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CULT CLASSIC

Thoughtfully and humanely acerbic.

An author best known for her essay collections—Look Alive Out There (2018) and I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008)—explores the inner workings of modern love in her second novel.

Lola’s whole life revolves around the magazine where she has worked for years. Her co-worker Vadis has become her best friend simply by being someone she sees every day and the person who knows more about her than anyone else. Lola’s identified each and every shortcoming in their boss, Clive—she describes him as a man “animated by logic and brown liquor”—but she’s still just a little bit in thrall to him. Even after Modern Psychology folds, she meets up with Clive and Vadis and another colleague for the occasional dinner. They’re finishing a meal in Chinatown when she steps out for a cigarette and runs into her ex, a writer named Amos. They have a charged conversation, one that makes Lola ask herself uncomfortable questions about her engagement to an artist she calls Boots. The next night, after an old acquaintance drags her to the same Chinese restaurant, Lola encounters Willis, an Olympic athlete and another former lover....She soon learns that these encounters are not coincidences and there are more such encounters to follow. Crosley is nothing if not ambitious here, interrogating contemporary wellness culture and the very nature of love as Lola confronts a gauntlet of ghosts from her romantic past and questions her desire for a future with Boots. Clive, who parlayed his role as editor of Modern Psychology into a brief career as a talk show host, emerges as a self-styled guru using the free labor of his unquestioning acolytes to create a product that gives clients perfect emotional closure. Crosley has created the ideal protagonist/narrator for navigating this low-key–SF but very real world. Lola is skeptical and prickly while also being vulnerable—a wiseass with a heart. The story is plenty engaging, but it’s Crosley’s analytical acumen and gift for the striking metaphor that really gives the book life.

Thoughtfully and humanely acerbic.

Pub Date: June 7, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-3746-0339-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

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BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL

A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).

In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.

A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.

Pub Date: June 10, 2025

ISBN: 9781250320520

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025

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MY FRIENDS

A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.

An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.

Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”

A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.

Pub Date: May 6, 2025

ISBN: 9781982112820

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: today

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025

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