A contemporary novel shaped like a folktale in which a young woman and those around her navigate consequences after a theft and encounters with trickster spirits. The setup focuses on moral complications inside domestic relationships and the social effects of magic on everyday life.

A sweeping, literary account of cancer treated as a historical subject: how clinicians, researchers, and institutions have identified, named, studied, and attempted to treat cancer over decades and centuries.

A young woman with a disputed claim to a ruling house is summoned to the capital to contend for a throne and to answer dangerous questions about her lineage.

An investigative nonfiction account tracing the life of Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the HeLa cell line, focusing on how her cells were taken, used in scientific research, and the ethical, racial, and personal consequences for her family.

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration in the United States operates as a contemporary racial caste system—what she terms the "New Jim Crow."

An author convalescing with a chronic illness observes and cares for a wild snail that becomes a daily companion. The book records close, patient attention to the snail’s behavior and anatomy while using that relationship to reflect on bodily experience, time, and recovery.

A narrative history of the Great Migration, tracing the movement of Black Americans out of the U.S. South into northern, midwestern, and western cities across much of the twentieth century.

A tightly focused, first-person account centered on a Black working-class family in Mississippi as they prepare for and endure Hurricane Katrina.

A retelling of the Trojan War era centered on the relationship between a famed Greek warrior and the person who witnesses and loves him. The account compresses mythic events into a personal, emotionally charged narrative that follows their bond through training, war, and the pressures of fame and fate.

A first-person memoir tracing the author's journey from an abusive childhood through competitive swimming, substance use, and sexual exploration toward eventual stability in adult life.

A wandering, nocturnal circus full of impossible attractions serves as the stage for a concealed magical contest whose rules and contestants are revealed in fragments.

A Stranger in Olondria follows an outsider in a foreign city whose interest in local books, monks, and oral traditions pulls them into investigations of stories, memory, and uncanny occurrences.

A married couple's crisis becomes the novel's engine when the wife disappears and attention turns to the husband as a suspect.

A narrative investigation into how animal infections jump into humans and create new epidemics, built from scientific case studies, interviews with researchers, and on-the-ground reportage.

A murder is discovered on the grounds of Belle Vie, a working antebellum plantation in Louisiana that now operates as an event venue. The estate’s manager becomes entangled in the official investigation and the local upheaval that follows, with labor relations and the plantation’s history intensifying the stakes.

Pepper is involuntarily confined in a budget-strapped psychiatric hospital in Queens and insists he is not mentally ill.

India Morgan Phelps (Imp) attempts to write her memoir while living with schizophrenia, anxiety, and OCD. Her account circles a romantic relationship with a transgender partner and a fixation on a mysterious, silent woman found beside a road.

A woman who has left a life tied to intelligence work is living overseas when a chain of events forces secrets from her past back into play, putting family and identity at risk.

A yearlong, site-specific study of a single patch of old-growth forest: the author records regular close observations across seasons and links those moments to ecological facts and reflective thought.

Set in a city where a religious temple practices dream-based magic, the novel follows a sequence of murders and rising threats that risk turning political tension into open conflict.

A police detective continues to pursue criminal investigations as larger social collapse looms, confronting cases that intersect with themes of suicide and civic breakdown. The central pressure is how an officer's commitment to law and process holds against an eroding public order and personal unease.

A young Nigerian woman leaves Lagos to study in the United States and must navigate new social categories, racial visibility, and evolving relationships across continents.

A lone survivor who was once part of a distributed starship consciousness seeks retribution after betrayal within an expansive imperial society.

An interdisciplinary nonfiction collection that interweaves Indigenous wisdom, ecological science, and personal memoir to reconsider how humans relate to plants and land.

Set in a damaged near-future world, the narrative follows humans and lifelike androids whose similarities prompt tests of empathy and legal distinction. The central pressure is whether artificially created beings should be treated as persons and how human identity holds up under scarcity, grief, and imitation.

A linked memoir of personal and communal loss: the author recounts the deaths of five Black men connected to her across roughly four years and situates those deaths within family history, local conditions, and systemic forces.

A journalist-investigator pursues the murky death and legacy of a notorious film director whose work inspired a devoted, secretive subculture.

An espionage thriller centered on a woman trained by Russian intelligence to use seduction and deception as tools of recruitment and infiltration.

A young woman from a Chinese-Malaysian community becomes involved in a ghost marriage ritual that asks her to negotiate between family expectations and a claim from the otherworld.

Set in late-19th-century New York, the story follows two supernatural outsiders—a golem created in Europe and a jinni liberated at sea—each stranded in a city they do not understand. Both must learn to hide their natures, adopt human customs, and find ways to meet emotional needs that differ from those around them.

Set in the violent 1850s, the novel follows Henry Shackleford, a young enslaved boy who becomes involved with abolitionist John Brown.

Set around a lotus-named pleasure house in historical China, the novel follows women and patrons inside a confined social sphere where personal desire, duty, and power collide.

Set in New Zealand's South Island in 1866, the novel opens with a prospector who arrives on the West Coast goldfields and becomes entangled with a group of twelve local men and a string of unsolved crimes.

Set across decades around an attempted assassination of a major reggae figure, the novel tracks how that act ripples through Kingston and New York over years of changing politics, gangs, and drug economies.

A Cup of Water Under My Bed is a memoir in linked essays about growing up Colombian–Cuban in a working-class immigrant family.

A government research zone has been sealed off after decades of strange phenomena. A team of four unnamed female specialists enters as the twelfth expedition to survey the area and record observations.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

A writer trains and lives with a hawk as she processes bereavement, using close attention to the bird and falconry practice as a way to reckon with grief.

A young woman on a tight budget takes a cheap apartment and soon experiences strange, threatening phenomena that suggest the place itself — and those connected to it — endanger her.

Set on a future Mars, the story follows a lowborn miner who infiltrates the ranks of the ruling elite by assuming a false identity.

Janet Mock recounts her path to womanhood from childhood through young adulthood, focusing on the realities of growing up transgender and multiracial in Hawaii and negotiating family, community, and medical systems.

Set before and after a fictional, devastating influenza pandemic, the book traces several connected people — including actors who tour small settlements — as they navigate loss, survival, and the persistence of art.

A small, remote English setting hosts a tightly observed family story in which religious rites, interpersonal strain, and mysterious occurrences create sustained unease.

A fictional first-person memoir presenting the life and travels of Estebanico (Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori), a Moroccan enslaved man who survives the Narváez expedition and recounts his experience in the New World.

Journalistic nonfiction that documents a contemporary, human-caused mass extinction by surveying past mass die-offs, profiling particular species losses, and reporting from scientific sites and researchers.

A nonfiction letter from Ta‑Nehisi Coates to his teenage son that explains what it feels like to be Black in the United States.

Two narrative strands span deep time: one traces an artificial-intelligence–guided project to terraform a world where Portia labiata spiders evolve into a complex civilization; the other follows humans aboard an interstellar ark leaving an ecologically collapsed Earth in search of a home.

A literary mystery shaped by old films and the archival traces they leave behind: a narrator follows production records, stills, and fragments of silent cinema to reconstruct a troubling past and the people connected to it.

A 2015 collection of short stories in which ghosts and the supernatural intersect with everyday lives. Each tale stages encounters—personal, domestic, or communal—where lingering grief, past wrongs, or unresolved ties create eerie, unsettling situations that reshape characters' present decisions.