Families are hard work . . . but good reading has never been easier
DOMINION by Addie E. Citchens
9780374609337 | 8/19/25
Reverend Sabre Winfrey, shepherd of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. Besides the barbershop and radio station he owns, he has an iron hand on every aspect of Dominion, Mississippi, society. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. After a surprising encounter with a stranger, Wonderboy finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined, and his response will send shockwaves through the entire community. Told from the point of view of the women who love these two men, DOMINION illustrates how we enable the everyday violence and casual sins of the patriarchy.
A Black Southern family drama that deals as much in tenderness and humor as it does in brutality, Addie E. Citchens’s DOMINION reveals the many sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy.
IF YOU LOVE IT LET IT KILL YOU by Hannah Pittard
9781250910271 | 7/15/25
Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend, a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister’s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also recently moved to town.
One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently—and soon—in her ex-husband’s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news—she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains—but the morning after baking mac ’n’ cheese from scratch for her nephew’s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she’s long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean’s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana’s autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.
Steeped in the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, IF YOU LOVE IT LET IT KILL YOU is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July’s ALL FOURS and Sigrid Nunez’s THE FRIEND.
THE SANDERSONS FAIL MANHATTAN by Scott Johnston
9781250384782 | 7/8/25
William Sanderson is very rich, but you can always be richer. He’s up for a huge promotion at investment giant Bedrock Capital, but there’s one crucial hurdle he must clear first—assuming he can keep the HR department at bay. Meanwhile, he looks for any string to pull to get his maddeningly indifferent daughter Ginny into Yale. Ellie, his wife, is a Kentucky-raised newcomer to New York who only wants to fit in, and daughter #2, the shy Zoey, is happy just to make a new friend, even in the form of the unusual new girl who calls herself a goblin.
Things turn upside down when the first trans student at the girls’ exclusive school mysteriously disappears. A frenzied search begins, and the entire city frets about her fate. Somehow caught in the crosshairs are the Sandersons, a family desperately trying to navigate all the new cultural rules, and failing miserably.
FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi
9780374616373 | 6/3/25
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. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
KING OF ASHES by S. A. Cosby
9781250832061 | 6/10/25
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident, and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.
Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.
Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.
Because everything burns.
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