All information sourced from publishers.
White River Crossing, Ian McGuire
A ragged fur peddler arrives at a remote outpost of the Hudson Bay Company in the winter of 1766 with a lump of gold, claiming that there is plenty more like it further north at a place called Ox Lake. The outpost’s chief factor, Magnus Norton, dreams of instant riches and launches a secret and perilous expedition to find the treasure and bring it back.
Led by a family of native guides, the party of prospectors includes Norton’s brutish deputy, John Shaw, and Thomas Hearn, the insular and intellectual first mate from the factory’s whaling sloop. During their long journey north, Shaw’s callousness and arrogance lead him to commit an act of sexual violence whose disastrous consequences will only fully emerge once they reach their final destination. There, amidst the bleak beauty of the Barren Grounds, as Norton’s carefully crafted plans begin to fall apart and the brutal arctic winter starts to descend, Hearn is forced to make a choice that will define his character and determine his future forever.
Trip, Amie Barrodale
Sandra dies unexpectedly at a conference in Nepal. Across the world in a desert in New Mexico, her teenage son, Trip, has run away from a centre for troubled youth.
But Sandra soon discovers that a mother’s work is never done, not even when you’re dead. It turns out limbo is a great place from which to keep an eye on your errant son. When Trip is picked up on the side of the road by a strange man, Sandra is the only one who knows where he is.
As Trip ventures further south towards the coast and directly into the eye of a hurricane, Sandra’s struggle to save him from the other realm begins.
From Florida’s Gulf Stream to the raging seas, through Munich-bound aeroplanes and from one body to another, Trip takes us on an absurd, profound and irresistibly entertaining odyssey – a story of childhood and motherhood, life and death, and everything in between.
As If, Isabel Waidner
Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.
Two men living mirror-image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.
The Lies Between Us, Jen Bray
This family lived a life before me. And now I wonder if it was what happened in that life – all those secrets – that tore this family apart … not me.
The warring Brown sisters. Lucy. Susannah. Tara. Each is haunted – by disgrace (Lucy), vanity (Susannah) and envy (Tara). Most of all they are haunted by secrets.
Just before a dinner at their mother’s idyllic holiday cottage, Susannah disappears. That same night a young woman is killed violently on a nearby beach.
Amid the confusion the next morning, Lucy discovers a link between Susannah and the murder victim. Lucy must summon all she knows from her short-lived policing career to figure out the connection and find her sister.
But tracking down Susannah means Lucy confronting her own shame. It also means resurrecting ghosts that Susannah, Tara – and their mother – desperately want to keep buried.
Even if Lucy finds Susannah, will the truth destroy them all?
Just Watch Me, Lior Torenberg
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her bathroom-less studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual, spiking stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plant propagations to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise $14,000 for a week of private life support for Daisy.
In the dungeon of her stream, Dell is in control, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms of engagement and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. On a dare, she discovers that she has a talent for eating spicy food, and her streaming fame explodes as her pepper consumption graduates from jalapeño to habanero to ghost. Finally, Dell is good at something – but as her behaviour becomes riskier and riskier and a troll-turned-incel threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Head of Household, Oliver Munday
From stories about a father who shows up hungover to chaperone his daughter’s kindergarten bowling trip, to another who rediscovers his love of graffiti, and a father who pays for his legal fees and apartment through his OnlyFans earnings, Head of Household is a short story collection that reckons with divorce, financial anxiety, and sexuality to create a collage of the beleaguered father, a man on the frontlines of a masculinity in crisis – stories of men salvaging the shreds of their identities while staging puppet shows and pretending to be ponies for their children.
