New Books: Fiction

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing--not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a 'Prairie Witch,' whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples' memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch's apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer with a time-traveling camera.

Birdie splits her days between caring for her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen, and working as a waitress at a roadside lodge in Alaska. Arthur is a soft-spoken recluse who calls the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River his home and lives completely off the grid, appearing in the town at random intervals. But when he shows up at Birdie's lodge one day, the two form a friendship, and they eventually fall in love. When Birdie and Emaleen move to Arthur's remote cabin, life initially seems idyllic. But as the days shorten Birdie begins to realize that the truth of Arthur's life is much more complicated and mysterious than she understood.

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist reeling from the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed in a cult called The Nameless. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, The Nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as "There is no god but the nameless," "All suffering is distortion," and "See only beauty." Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of The Nameless, extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult's inner workings, compassionate teachings, and closer to Odo.

Gail Baines is long divorced from her husband, Max, and not especially close to her grown daughter, Debbie. Today is the day before Debbie's wedding. To start, Gail loses her job--or quits, depending who you ask. Then, Max arrives unannounced on Gail's doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay and without even a suit in which to walk their daughter down the aisle. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband-to-be. It will not only throw the wedding itself into question but also send Gail back into her past and how her own relationship fell apart.

July 1962. A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family's youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren't telling her.

Big Jim and the White Boy is a radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, centering the experiences of Jim, an enslaved Black man in search of his kidnapped wife and children, along with his cheeky sidekick, Huckleberry Finn. Jim and Huck's high-stakes adventures take them on an epic voyage across the antebellum South and Midwest, through Confederate war camps and runaway safe houses, into Old West standoffs, and on the road as covert Underground Railroad agents.

A sweeping story about four women whose lives are shaped by love, longing, and pain. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in the U.S. who is unlucky in love and coping with the pandemic on her own. Zikora is a successful lawyer living in Washington, DC, who finds herself, unexpectedly, a heartbroken single mother. Omelogor is a scholar researching pornography for a master's thesis in Women's Studies. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka's housekeeper, is trying to reclaim her dignity after a terrible sexual assault. In Dream Count, we come to know these interesting and complicated women as they navigate their complex lives.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones," "The Chaser," and "The Masker."

Adopted into the Cherokee tribe as a teenager, William Holland Thomas (1805-93), known to the Cherokees as Wil Usdi (Little Will), went on to have a distinguished career as lawyer, politician, and soldier. He spent the last decades of his life in a mental hospital, where the pioneering ethnographer James Mooney interviewed him extensively about Cherokee lifeways. The true story of Wil Usdi's life forms the basis for this historical novella, the final published work of fiction by the late award-winning Cherokee author Robert J. Conley.

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears, and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between the real world and the dream world, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he's been missing all along.