Debuts (6/9/26)

Discover these must-read debut novels!

UNIVERSE OF GRACE by Rachel Calnek-Sugin
9781250430021 | 11/17/26

One afternoon, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo, a jaguar tells six-year-old Grace Goldberg-Li that she isn’t human. But this is something that Grace has already suspected. Her life seems normal, but no one else, not even her beloved sister seems to be experiencing things as brightly and painfully as she does. As she approaches adolescence, Grace begins to think that she might be an alien. Maybe this would explain the urge to steal every beautiful object she can find, or the peculiar voice in her head that’s fixated on the apocalypse of climate change, insisting that everyone she loves is going to die.

In adulthood, Grace still doesn’t have the answer to the strangeness that seems to be outside and inside her. Is it the world that is unusual and falling apart? Or is it her? She will attempt, over and over, to remake herself and find a place in it. She will fall recklessly in love with a gorgeous doctoral student; she will merge into a tree during the pandemic; she will become the best employee that Wendy’s has ever seen; she will travel to the ends of the earth and keep going.

Tender, profound, and endlessly imaginative, Rachel Calnek-Sugin’s UNIVERSE OF GRACE is a transcendent coming-of-age story in a world that’s uncertain and wondrous in equal measure. Covering the span of a single life and everything it touches, UNIVERSE OF GRACE shows us that we are each more interconnected, vast, and variable than we can ever know.

OUR CUT OF SALT by Deena Helm
9781250434661 | 9/22/26

In this lyrical debut, three generations of Palestinian women must put the haunting of their ancestral home to rest, before the secrets of the past drown them all. OUR CUT OF SALT is a powerful and intimate look at what it means to make a home, to lose it, and to return, only to find it irrevocably changed.

There is something haunting Nuhad’s childhood home in Haifa. Cats avoid its perimeter, strange noises come from within, and residents have mysteriously vanished without a trace. Although Nuhad has not returned to her home since the Nakba in 1948, she always held a place for the house in her heart.

And, in return, the house did the same for her.

After Nuhad passes away, her granddaughter, Marina, is determined to visit her grandmother’s home after a lifetime of being kept in the dark about her culture and family history. Marina’s mother, Haifa—named for the city that was lost to their family—reluctantly agrees to her trip, though she knows firsthand that some secrets are better left buried.

But the house is no longer a home. It is a painful, festering wound that infects everything it touches. The more Marina digs into her family’s past, the sicker she becomes. Despite Nuhad’s ghostly warnings, Haifa rushes to help her daughter.

As the three women converge in their ancestral home, they must put the haunting to rest before the secrets of the past drown them all. 

I AM THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED by Emily Zinnikas
9781250454782 | 9/15/26

A horror debut in which a reclusive painter and the only survivor of an unsolved teen massacre returns to her hometown to confront her past, with the help of her childhood boogeyman and the possessed forest that surrounds her haunted house.

Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

CLAIMED BY THE ORC KING by Roxy Taylor
9781250439239 | 11/3/26

Thena came to FantastiCon to survive the weekend with minimal human interaction and maximum sarcasm. She didn’t plan on catching the attention of a seven-foot orc painted in war green—or the way her pulse stutters when he looks at her like she’s already his.

Viggo Klausson isn’t a cosplayer. He’s the High Chieftain of the Eastern Orcs, stranded in the human world while searching for the mate fate promised him. The moment he scents Thena, the bond snaps tight.

Then a portal drags her into Korule—a fractured kingdom where women are rare, power is carved in blood, and claiming a mate can start a war.

Thena refuses to become anyone’s prize. An ancient magic awakens inside her, and suddenly she’s not just the king’s fated mate.

She’s dangerous.

Viggo may be steady. He may be patient. But when enemies circle, he does not hesitate to bare his teeth.

He found his mate.

Now he has to earn her.