Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son, Nico, in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.” As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general --- and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at 18 for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

Maggie thinks she’s finally found the love of her life. Theo is charming, passionate and crazy about her. So when Theo mysteriously disappears, Maggie certainly doesn’t expect that he’s gone for good --- let alone stolen her life savings, heart and self-esteem. Now she’s living in a caravan in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere, left to pick up the pieces. When junior reporter Flick catches wind of the story, she decides that exposing the romance fraudster may be just the career break she needs. The pair embark on the road trip of their lives, where unexpected twists, hidden secrets and hard truths are revealed. And, as an unlikely friendship begins to blossom, they realize it’s not just about finding the guy, it’s about finding themselves.

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn’t? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.

Already the gateway for illegal Canadian liquor during Prohibition, the Motor City becomes a crucible for American class conflict during the Great Depression, with an army of laid-off Ford workers drifting into the ranks of the burgeoning union movement. To keep the hundreds of thousands still employed by Henry Ford in thrall, he recruits black laborers migrating from the deep South to serve as “strike insurance.” The Model T mogul also has bought a sizable chunk of Brazil's Amazonian rainforest, vowing to grow his own rubber for tires, but stubbornly refusing to include a botanist in his troop of would-be jungle tamers. As a series of biological plagues descend on the Fordlandia plantation, the racial melting pot he has created in Detroit begins to boil over, and not even the Sage of Dearborn can control the forces that have been unleashed.

Writing can feel like an endless series of decisions. How does one face the blank page? Move a character around a room? Deal with time? Undertake revision? The good and bad news is that in fiction writing, there are no definitive answers to such questions: writers must come up with their own. Elizabeth McCracken has been teaching for more than 35 years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A LONG GAME, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. Writing “is a long game,” she notes. “What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.”

Tenderhearted Galilee was raised by the Kincaids, a formidable clan of Black women sequestered deep in the weeping willows and dark rushing creeks of their land. Galilee has always known that she’s different --- that there is an old and unknowable secret around her very existence. Lucifer Helel is fronting as the head of security for her wealthy friend Oriaku’s family, protecting a mysterious, ancient artifact. But from the moment she lays eyes on him, Galilee knows he’s not human. From her first incendiary touch, Lucifer knows something even Galilee herself doesn’t --- that she isn’t human either. Leviathan, Lucifer’s most trusted prince of Hell, is determined to eliminate the intolerable danger that is Galilee before she brings death and disaster to those he loves. But Lucifer and Galilee’s attraction threatens to bring all the structures of their existence crashing down around them.

“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, BREAD OF ANGELS takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry and then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave and Easter.

If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry --- and relate.) Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband, Nick, and their daughter, Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in. It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal…until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them --- and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom.