New Release Radar – March 31, 2026
There are weeks when the new releases feel like noise, and weeks when they feel like someone curated them just for you. This is one of the latter.
We’ve been watching what’s arriving on shelves and a few things have stopped us cold. Some we already have. Some we’ve ordered. All of them earned a second look.
Ruins
Lily Brooks-Dalton
Professor Ember Agni is a rising star in archeology, trying to balance an unfulfilling career in academia and a crumbling marriage, all while pursuing her true passion: unearthing a lost empire that no one else believes existed. Just as she’s about to give up on the ambitious expedition she spent a decade trying to fund, a message arrives from overseas. A former student claims to have found something extraordinary—an artifact that hints at the forgotten world lying beneath history’s tidy surface.
With vindication finally within reach, Ember risks everything for the sake of discovery and undertakes an odyssey that will either make her name or ruin her. Driven by unwavering faith in her vision of the past, she challenges the limits of her nation, her colleagues, and herself in order to exhume the missing pieces of how humanity began. But as she journeys deep into an untouched wilderness, in dogged pursuit of a dead civilization, she collides with the wreckage of her own life.
On the brink of either discovery or destruction, Ember must choose who she wants to be, and to what kind of world she wants to belong.
Son of Nobody: A Novel
Yann Martel
From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.
The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time—until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later.
As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief.
Son of Nobody takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, always.
American Han: A Novel
Lisa Lee
“American Han shook me to my core. Gutting in its quietest moments and heartbreakingly familiar in its loudest conflicts, this book is a gripping portrait of the cost of assimilation into American life.”
—Muriel Leung, Lambda award-winning author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player.
But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don’t want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn’t all it promised it would be.
Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.
How to Survive the End of the World: A Graphic Exploration of How to (Maybe) Avoid Extinction
Katy Doughty, Katy Doughty (Illustrated by)
Since 99.9 percent of all species that have lived are extinct, it’s bound to be our turn eventually, right? So what’s most likely to kill us? A well-timed asteroid? Some new robot overlords? With wit and dry humor, debut graphic novelist Katy Doughty blends science and history to explore our chances of surviving disasters such as plagues, global warming, and alien invasion. Drawing on interviews with experts in fields like infectious diseases, AI, and interplanetary exploration, she combines cutting-edge research with compelling visuals: mugshots of the deadliest microbes, graphs of the winners and losers of mass extinction events, and a whole lot of dinosaur drawings. For apocalypse aficionados, the morbidly curious, and the just plain curious, this is your antidote to existential dread—a timely, imaginative, and ultimately hopeful take on humankind’s ability to survive the odds.
Upward Bound
Woody Brown
Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth; then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.
In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won’t soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center’s doors.
A Good Person
Kirsten King
Lillian and Henry have been enjoying each other’s company, particularly in bed. Even though Lillian’s best (and only) friend calls it a “situationship,” Lillian knows better. And she has a plan to lock Henry down. She’ll be the best, most accommodating version of herself until he falls in love with her. But when Henry blindsides Lillian with a breakup instead of a love declaration, Lillian is left with no choice but to exact revenge with a hex.
Lillian expects Henry to grovel and come crawling back to her. What she doesn’t anticipate is becoming a prime suspect in his murder case when he’s found dead.
Desperate to control the narrative, clear her name, and assume her rightful place as Henry’s mourning girlfriend, Lillian’s pursuit of the truth will throw her into a dangerous tailspin, which may just upend her life for good.
A deliciously addictive novel that explores our darkest, most human impulses, A Good Person heralds Kirsten King as a striking new voice in fiction.
Only a Little While Here: A Novel
María Ospina, Heather Cleary (Translated by)
Winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize • Winner of Colombia’s National Novel Award
This prizewinning novel interweaves four animal odysseys in a gripping, adventurous meditation on migration and displacement in the inextricable human and natural worlds.
In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes the gratification to be found through close, humble observation of nature. With characteristic precision and intensity, Ospina trains our attention on the lives of five creatures: a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights, an orphaned porcupine saved by kindness, two dogs grieving the loss of their human companions, and a determined beetle transported to a vast, unimaginable world. The surprising drama of their lives reveals the fragility and power of belonging, and what it means to create—or lose—a home. Along the way, our narrator models the attentiveness needed to mend the rift between humans and non-human creatures and celebrates animals’ often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world.
Alive with eagle-eyed curiosity, Only a Little While Here is ecological fiction at its most soul stirring.
Mothers and Other Strangers: A Novel
Corey Ann Haydu
Two estranged childhood best friends reunite as expectant mothers, after a mysterious falling-out between their own mothers keeps them apart for years. Perfect for readers of Claire Lombardo and J. Courtney Sullivan.
When Sydney and Mae meet on the playground as toddlers, it seems like kismet. Even their very different mothers—the Type-A Beth Ann and the free-spirited Joni—agree the girls are made for each other, and it’s not long before even the mothers become inseparable.
Then a falling out draws them apart, and decades later, the loneliness still lingers for the newly pregnant Sydney. Adrift in the absence of her closest friend, Sydney has been drawn into a Multi-Level Marketing scheme, exacerbated by the demands of her inflexible mother, Beth Ann, whose constant scrutiny seems reserved only for her daughter.
