An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery—a portrait of the artist as a young woman set in a Berlin that can't escape its history.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection, while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together? Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.

Laura de León is a radar astronomer who studies Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs) such as threatening asteroids and comets at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. In Los Angeles in 2020, several crises are coalescing. The first strain of SARS-CoV-2 triggers the lockdowns, the city roils with protests of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd and the police killing of Breonna Taylor, while the Bobcat Fire sweeps across the San Fernando Valley. In the midst of these emergencies, Laura is struggling to keep her family alive. A story about family, love, risk, and science, A History of Hazardous Objects contemplates how experiencing trauma and pain may help us secure a safer and more just world.

These are stories about working class people who come and go mostly unnoticed or ignored, whose lives are not fodder for literary tropes or cliches. They are neither heroes nor villains, just regular people with their flaws and merits, facing the challenges and questions posed by everyday life. Gilb writes in a distinctive, appealing voice, welcoming the reader in with an easy sense of familiarity, and the effect is spare on the surface, but profound. Deftly capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships in a simple word or gesture, he peels back the surface of seemingly unremarkable encounters to reveal layers of myth and uncanny surrealism, propelled by the momentum of new, changing times.

Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic. But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
 

It’s 1918. In the small fishing village of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Frame murders her husband hours after their wedding and thrusts the revolver into the blowhole of a beached whale. Crime reporter Toby Havenshaw is dispatched by the Halifax Evening Mail to cover the hearing, and his diary subsequently follows the surprising twists and turns of Elizabeth Frame’s flight from the law, accompanied as she is by a love-besotted court stenographer. But Toby’s diary also paints a vivid and deeply affecting portrait of his marriage to Amelia, a surgeon just returned from the front lines in France and Belgium. When a child is born to Elizabeth Frame on the lam, Amelia is drawn into events in ways she could never have imagined. And then everything changes.

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons. In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before. Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.