More Debuts (8/6/24)

We have no shortage of upcoming debuts–from literary fiction to coming of age to YA dark fantasy, and more!

ELEVEN PERCENT BY MAREN UTHAUG
9781250329646 | 4/22/25

It is the New Time, a time not so different from our own except that the men are gone. All but eleven percent of them, that is, the minimum required to avoid inbreeding. In this story, four different lives intersect: Medea, a tiny, long-haired witch and snake whisperer; Wicca, a young priestess who excelled at the “self-pleasuring” curriculum in school and has lost her pregnant lover; Eva, a doctor working in a spa center, and Silence, who lives in an almost abandoned convent. Each will discover the cracks in this women’s paradise.

MAZELTOV BY ELI ZUZOVSKY
9781250345271 | 2/11/25

On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam braces for his bar mitzvah mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction. In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming of age: his newly devout father, with a past of mystic rituals he practiced on his son; his best friend Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khahlil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world.

SLEEPING CHILDREN BY ANTHONY PASSERON, TRANSLATED BY FRANK WYNNE
9780374612269 | 4/29/25

This weaves two stories: that of the appearance of AIDS in the early 1980s in a family living in the countryside near Nice, and that of the fight against the illness that was undertaken in a French hospital. Passeron focuses on the experts in retrovirology—Luc Montagnier, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and their colleagues—who discovered evidence of a retrovirus that was eventually named human immunodeficiency virus.

THE SCORPION QUEEN BY MINA FEARS
9781250852946 | 1/28/25

At sixteen, Amie finds herself disinherited, framed for a scandalous crime, and forced to serve Princess Mariama of Mali. Her father, Emperor Sulyeman, has created a series of impossible trials for his daughter’s suitors. When they fail, he publicly boils them alive. At first, Amie’s life at court is drudgery, but the more she learns about the princess’s circumstances, the closer the two girls become. Amie and her intended, Kader, plan to escape Timbuktu and make a new life far away from the shadow of death that has fallen upon the emperor’s court, but she finds herself increasingly drawn to the princess in ways she doesn’t understand. When a mysterious discovery forces her hand, she must choose between fleeing with the boy she loves or helping the princess to end the trials forever.

PRIDE OR DIE BY CL MONTBLANC
9781250340474 | 4/15/25

Seventeen-year-old Eleanora Finkel just wants to finish her senior year and get the hell out of Texas. But when her club meeting inconveniently coincides with an attack on the school’s head cheerleader, she and her friends find themselves in the hot seat. In order to clear their names and ensure the survival of their club for future queer teens, they’ll have to track down the real culprit themselves. But Eleanora is far from a professional detective; she’s riddled with anxiety, annoyingly attracted to the case’s cute victim, and her trusty crochet hook feels insufficient for fighting off a murderer. Can this ragtag group of unlikely sleuths find their way out of an entire freaking murder mystery before one of them is next?

THE ROMANTIC TRAGEDIES OF A DRAMA KING BY HARRY TREVALDWYN
9781250366788 | 1/28/25

Patch Simmons has decided that this is the year he will get a boyfriend, so it’s goodbye to his French pen-pal Jean-Pierre and hello to the world! Unfortunately, the only other “out” boys in his school year are dating each other, so finding a boyfriend isn’t going to be easy… Until fate finally intervenes and two new mysterious boys join drama club: Peter, who’s just moved from New York and his best friend, Sam. Patch is confident that one of them will be his first boyfriend. So armed with his single mum’s outdated self-help books, his over-supportive best friend, and an alarming level of self-confidence, Patch is confident that this mission will be a complete success.