New Edelweiss E-galleys (6/3/2025)

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.
In Ilana Masad’s BEINGS, the couple’s experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair’s trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness, and alienation in the repressive 1960s—as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis’s letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis, and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden—sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally—in the archive.

TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY: LIFE, DEATH, AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley
9780374617127 | 9/16/25

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike?

In TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that U.S. officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

ELECTRIC SPARK: THE ENIGMA OF DAME MURIEL by Frances Wilson
9780374613204 | 9/23/25

The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is “puzzling.” Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences, and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as “Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes.” Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.

ELECTRIC SPARK explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

“As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader” (The Boston Globe), Frances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.

THE EVERLASTING by Alix E. Harrow
9781250799081 | 10/28/25

It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree—a woman not yet a knight, and a man without a story. That is where she pulls a sword from the heartwood and becomes a legend. And it is where, more than a thousand years later, he will find her—and lose her—and find her—and lose her again. It is where a new story will be written—but whose will it be?

SUGAR AND SPITE by M. C. Beaton, R.W. Green
9781250378569 | 10/14/25

When a series of deaths within the small Cotswolds birdwatching community begins to unravel her village, Agatha and her team at Raisin Investigators are certain there has been foul play involved. Now, they must dig up decades’ worth of tempestuous relationships and simmering secrets among the birdwatching enthusiasts of the village in order to prevent any further deaths.

But with Agatha’s own relationship with John Glass on the rocks after he is called away on his job as a cruise ship dance instructor, and Sir Charles Fraith now attempting to step into John’s shoes as her lover, Agatha has her work cut out for her.

Agatha will have to break out her binoculars and embrace her bitter side to solve the murders and wrangle the sickly-sweet temptations in her own life. Will she be able to gather all the breadcrumbs and put together the clues before she becomes a sitting duck herself?

BLOOD FOR THE UNDYING THRONE by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur
9781250895363 | 10/28/25

The Empire scorns all invisible gods. The Empire kills all visible ones.

The Empire continues to enforce its so-called peace with massive war machines that destroy even gods and monsters, leaving the conquered with nothing to worship or fear except the might of the Empire. But desperate odds such as these can inspire resistance.

Last seen rallying under Loran’s banner, Emere survives an assassination attempt that will lead him to uncover sinister plots at the very heart of the Empire.

Arienne has crossed the continent to learn more about the Star of Mersia, the famed weapon that wiped Mersia from the map. But when she arrives in the lifeless land, Arienne finds much more than ruins.

One hundred and seventy years ago, Yuma dares to defy Mersia’s ruthless Grim King Eldred. When she meets an emissary from the Empire, she realizes that they might just have the power to overthrow the Grim King—but is there a cost to aligning with the Empire?