Check out these compelling family fiction reads!
COYOTELAND by Vanessa Hua
9781250395511 | 5/12/26
Living in El Nido, a privileged community in the hills east of Berkeley, is supposed to mean you’ve made it. So when Jin Chang moves there with his wife and daughters after years of scraping by, he hopes it will finally be the end of his bad luck. What his family doesn’t know is that he’s bending the rules for one final scheme: to make it big in real estate. Next door, Blair Belle prides herself on her progressive politics. After all, she treats their new nanny, Ana Rodriguez, and her daughter like family—even if she doesn’t know them all that well. But she can’t help but feel skeptical of the new neighbors, especially when she begins to suspect that Jin’s plans might interfere with the Belle’s own luxury development.
Jin’s teenage daughter Jane can tell her dad is keeping a secret, but she’s also struggling to navigate El Nido’s cliques. Tasha Washington has always felt isolated, too, as one of the only Black girls at the school. In the wake of a coyote attack, Jane and Tasha bond. Together, they hatch a plot to expose the town’s hypocrisies. The shockwaves will rock their own families. As fire season escalates, and the roaming coyote continues to unleash chaos, the characters become embroiled in a series of scandals that will change El Nido—and their own fates—forever.
Urgent, riveting, and deeply heartfelt, full of sharp wit and keen empathy, COYOTELAND is at once a delicious suburban drama and an unflinching exploration of our current moment.
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.
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. A burnt-out youth climate activist, Rishi used to want to save the world, but now she just wants to have gay sex. Her plan is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, study literature, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and promptly 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. Instead 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, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and 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 Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.
ALL US SAINTS by Katherine Packert Burke
9781639738113 | 5/19/26
Exactly 19 years ago, in May of 1992, 17-year-old Roland St. Cloud fatally stabbed his twin sister Edna’s three best friends. The slaying became instant tabloid fodder leading to a bestselling true-crime book and horror movie franchise. Each year on the anniversary of her family’s undoing, Edna stages a ritualized reenactment of the murders. She is joined by her husband, Roger, true crime author extraordinaire; her younger sister Calla, a failed playwright who spends her days lost in virtual reality; her younger brother James and his girlfriend Heather; and her teenage daughter Wren. Together, the St. Cloud family seals the windows and doors of the house and light a grim candle. Thus begins their macabre theater of memory.
ALL US SAINTS is a literary family drama packaged as a two-act play, in whose intermission we glimpse the painful childhood Roland faced as a closeted transwoman in the early 90s, when queer and trans people were cast as monsters worthy only of shame and vitriol. ALL US SAINTS is a story of life after trauma and a scathing commentary on the cisgender gaze.
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