Across the city, Mae is stunned to find herself single, pregnant, and still haunted by the loss of her mercurial late mother, Joni, whose mysterious death holds as many unanswered questions as Mae does herself. Mae is an artist who has lived under the shadow of the one painting (of two girls) that made her famous years ago, the success of which confines as much as it defines her.
When Sydney and Mae find themselves back in one another’s lives, each with a baby girl on the horizon, it once again seems like destiny. Each begins to pull the other away from the coercive influence of outsiders—mommy groups, marketing schemes, artistic pressures, and ex-boyfriends. But the two women will soon discover that it’s not destiny that has drawn them together this time, but a devastating secret at the center of their orbits—a truth that finally will bind them or shatter them, for good.
An intimate and searing novel about mothers and daughters, and destiny and desire, Mothers and Other Strangers takes a full-hearted look at those relationships in life that are as impossible as they are utterly essential.
The Traitor: A Novel
Kobo Abe, Mark Gibeau (Translated by)
In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.
Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.
Yevgeny Onegin
Alexander Pushkin, Antony Briggs (Translated by)
Arguably the jewel in the crown of Russia’s greatest writer, Yevgeny Onegin is Alexander Pushkin’s sublime masterpiece of love, death, dueling, rivalry, identity and the search for happiness.
The aristocratic Yevgeny Onegin has come into his inheritance, leaving the glamour of St Petersburg’s social life to take up residence at his uncle’s large country estate. Master of the nonchalant bow, the aristocratic and aloof Onegin is the very model of a social butterfly – a fickle dandy, liked by all for his quick wit and easy ways.
When the shy and passionate Tatyana becomes hopelessly infatuated with him, Onegin rejects her with brutal condescension. Swiftly moving on, he carelessly diverts himself by flirting with her sister, Olga, sowing the seeds for future disaster and heartbreak.
By turns playful, philosophical, sardonic and mournful, brimming with rich descriptions of Russian life, from drinking and dancing to crisp wintry landscapes, Yevgeny Onegin is a work of thrilling energy. This deft and vibrant translation by Anthony Briggs, acclaimed translator of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, brilliantly conveys this vitality, capturing all the supple lightness and humour, as well as the depth, of Pushkin’s luminous verse novel.
Event Horizon
Balsam Karam, Saskia Vogel (Translated by)
From the author of The Singularity, a saga of one girl’s resistance and exile in the stars and soil of empire.
Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich and mothers and daughters make their living banished from society—without rights, access to care, or legal status. Simmering under the surface of their day-to-day survival is a desire for change—and one day, Milde and her friends act on it, setting fire to government buildings in the city that has rejected them.
When Milde is framed as the instigator of the uprising, she is arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass, for an experiment. Milde chooses the Mass.
Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflection on oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. With a completely unique voice, Balsam Karam writes about the swirl of hope and despair in the lives of the marginalized and a young woman’s unwavering belief in a better world.
Mrs Kleofas’s Rooster: Three Novellas
Gyula Krúdy, John Batki (Translated by)
A trio of darkly elegant, women-centric novellas from a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature.
Mrs Kleofas’ Rooster brings together three captivating novellas by Gyula Krúdy, originally written in the 1920s and now available in English for the first time. Each story centers on a woman protagonist: a timeless adventuress, a resilient single mother, and a seductive Budapest femme fatale, respectively. In the title novella, a roguish narrator listens to the thrilling life story of an ageless, mysterious woman whose journey takes her from a childhood of suffering to a career as a cunning accomplice in daring schemes. The next story, NN, follows the life of a steadfast single mother, Juliska, amid the rhythms of village life. In Autumn Meeting, Krudy’s sharp wit unfolds through Rizili, a charming yet ruthless socialite who leads a suspended jockey on an intoxicating night through Budapest’s City Park.
Eunice
Lisette Lombé, Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translated by)
A fierce, tender novel about grief, memory, and the powerful bond between mothers and daughters.
Nineteen-year-old Eunice’s life is suddenly interrupted when she learns that her mother, Jane, is dead, found drowned in a river after leaving a nightclub. The police rule it an accident, but Eunice isn’t so sure. A red notebook, discovered in a hair salon, suggests there’s more to her mother’s story—cryptic initials, clues, fragments of a life Eunice never fully knew. As she begins to unravel the mystery, she’s forced to confront long-buried family secrets and the painful gaps in her own understanding of who her mother was.
Eunice is a novel about the fierce bond of sisterhood, complex legacies passed down through generations, and the transformative power of forgiveness. It poignantly touches on the power of awakening to tenderness and the hard-won grace of letting go, written in rhythmic, lyrical prose that bears the mark of author Lisette Lombé’s background in slam poetry.
Stardust
Léonora Miano, Gila Walker (Translated by)
An unflinching look at the realities of racism, poverty, and exclusion in contemporary France—told through the eyes of a young Cameroonian mother navigating life on society’s edge.
At just twenty-three, Louise finds herself stranded in a Paris shelter with her baby, Bliss, in her arms while battling homelessness, racism, and the struggles that come with being a female immigrant trying to keep her dignity alive. Yet amid the chaos, Louise encounters a fragile network of mothers and survivors from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, each carrying their own story of violence, addiction, and resilience.
Based on a pivotal moment in author Léonora Miano’s own life, Stardust is a luminous story of the quiet power of choosing life. The novel was first composed over twenty years ago and remained unpublished for years. Now, Miano invites readers into her world, shedding light on the invisible corners of French society and offering a moving meditation on motherhood, dignity, and renewal.
