Adult

Adult

Percival Everett

A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, he runs — and the raft journey down the Mississippi becomes his story of language, literacy, and who gets to be the narrator.

Adult

Tommy Orange

Twelve urban Native voices converge on the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie, Dene, fourteen-year-old Orvil, and others are connected in ways they do not yet know — a chorus about city life, inheritance, and a day that will not stay in the past.

Adult

Amanda Peters

In 1962 a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia comes to Maine to pick blueberries. Four-year-old Ruthie vanishes from the fields. Her brother Joe is the last to see her. Decades later, a girl named Norma in an affluent white family begins to suspect her memories are not imagination.

Adult

Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American poet in recovery, hunts for meaning in death, family, and a painting that may be his mother. Orphaned, addicted, and allergic to easy transcendence, he turns martyrdom into a question instead of a costume.

Adult

Yael van der Wouden

Rural Netherlands, 1961. Isabel keeps her late mother’s house in strict order until her brother leaves his new girlfriend, Eva, there for the season. Desire, suspicion, and missing silverware open a door onto what the family kept after the war.

Adult

Saou Ichikawa

Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton. Shaka lives in a care home outside Tokyo, uses a ventilator, and writes erotica under a pen name. A dare involving a nurse and a large sum of money detonates her claim on sex, money, and the right to be outrageous.

Adult

Sara Nović

At a residential school for the deaf, transfer student Charlie has never met another deaf person; Austin is the campus star until his baby sister is born hearing; headmistress February is fighting to keep the school open. Sign, lip-reading, implants, and civil rights share the same hallway.

Adult

Octavia E. Butler

On her twenty-sixth birthday, Dana is pulled from 1976 California to an antebellum Maryland plantation to save a drowning white boy — the ancestor she must keep alive so she can be born. Time travel makes slavery a present-tense problem she cannot theorize from a safe distance.

Adult

N.K. Jemisin

The Stillness is ending, again. Orogenes — people who can still earthquakes, and who are hated for it — survive as a controlled caste. Three braided narratives open a broken world that still has love, geology, and a system that calls oppression safety.

Adult

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu leaves military-ruled Nigeria for the United States and learns, for the first time, what it means to be Black in America. Obinze, shut out after 9/11, builds an undocumented life in London. Hair, blogs, class, and the difference between becoming American and staying yourself.

Adult

Torrey Peters

Reese, a trans woman who wants a child; Ames, who detransitioned and is not done with Reese; and Katrina, Ames’s boss, who is pregnant. Three adults try to invent a family that the available scripts do not cover.

Adult

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Incarcerated people fight to the death on national television for a shot at freedom. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are partners and rivals inside a spectacle that sells Black pain as entertainment — with footnotes that will not let you watch from the couch.