Releases I'm Ready For, Summer/Fall 2025

The next few months promise a fascinating crop of new books from authors I love!

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (August 5): I always trust Newitz to have an original, thoughtful take on whatever they write about, and I've especially enjoyed their previous fiction involving robots, AUTONOMOUS and THE TERRAFORMERS. So a Newitz story about robots running a noodle restaurant in a post-secession San Francisco sounds like a good time to me. Don't miss the charming retro website for the restaurant/book.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane (August 12): This novel is based on real events from the life of a real person I've never heard of, the author Penelope Fitzgerald. But I was enthralled by Kane's earlier novel also based on real events I hadn't heard of, THE REPORT, so I'm on board. I look forward to more history and more of Kane's great writing about interpersonal dynamics.

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19): I follow Anders's excellent newsletter, so I've been hearing about her next novel for a while and getting excited about the premise: A trans witch teaches her grieving mother how to do magic, while also investigating the secrets of a book from 1749. It sounds like there is so much wonderful stuff woven into this story, and I can't wait to read it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang (August 26): Kuang's BABEL was an ambitious, skillful alternate history about Oxford translators controlling the magic that powers the British empire. I'm intrigued that the new novel features more magical academics, this time at Cambridge, and they're journeying into hell to save a professor's soul, or maybe just to secure a recommendation.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy (September 16): I admired Flournoy's debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, for depicting a large, complex family as well the city of Detroit over time. I'm expecting more strong portrayals of characters over time in this story about the friendship between five Black women as they figure out adulthood.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry (October 14): It takes impressive range and imagination to write a novel about a high school field hockey team performing witchcraft (WE RIDE UPON STICKS) followed by one about Mongolian monks searching for the next reincarnation of a great lama (WHEN I'M GONE, LOOK FOR ME IN THE EAST). I trust Barry with any subject and genre now, but I'm particularly interested in "a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica"!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tom Comitta introduces People's Choice Literature, a project to create America's most wanted and unwanted novels, with graphs: "There are several survey results that might give you pause. For one, there's a glaring contradiction in responses to two answers. The most wanted activity for characters to experience in a novel was 'falling in or out of love,' but the most unwanted genre was romance. Given the popularity of romance novels, it's hard to square this until you consider their place in culture, with romance often seen as a form of women's literature, a category that historically has not been given as much weight and respect as literature written by cis men."

→ Laura Miller at Slate reviews the resulting book: "People's Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age–y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That's the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.... Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times."

June Reading Recap

Last month, along with my usual novel reading, I read two powerful nonfiction books. Both are about not looking away from the death and destruction in Gaza inflicted by Israel during the present war and in the past. Both hope for a future that denounces these acts on the way to peace.

→ ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, writes Omar El Akkad, and "this" refers to the devastation of Gaza. He opens by describing an injured child found in the rubble of her home, and throughout the book, he returns to stories of Palestinian children bombed, shot, killed, orphaned by the Israeli barrage. El Akkad is challenging the reader not to look away from these horrors, not to place the victims in a category that excuses the slaughter, not to soften the language used in discussing the genocide. I struggled with these challenges, and my starting point wasn't as far removed as many who I hope this book will reach, though their challenge will be even greater.

The book is not all dead children, although those stories could easily fill many volumes. El Akkad weaves accounts from the current war with observations from his own life as a Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant in Canada and the U.S. and a journalist in other war zones. He uses all these episodes to frame sections that lay out his well-conceived ideas in powerful writing: "Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

→ In BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING, Peter Beinart approaches the current moment, and the history of Palestine and Israel, from a Jewish perspective. He also brings his perspective of a childhood spent partially in apartheid-era South Africa to consider how one people justifies oppressing another and how a country can move past that oppression.

I appreciated the amount of historical and cultural context this book includes, giving me a greater understanding of the histories of Palestine, Israel, and Zionist movements over the centuries. Beinart also draws from Torah and Talmud passages that help make his case for opening eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering.

Beinart's arguments seemed persuasive and well-developed to me (plus well-cited: there are extensive endnotes), but I didn't need convincing. I hope the book will provide some clarity to readers grappling with complicated feelings about Israel, and I'd love to also see it read by those who only feel a single way.

→ DOWN IN THE SEA OF ANGELS by Khan Wong: In 2106 San Francisco, Maida starts her new job with the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project. The organization finds and documents artifacts from before the Collapse that upended society and halved the population. Maida is a psion, one of the minority with psychic abilities, and her power lets her sense the history of objects she touches. A jade teacup produces stronger visions than she's ever experienced, revealing the lives of two San Franciscans from the past. In 2006, Nathan is a designer who feels unfulfilled by his work in the tech industry but loves the community and creativity he finds at Burning Man. And in 1906, Li Nuan is an indentured servant in Chinatown desperate to escape her brutal life in a brothel. The teacup brings them visions as well, in a connection that provides hope. But Maida's power also shows her that an anti-psion movement is growing, stoking fear and threatening to round up people with abilities.

I enjoyed this ambitious novel. Each of the three storylines is well-developed, with a strong set of characters and a clear arc. Wong portrays every version of San Francisco with care, and I was delighted by the historical details, the familiar-to-me recent past, and the imagined future shaped by drastic climate change. The way the three stories fit together is interesting—there are no huge surprises, and yet the overall story adds up to something a bit different than I expected. I didn't love everything about this (a recurring problem of shifting verb tenses was a big irritation), but there's a lot that will stay with me.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal: After gaining fame as the Lady Astronaut and participating in humanity's first voyage to Mars, Elma is now back on Mars with the second expedition. This time, the plan is to establish a permanent habitat, and Elma is thrilled to have her engineer husband as another member of the crew. At first, the habitat setup goes as planned, though Elma keeps encountering signs that there were problems on the previous mission she never learned about. But when one of the supply crates is found destroyed, it raises questions about the viability of the current mission, as well as more questions about what happened on the last one.

I was glad to return to the Lady Astronaut world and characters, but this fourth book felt slower to get going than the rest of the action-packed series. Since harrowing events didn't arrive at the usual fast pace, I had more time to grow frustrated by details and subplots that interested me less. But whenever the big problems did appear, they were as exciting as ever.

→ CURSED BREAD by Sophie Mackintosh: Elodie lives a small life in a small town, working every day at the bakery with her husband, who is driven by the desire to bake a perfect loaf but has no desire for Elodie. But when glamorous Violet and her ambassador husband move to town, Elodie's life is transformed. At first Elodie observes the couple from afar, catching glimpses of their passionate but disturbing relationship. Then Violet seeks out friendship, granting the attention that Elodie is starved for. Elodie's obsession with Violet, and by extension her husband, continues into a later narrative thread, when Elodie is writing letters to Violet in the aftermath of a strange tragedy that befell the town.

All I knew going into this book was that the marketing connects it to a real historical mystery involving tainted bread. That sets up the wrong expectation, because most of the story isn't concerned with that event, and while it does provide an explanation of the mystery, it raises far more unanswered questions. The novel primarily focuses on exploring obsession, creating unsettling vibes (sometimes both sexy and unsettling), and presenting a narrator who won't or can't commit to what really happened. I found it interesting to read, but not enough of the elements and questions resolved in a satisfying way.