Dive into rich family narratives with these family fiction picks!
MEET ME IN THE GARDEN by Nina LaCour
9781250810472 | 8/4/26
New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.
But five years later, Odette’s life is nothing like what she’d planned. She’s a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.
Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, MEET ME IN THE GARDEN is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.
UNPRECEDENTED TIMES by Malavika Kannan
9781250420787 | 8/18/26
Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. Her future is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, embrace her queer identity, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she gets a new tattoo, makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and even gets her heart broken.
What is not a part of Rishi’s plan, however, is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she increasingly finds solace in the friendships she’s made. In lieu of virtual college, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective and grapple with America’s political situation and growing disillusionment—along with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.
UNPRECEDENTED TIMES captures the beauty, frustration, love, and pain that exist in relationships between best friends, lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for first-generation Americans: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.
TENDERNESS by Rowan Beaird
9781250386694 | 7/21/26
On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?
Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, TENDERNESS is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.
Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, TENDERNESS is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.
THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY by Claire Carusillo
9781250408631 | 8/11/26
Claire grew up with the legend of the Unsinkable Mounsey Women. Her great-great-grandmother Fanny made headlines in 1915 for washing ashore in England nearly a year after her ship sank. Fanny’s daughter Sarah went to collect her mother on the equally ill-fated Lusitania—whose sinking she, too, survived. Their improbable endurance led to regional stardom on the Midwestern vaudeville circuit. But Claire never knew the full story—until now.
Listless, jobless, and recently canceled for extolling skin-care advice online that sent a reader to the hospital, Claire is surprised when a knock at the door turns out to be the police, looking for answers about a murder from the 1970s they suspect her mother, Kath, may know something about. As the cops zero in, Claire demands answers from her mother.
Kath’s comically long response, which blossoms into the story of the Mounseys and their descendants writ large, moves from a Liverpudlian poorhouse at the onset of World War I to a Lake Michigan lighthouse in 1971 (when sex was freer and McDonald’s fried their potatoes with beef tallow) to present-day Chicagoland; along the way, it offers Claire a richer understanding of what she inherited from the complicated, resilient women she descends from.
Replete with inappropriately old boyfriends, dubious medical professionals, and more than a few boats, THE RESPONSIBLE PARTY is the story of several women, in several different timelines, trying to stay afloat.
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