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BERLIN ATOMIZED

A striking debut from a new global voice.

Three siblings from Buenos Aires weather the eventful unfolding of the 21st century.

Kornberg’s debut novel, which she stylishly co-translates from Spanish with Rockwell, is presented as a collection of diaristic writings assembled and edited in 2063 by a childhood friend of the Goldstein family. It begins in Buenos Aires, with Nina Goldstein: “If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time machine, a photo lost to the internet, a Daft Punk record.” Nina and her older brothers, Mateo and Jeremías, grow up in a gated community north of Buenos Aires with scant parental involvement. The music scene of the period, including the Cromañón nightclub fire of 2004, is a backdrop to their coming of age, presaging future tragedies and two of the siblings’ careers in the arts. As Jeremías comments, “Want to destroy your friendships? Form a band. Want to destroy a band? Give its members time, feed them candy, coke, ideological warfare, propaganda, fascism.” As the book hopscotches forward in time, settings include Uruguay, Paris, Berlin, Gaza, Brussels, and Tokyo, all in various dystopian iterations—Paris is the epicenter of a bloody hacker-driven revolution in a not-far-off future. Though their family is geographically scattered and one of them dies young, the Goldstein siblings remain crucially connected, retaining in their orbit longtime friends and romantic partners, a redefined version of dysfunctional family more lasting than anything else in Kornberg’s atomized landscape. Capturing a lost generation that feels both timeless and particular in its ironic fatalism and its various intellectual, artistic, and political responses to a broken world, this novel will be of interest to the international literary community.

A striking debut from a new global voice.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9781662602856

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Astra House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

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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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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: July 4, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025

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