Contemporary Fiction

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The Recovery House

By Derek Owusu

In The Recovery House, Derek Owusu follows Jamal, a young writer who wakes in a residential mental health facility after a breakdown. Disoriented, alcoholic, and carrying a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, Jamal must piece together how he arrived there. The recovery house—creaky beds, watchful nurses, restless corridors—becomes both constraint and shelter. Within its walls, Jamal forms unexpected bonds: a friendship with Joy, who sings The Cranberries into the dark; a weekly Bible study; a Turkish man he connects with over a pot of oxtail. Written in Owusu's unbroken, breathless prose with no chapter breaks, this slim novel interrogates the line between illness and inspiration, faith and doubt, and the ethics of mining one's suffering for story. It is a tender book about what it means to be witnessed, to recover, and to create without destroying the self that creates.

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Countries of Origin

By Javier Fuentes

Countries of Origin is a literary fiction debut about Demetrio, a young pastry chef who has built a respected career in New York in 2007 while living without legal status. When he is forced to return to Madrid, the city of his birth, he arrives as a stranger in his own country. On the way he meets Jacobo, a wealthy Spanish student, and the two begin an ambiguous, charged relationship over one summer. Fuentes uses the romance to look at deeper questions: what home means when a country has rejected you, how class and money shape intimacy, and how a person rebuilds a life from displacement. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Its measured, reflective style makes it a good fit for readers who like character-driven stories about migration and queer desire.

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Perfection

By Vincenzo Latronico , Sophie Hughes

Perfection is a short, cool-toned novel about Anna and Tom, a couple from southern Europe who move to Berlin in the 2010s and work as freelance designers. They build an enviable life of good taste, travel and online visibility, then slowly find that the life they curated no longer feels like their own. Vincenzo Latronico, writing in Italian and translated by Sophie Hughes, treats the couple as a case study in millennial aspiration, digital work and the gap between how a life looks and how it feels. It is a quick read but a pointed one, and it works well as translated fiction for readers who like their literary fiction brief, ironic and socially observant. It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

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Bridge to Terabithia

By Katherine Paterson

Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson's 1977 novel, follows Jess Aarons, a fifth-grader in rural Virginia who feels out of place in his struggling family and at school. His life changes when Leslie Burke, a bookish and fearless new neighbor, moves in next door. Together they invent Terabithia, a secret kingdom in the woods across a creek, and the friendship opens Jess's eyes to art, imagination and his own worth. The story then turns toward grief, and the book asks how a young person can carry loss without losing what the friendship gave him. It won the 1978 Newbery Medal and remains one of the most widely read award winning books for young readers, valued for its plain, compassionate treatment of friendship, class and death.

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The Kiss Quotient

By Helen Hoang

Stella Lane is highly accomplished at finding patterns in economic data but feels far less certain about dating and physical intimacy. Convinced that she can approach the problem through structured practice, she hires Michael Phan, an escort who accepts the arrangement while carrying financial responsibilities and private ambitions of his own. Their carefully defined lessons soon become complicated by desire, affection, and the widening gap between what each person feels and what each believes they deserve. Helen Hoang’s contemporary romance uses this transactional beginning to examine consent, communication, autistic experience, cultural identity, family obligation, and shame. Alternating attention between Stella and Michael, the novel gives both partners substantial emotional obstacles rather than treating either as the other’s solution. Its central question is not whether love can be calculated, but whether two people accustomed to protecting themselves can trust what cannot be mad…

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Seven Days in June

A Novel

By Tia Williams

Eva Mercy has built a demanding life in Brooklyn as a successful writer of supernatural erotica and the single mother of a perceptive teenager. Her carefully managed world is disrupted when Shane Hall, an acclaimed and famously private literary novelist, appears at a publishing event. To everyone else, their meeting looks like an introduction. In reality, Eva and Shane shared an intense, formative week as troubled adolescents—and have carried its emotional consequences into adulthood. Their reunion unfolds over seven summer days, while flashbacks reveal the pain, attraction, and desperate coping strategies that first drew them together. As Eva and Shane reconsider what happened between them, the novel asks whether enduring love is enough without honesty, accountability, and recovery. Tia Williams combines a second-chance romance with an exploration of chronic pain, addiction, self-harm, Black literary culture, motherhood, inherited trauma, and the ways writers transform private experi…

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The Book of Disappearance

By Ibtisam Azem , Sinan Antoon

The Book of Disappearance is a speculative novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem, published in Arabic in 2014 and rendered into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019. Set over a single forty-eight-hour period, the novel imagines a world in which every Palestinian Arab within Israel vanishes without explanation. The story unfolds through two perspectives: the diary of Alaa Assaf, a Palestinian man in Jaffa who grieves his grandmother and wrestles with a city whose name has been overwritten, and the account of Ariel Levy, an Israeli journalist and neighbor who discovers Alaa's empty apartment and slowly begins to inhabit it. What begins as a story about mass absence becomes a meditation on presence, memory, ownership, and the politics of erasure. The novel operates between literary fiction and speculative fiction, pressing directly on questions of Palestinian identity, colonial memory, and what it means to be rendered invisible.

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The Pelican Child

By Joy Williams

The Pelican Child is Joy Williams's seventh collection of short fiction, published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2025. The twelve stories, most previously published in literary journals, gather Williams's signature fusion of the mundane and the mythic: talking dogs at a writers' retreat, a Slavic folkloric figure meeting John James Audubon, twin sisters plotting ecological retribution in Wyoming, and a man's mother receiving his terminal diagnosis with a koan. The collection is unified by its preoccupation with mortality, the slow unraveling of the natural world, and the uncanny quality that hides inside ordinary American life. Characters drift through a diminished landscape where care homes replace family photos with stock images, where lakes are drying, and where the boundary between the living and the dead remains stubbornly porous. The book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and received broadly favorable critical attention.