New Books: Fiction

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.

Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power the means by which he intends to rule Middle Earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring - the ring that rules them all, which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

The armies of the Dark Lord are massing as his evil shadow spreads even wider. Men, dwarves, elves and ents unite forces to do battle against the dark. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam struggle further into Mordor in their heroic quest to destroy the one ring. The devastating conclusion of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic tale, begun in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, which includes the appendices and index in full.

Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of existence, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of Communist Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, and a visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges--Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. This is a missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each.

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.

2025 Booker Prize Winner. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, six astronauts and cosmonauts have left their lives behind to travel at warp speed as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen. Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.

Frodo and the Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. Now they continue their journey alone down the great River Anduin--alone, that is, save for the mysterious creeping figure that follows wherever they go.

"There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now," proclaims guest editor Lauren Groff in her introduction. This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Short Stories 2024 boasts a collection of twenty stories that "buzz with their own strange logic." A man becomes a tourist in his own hometown. An unemployed jeweler sails in an antique slave ship. A therapist decides to call an ex-patient years after their last session.