One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983. This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.

Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly. Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be ex-husband Jonah. Hailey—nicknamed Sunshine by her mother for her bright outlook and ever-present smile—has always tried to do what is expected of her and is regarded as the family peacemaker. But is anyone, including Hailey, who she has always seemed to be? The months leading up to Jonah’s death have been fraught, including a bitter separation and a messy custody battle over their young daughter, Maya.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taking over her parents’ estate-sale business is not the life’s work that Emma Lewis bargained for. Yes, she grew up helping them empty people’s nests, but nothing prepared her for her biggest and stickiest “get”—the grand, beautiful house of ill repute masquerading as a decidedly beddable B and B. Should Emma turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady, escort-y, and proud of it?

Ruth is a woman who believes in and despairs of the curative power of love. Her daughter, Eleanor, who is addicted to drugs, has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth adjusts herself in ways large and small to give to Eleanor what she thinks she may need—nourishment, distance, affection—but all her gifts fall short. After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor's apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, proves a compensation for all of Ruth's past defeats and disappointment. Love without fear is a new feeling for her.

Despite managing bookstores on the same Boston street, Josie Klein and Ryan Lawson have never interacted much—Josie’s store focuses on serious literature, and Ryan’s sells romance only. But when the new owner of both stores decides to combine them, the two are thrust into direct competition. Only one manager will be left standing, decided by who turns the most profit over the summer.

It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life.

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance.

The third of four children born to a middle-class Calcutta family, quiet Durga is surprisingly the first to leave the nest of her loving, overbearing family. She is not as charming as her older sister, Tia, as lighthearted as her brother, Arjun, or as clever as her younger sister, Parul. But when she arrives in Ireland to work at a tech company, she finds that for the first time ever she is free—to have fun, to stay out, to sample everything that life has to offer. Suddenly, Durga can be whoever she wants to be. And she wants it all. But freedom comes at a price.

His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest–assisted by a brooding yet brilliant donkey–to find his lost sister in the ruins of Troy. Some war stories transcend time and circumstance, and so it is with the resourceful and heartbroken Hani, who must employ every bit of intelligence, every scrap of ingenuity, and ultimately every ounce of his spirit and humor to withstand the forces of civilization’s collapse.

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States.

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness. But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota.

When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four hour roller-coaster ride. Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart supporters and a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or revelation.

Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love.

Equal parts funny and tender, What Will People Think? is a heart-bursting exploration of what it means to discover and embrace the hidden parts of yourself, and how love in all forms can make you whole.

Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD - and now they're filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts.

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. No one has heard from his wife, Evelyn, in two decades. She abandoned the family without a trace, and clearly doesn’t want anything to do with Duc, the business, or their kids. But the money has to go to someone. With the help of the shady family lawyer, Duc informs his five estranged adult children that to receive their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations across America: Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart?

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable.