Debut Roundup

From road trips to AI therapists to glowing babies and more, check out this list of upcoming debuts!

MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING by Zee Carlstrom
9781250365675 | 4/8/25

The newly nameless narrator of MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING has rejected the gender binary, has flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate gig, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is on a bender to end all benders.

A call from their mother with the news that their MAGA-friendly, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing launches the narrator from Chicago to deep red Arkansas in a stolen car. Along the way, the narrator and their new bestie—a self-proclaimed “garbage goth” with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail)—unpack the narrator’s childhood and a recent personal loss that they refuse to face head-on.

SIKE by Fred Lunzer
9781250343123 | 5/20/25

Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it’s time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.

He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London’s tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it.

Shifting between Adrian and Maquie’s perspectives as it tracks the fraught first year of their relationship, Sike is a story of two people wrestling with connection, identity, anxiety, success, and the limits of our obsession with self-analysis and awareness.

WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK? by Sara Hamdan
9781250329813 | 5/20/25

Mia Almas has a secret. By day, she works at a respectable job as a media fact checker—a position her conservative, Arab grandparents approve of—and, by night, she takes to the stages of New York City comedy clubs. She holds herself back in a lot of ways, especially in the romance department, but being on stage lights her up and makes being a wallflower the rest of the time more bearable. That is, until Phaedra, her stylish and bold new neighbor, inspires Mia to take a few risks.

As Mia pursues a forbidden romance with her boss, her standup gets better and bolder, leading to a surprise spotlight that exposes her secret gig. Horrified and worried that her rebellious act could mean big consequences for her reserved Palestinian-American family, Mia frantically dives into damage control. But all of her efforts to pull back from the spotlight expose a family scandal from the 1940s that could change everything. . .

THE NIMBUS by Robert P. Baird
9781250392657 | 6/10/25

On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.

Though the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even though the nimbus is turning her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging div school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.

FINDING GRACE by Loretta Rothschild
9781250381828 | 6/10/25

Honor seems to have everything: she adores her bright and beautiful daughter, Chloe, and her charming, handsome husband, Tom, even if he works one hundred hours a week. Her bestselling children’s books mean that she’s made a name for herself doing what she loves. Yet Honor’s longing for another baby threatens to eclipse all of it—until a shocking tragedy changes their lives forever, and Tom is left to pick up the pieces.

Grace has made her London wine shop a second home for people like her—those running from their own pasts. Passionate, studious, and self-assured, she finds herself curious about Tom, who becomes a fixture at the shop.

As Grace falls for Tom, she shares things about herself that she’s never told anyone—while Tom is keeping a secret that could destroy their burgeoning romance. Through it all, the lasting impact of Honor’s obsessive want looms over them, as does the possibility that their meeting was no accident.

Can Tom and Grace wade through the secrets to find each other on the other side? Do we all have ghosts that refuse to stay buried? And how do old love and new love align?