Literary Fiction

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A Domestication

A Domestication

Camila Sosa Villada

A celebrated trans actress has everything she once dreamed of: a successful career, a wealthy lawyer husband, a beautiful home, and an adopted son she fiercely loves. Yet beneath the polished surface of domestic happiness, she feels trapped between the freedom she has fought for and the expectations of conventional family life. When a visit to her rural hometown forces her to confront the prejudice and pain of her past, the life she has carefully constructed begins to fracture. Provocative, darkly funny, and emotionally raw, A Domestication explores desire, gender, class, and the uneasy price of belonging.

Jaded

Summer 1986, at Kelsey College. Professors Sam and Vera Ward have been married for decades, but their relationship follows an unusual arrangement: each academic year, Sam may take one student as a lover, provided the affair ends within twelve months. Their carefully controlled tradition begins to unravel when they choose Jade, a mysterious and fiercely intelligent young woman who has plans of her own. As desire turns into obsession and manipulation, the boundaries between predator and prey begin to collapse. Secrets become weapons, loyalties shift, and the power dynamics that once held the Wards’ marriage together threaten to destroy them all. Seductive, unsettling, and sharply observed, Jaded explores sexual politics, complicity, ambition, and the dangerous games people play to maintain control.

United States 2027

Mothersick

When sisters Mara and Nell watched their parents’ marriage fall apart, they made a pact: no husbands, no babies, and no repeating their family’s mistakes. For years, their bond was the one thing they could count on. But when Mara unexpectedly falls in love and becomes a mother, the sisters find themselves on opposite sides of a life-changing divide. While Mara struggles with the overwhelming contradictions of motherhood, Nell throws herself into a relationship that threatens the independence she has fought to protect. Meanwhile, their absent mother and their aunt Jean hold the key to family secrets that refuse to stay buried. An intimate, sharply observed novel about sisterhood, motherhood, and the complicated inheritance of family, Mothersick asks whether love can survive when the lives we choose lead us in different directions.

United Kingdom 2027

Second Nature

Ling Ling Huang

In the isolated community of the Veil, Bodie grows up surrounded by his many mothers and devoted to a female God. His world seems peaceful, governed by ancient traditions and strict expectations. But as Bodie develops romantic feelings for his closest friend, Aster, he begins to question the rules that shape their lives. When he approaches a mysterious ritual marking the transition to adulthood, unsettling truths emerge about the society he has always trusted. To protect himself and the people he loves, Bodie must confront the one thing his community forbids: escape. Haunting and thought-provoking, this speculative novel explores faith, desire, survival, and the dangers of unquestioned traditions.

United States 2027

A New Kind of Clean

A New Kind of Clean

Missy Djalo has spent years chasing her dream of becoming an actress, enduring failed auditions and struggling to escape the shadow of her fractured relationship with her Cameroonian mother. Broke and desperate, she receives an unexpected opportunity to audition for a mysterious company called Air Free. Welcomed into a beautiful house by a charismatic couple, Missy soon realises that the audition is unlike anything she has experienced before. As reality and fantasy begin to blur, she faces an unsettling question: how much of herself must she sacrifice to become the person she longs to be? A surreal, unsettling tale of ambition, memory, and identity, this philosophical horror explores the frightening possibility that achieving your dreams might mean losing yourself.

So We Look to the Sky

So We Look to the Sky

In contemporary Japan, one scandal connects the lives of five people struggling with desire, shame, loneliness, and the expectations placed upon them. When a young man’s affair with an older woman is exposed online, the fallout ripples through the lives of teenagers navigating first love, a married couple facing infertility, a young man caring for his grandmother with dementia, and a single mother working as a midwife. Through these interconnected stories, Misumi Kubo explores the intimate realities often hidden behind the surface of everyday life: the pressures on women’s bodies, the stigma surrounding sexuality, poverty, family obligations, and the desperate need for human connection. Unflinching yet deeply compassionate, this award-winning Japanese novel finds hope in the fragile, stubborn force of life itself.

Eat Bitter, Anastasia

Eat Bitter, Anastasia

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

Anastasia Ān Xiá Huang is in her twenties, living in Oakland’s Chinatown, and wondering whether the city she loves is also the place holding her back. Working at a modern art museum while her own artistic ambitions gather dust, she sees an unexpected inheritance—a rundown Victorian house left by her beloved uncle—as her chance to start over. But the house holds more than renovation projects: unsettling memories of her childhood begin resurfacing, forcing her to confront an absent father, a distant mother, and the family secrets that have shaped her. As Anastasia untangles the mysteries of her home and her past, she must decide what it means to belong somewhere and whether moving forward requires leaving something behind. A vivid, intimate novel about family, cultural identity, grief, and the complicated ties between people and places.

United States 2027

Swans

Claire Luchette

March 1970. With postal workers on strike, seventeen-year-old Sibby escapes a conversion camp and hits the road with a letter for the woman she loves. Along the way, she meets Lee, a woman transporting two swans to Ohio, and the pair begin delivering messages across the Midwest. As they invent stories about the people behind the letters, an unexpected love story begins to unfold between them. Funny, tender, and unconventional, Swans explores queer love, self-invention, and the freedom to imagine a different life.

United States 2027

Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger

Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger

London, 1938. After a music hall performance, Richard Hadley encounters the mysterious Miss Lambert, a woman who seems to have attracted the attention of dangerous forces. Intrigued and determined to protect her, Richard follows her to a secretive gathering in the English countryside and eventually boards a train bound for Scotland. As old acquaintances, political figures, and suspicious strangers enter the picture, he finds himself caught up in a puzzling adventure whose true stakes he can barely comprehend. Blending espionage, eccentric characters, music, and understated humour, Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro delivers a playful period mystery in which nothing is quite as it seems.

United Kingdom 2027

The Mail Carrier

The Mail Carrier

Roger Martin du Gard

In a small French village, a postman knows everyone’s secrets—and cannot resist uncovering more. Joigneau begins his daily rounds with a bag full of letters, bills, telegrams, and summonses, but delivering the mail is only part of his business. Curious, calculating, and shamelessly intrusive, he opens envelopes, delays deliveries, and invents excuses to enter people’s homes. As he moves from one household to another, the private ambitions, petty rivalries, hidden anxieties, and quiet hypocrisies of the village come into view. A baker cheats his customers, a café owner plots to acquire a neighbour’s property, and superstition shapes everyday decisions. Over the course of a single day, Roger Martin du Gard constructs a vivid portrait of provincial French life, revealing how much drama can hide beneath an apparently peaceful surface. Observant, gently satirical, and rich in human detail, this short novel is a reminder that even the smallest communities contain entire worlds of secrets.