unsaid. Illustrations by Eva Moflárová deepen the book’s emotional texture, creating a work of rare intimacy and moral force.
Jana Bodnárová was born in former Czechoslovakia. In addition to publishing books of prose, poetry, works for children, radio plays, and screenplays for television, she has also created and presented video performances both in domestic galleries and on experimental theatre stages abroad.
Isabel Stainsby is a translator with extensive experience in French, German, Czech, and Slovak.
A Room Above a Shop, Anthony Shapland
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
M has inherited his family’s ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above – the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.
Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.
Anthony Shapland grew up in Bargoed, South Wales. He is a writer and artist, and founder of G39, an artist-led space in Cardiff. His short story ‘Foolscap’ was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Award and he was selected for the Hay Writers at Work programme in 2023. This is his debut.
Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo Mbue
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Three years ago, Wolo’s wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.
Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo’s family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father’s second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared.
What do we owe those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.
Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African village’s fight against an American oil company, was named by the New York Times as “One of the 10 Best Books” of 2021. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue lives in New York.
Fair Ones: A Double Novel, Lydia Millet
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Lydia Millet’s dialogue-driven, fast-moving double novel Fair Ones follows two Brooklyn women in their forties reeling from the sudden and baffling death of their friend Claire. Fair, Mara’s account, opens in the wake of initial shock as she and Jen come to grips with the enigma of Claire’s killing. Ones, told from Jen’s point of view, picks up a year later as she and Mara wrestle with new relationships and old secrets.
In this vibrant, funny-sad fiction of companionship and solitude, Millet dazzles with dry wit and sharp prose. The narrators’ inner and outer conversations, and their ongoing entanglement with the memory of Claire, explore the ways we create and define ourselves through others. Fair Ones is a love song to the intricate annoyances of families both chosen and unchosen—and to the banality, bombast, and humble beauties of midlife friendships.
Lydia Millet is the author of more than twenty books, including A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times “10 Best Books” of the year in 2020, and a story collection called Love in Infant Monkeys that was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Other books have won awards from PEN-Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Millet works at the Center for Biological Diversity and lives outside Tucson, Arizona.
Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; Inherent Vice; and Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.
If the Dead Belong Here, Carson Faust
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.
Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted—both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family—and a people—determined to heal from old wounds.
Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota.
Conversation with the Sea, Hugo Hamilton
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Fleeing his failed marriage in Berlin, Lukas Dorn revisits the West of Ireland, the place of his honeymoon two decades earlier. While his former wife is being cancelled at work and his daughter is arrested at a street protest, he tries to make sense of his broken life with a journal as his sole companion.
His inherited memory of the Nazi Holocaust comes face to face with the present when he meets a refugee from a recent warzone. As Lukas communes with the elements in this wild coastal place, he is forced into a confrontation with the past that will carry him to the edge of existence.
Conversation with the Sea speaks with heart-rending tenderness to the present moment, as it explores truth, illusion and the deadly silencing of war in a captivating tale of love in a time of displacement.
Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People, a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. It was translated into twenty languages and adapted for stage at the Gate Theatre. He has published ten novels including Dublin Palms and The Pages, a collection of short stories, and a second memoir The Sailor in the Wardrobe. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz order of merit, awarded by the German state for his exploration of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.
Vaim Hotel, Jon Fosse, Damion Searls (Tr)
Publisher: Transit Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
No one knows why The Guest has traveled to Vaim. He checks into the Vaim Hotel, whose only other inhabitant is Brita, the domineering proprietor who swears she’s seen him before and slips into his daily wanderings. As he acquaints himself with village life, The Guest soon learns that Vaim is not like other places. Then things start to vanish: his new fishing pole; his wallet, bag, and car keys. With no way to pay his bill, The Guest must accept that his short trip has become an indefinite stay.
Suffused with dark humor and “mystical realism” (The Guardian), Vaim Hotel—which can be read on its own or as the second of a loose triptych—occupies the intersection of the mundane and the uncanny. It’s a mesmerizing tragicomic novel unfolding a world caught between temporal reality and otherworldly implications—where everything is as it’s been, and nothing is as it seems.
Jon Fosse is one of Norway’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.
The Given World, Melissa Harrison
Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the ancient Welm Valley, something is shifting: the river is behaving oddly, while the arrival of spring, with its familiar rhythms, is shadowed by an undercurrent of unease.
A woman falls while out walking and hopes to be found before nightfall; a builder experiences sudden, overwhelming vertigo on a farmhouse roof; across the village, people are plagued by the same vast, strange dream. And alone in the converted priory, overlooking watermeadows unchanged for centuries, Clare Grey receives devastating news which will force her to reconsider her family’s past and the fresh weight of her solitary existence.
Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer, podcaster and children’s author. Her 2018 novel All Among the Barley was the UK winner of the European Prize for Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk.
Objects of Desire: Stories, Adam O’ Fallon Price
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Objects of Desire, Price’s debut short story collection, is filled with people driven by restless longings and unattainable desires—pushed to act by needs only half-understood—all the while picking up unintended bedfellows and conspirators: A resentful brother grapples with the responsibility of bone marrow donation for his dying sibling. A down-on-his-luck artist chases his dog through a cornfield and into the home of dangerous strangers. A college women’s soccer goalie takes her pain out on her opponents, as she struggles to process her childhood and forgive her mother.
Price shows us how the aching, often desperate, pull of wanting can unsettle our lives. The characters in this collection are consistently reaching for something more, only to miss the mark in quiet but irreversible ways.
Adam O’Fallon Price is the author of two novels, The Grand Tour (Doubleday, 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (Tin House Books, 2019), which won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. He received an MFA from Cornell University, and his short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Born in Los Angeles, he grew up in the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Tennessee. He now lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, and teaches fiction writing at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Wine Club, J.L. Vox
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
From the sunlit hills of Tuscany to quiet nights in Canada, Paul and Neo’s story unfolds like a glass of wine—layered, complex, and deeply human. Through shared journeys, laughter, and painful silences, father and son discover that it is never too late to open a bottle or to open a heart.
Poetic, heartfelt, and rich with imagery, The Wine Club invites individuals to reflect on the ties that endure across generations. With each unfolding scene, it offers an intimate exploration of how wine, memory, and family intertwine. Those who open these pages will be transported to vineyards and kitchens, to moments of regret and reconciliation, and to the timeless spaces where heritage meets hope.
The Wine Club calls on people everywhere to savor connection, embrace authenticity, and cherish the stories that give life its deepest meaning.
J. L. Vox writes emotionally driven fiction about family, memory, travel, and the hidden weight of unfinished conversations. His stories are rooted in real places and intimate human moments — the kind found at dinner tables, on winding roads, in old photographs, and in the silences between parents and children. Drawing from a lifelong love of travel, storytelling, wine, and history, Vox creates novels where landscapes are not simply settings, but emotional turning points. The Wine Club is his debut novel.
Monaghan, Timothy O’Grady
Publisher: Wilton Square Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and teller of this tale, is a celebrated theorist of postmodern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multimillion-dollar career as an investment banker. And the mysterious Ryan, who drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Through him, the war in Ireland and its psychic legacy are brought into close focus in a way rarely seen in contemporary fiction.
Their lives merge and conflict, rise and fall, as one man becomes the undoing of the next. Hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and profound, this is a novel about what happens when you cannot escape your past, featuring drawings and paintings by Anthony Lott.
Timothy O’Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and four novels. His novel Motherland won the David Higham Prize for the best first novel in 1989. His novel I Could Read the Sky, a collaboration with photographer Steve Pyke, won the Encore Award for best second novel of 1997. It was filmed and also travelled as a stage show.
The Occidental Book of the Dead, T. Geronimo Johnson
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.
After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.
When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.
Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with his trademark virtuosic dissonance, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of corruption and conspiracy in a nation divided.
Born and raised in the American South, T. Geronimo Johnson is the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville, longlisted for the National Book Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence; and Hold It ’Til It Hurts, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He won the inaugural Joyce Carol Oates Award, the Rome Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the William Saroyan International Prize, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he later taught writing, and has held Stegner and Iowa Arts fellowships.
One Part Ocean, Dominique Fortier, Rhonda Mullins (Tr)
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
While writing Moby Dick, Herman Melville meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, an encounter that alters the course of his life and his novel. From this true story of friendship, only a handful of Melville’s letters remain. Inspired by the surviving correspondence, Dominique Fortier imagines the passionate relationship between the two authors: their desires, their domestic arrangements, Melville’s struggle to write, and Hawthorne’s powerful hold over Melville.
Melville’s story is interspersed with the frantic scribbling of Lizzie, his wife, her words flying onto the page, her stream of consciousness ideas and talents not given the same time and space to develop as her husband’s.
A third exchange unfolds between Fortier as she is writing the book and a companion who is half real, half imagined, a man she says is primarily a poem. Forming a bridge between past and present, Fortier’s novel braids together these three parts, telling the story of the most beautiful of shipwrecks, Moby Dick.
Writer and translator, Dominique Fortier weaves together novel, poetry, and essay to build a body of work exploring history, fiction, and the self. Her first novel, Du bon usage des étoiles (On the Proper Use of Stars), was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and Au péril de la mer (The Island of Books) won the Governor General’s Award for French fiction. Les villes de papier (Paper Houses) won France’s Prix Renaudot – Essai and has been translated into fifteen languages. Fortier is a member of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco literary council.
Rhonda Mullins is a Montréal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’s The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Pale Shadows, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Her translation of Dominique Fortier’s Pale Shadows was nominated for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. Her translations have been contenders for CBC Canada Reads in 2015 and 2019, and one was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.
The Red Dress, Frank Huyler
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Nick, in the wake of a failed marriage, settles for the relative ease of a well-paid job captaining a luxury yacht, but it leaves little time for his seven-year-old daughter Natalie. In a stroke of good fortune, he is offered a mysterious yet lucrative opportunity that allows Natalie to tag along, and they are soon flying across the globe in a private jet. The workload proves light and they are encouraged to enjoy the sun, surf, and island amenities—but they must wear customized digital glasses that shield the identities of his employers. When Natalie is invited to play with their children and her treasured red dress disappears, Nick discovers that everything is not as it seems, and what began as a grand adventure warps into an unsettling mirage.
An exploration of extreme privilege, global inequality, and the power of emerging technology, The Red Dress is also an eloquent story about our search for connection that raises essential questions about what we owe to ourselves and those we love.
Frank Huyler is the author of three novels, including The Red Dress, and two books about his work as an emergency physician: The Blood of Strangers, considered a classic of medical writing, and White Hot Light, a finalist for the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. His books have been widely translated, and his poems, essays, and opinion pieces have appeared in many publications, including the Atlantic, American Scholar, Guardian, New York Daily News, Vice, and Washington Post. Huyler practices medicine in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Big Man, Dean Atta
Publisher: Cipher Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Big Man follows the life of Big, a middle-aged, Black British gay man who lives a gentle life with his boyfriend, Little, in their home in East London. Big and Little enjoy evenings out and group holidays with friends, as much as practising yoga together at home, and running side by side along the Hackney canals.
Big came of age in the club scene under the watchful eye of Mother, an African American trans woman who made a home and a name for herself in London, her house a refuge for wayward queer youth like Big. When he finds out Mother is releasing a memoir, the two reconnect after decades of distance, and Big finds himself having to confront a long-repressed assault that opens old – and new – wounds.
A tender, daring novel full of gentle humour, Big Man explores themes of identity, aging, sex, family, and trauma, turning a lens on what it means to age as a queer person, while being a double-edged love letter to the people and places that make us.
Dean Atta is the author of YA novels-in-verse The Black Flamingo and Only on the Weekends and a poet named as ‘one of poetry’s greatest modern voices’ (Gay Times). The Black Flamingo was a top-selling debut of 2020 and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, CILIP Carnegie Medal, The Jhalak Prize and The YA Book Prize. It was also awarded the prestigious Stonewall Book Award and the Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice Award 2020, and sold to the US in a five-way publisher auction. He is co-writer of the BAFTA and BIFA nominated short film Two Black Boys in Paradise. Big Man is his adult debut.
In Out, Joe Conroy
Publisher: Cipher Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
It’s the end of 2015. For our narrator, every day is mostly the same; a visit to the local corner shop to retrieve a blue plastic bag of wine and off-brand cheese puffs before falling into the sofa crevice to get drunk, get high, and stare at the television.
He was ‘normal’ once – he held up a job at a fashion magazine (that his mother got him) and wore nice clothes and showered and cleaned his teeth and bitched about his boss. Now, the only people who visit are his busy, narcissistic mother, his annoying stepsister, Olivia, and the men he finds on Grindr to pay for his meals.
When one of his dates leads to assault, he finds himself suddenly sober and back at his mother’s, a fancy suburban townhouse that betrays her Scouse roots. As weeks go by, he starts to slowly unravel, along with their already complicated relationship, and when, months later, he’s asked to perform his duty as her son at a Women of the Year party in her honour, his past and present collide with catastrophic consequences.
At once a propulsive and hilarious debut that charges towards oblivion, and a dissociated depiction of queer loneliness and self-destruction, In Out gives us a new kind of antihero grappling with life in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, exploring what it means to be untethered along with ideas of masculinity, class, family, and addiction.
Joe Conroy (b. 2002) is a writer from Liverpool. In Out, his debut novel, is set for publication on October 1st, 2026.
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