New Arrivals for the Week of August 11

Emmy-winning writer Aisha Muharrar, whose credits include Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Hacks, makes her fiction debut with a novel that’s been landing on just about every summer reading list. Centered on two women brought together after the death of someone they both loved, it digs into the layered grief and quiet rivalry that follows. Oprah Daily calls it “warm” and “heartfelt… celebrating the joy of connections, especially those cut short.”

“Expansive yet fast-paced,” says Publishers Weekly of this sweeping, meticulously researched history of New York’s turbulent reinvention in the late ’80s. From Wall Street excess to street protests and cultural flashpoints, Mahler, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, captures the contradictions and ambitions that defined the era. Arriving as New Yorkers brace for a high-stakes mayoral race, its meditation on ambition, inequality, and civic identity feels strikingly of the moment.

In a prestigious writing program, a student’s thesis draws on real events that match a professor couple’s private history, igniting gossip, suspicion, and the quiet dismantling of professional and personal alliances. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “sexy, engrossing book about the nature of attraction, ambition and loyalty.”

Named one of NPR’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2025, this blistering satire follows a conflict reporter whose pursuit of career-defining stories collides with the horrors of the job, interrogating how stories are shaped—and sold.

In the winter of 1952, the future Booker Prize–winning novelist, then a struggling writer and expectant mother, travels with her young son from England to a remote Mexican town in hopes of claiming a family inheritance. Over three months, she navigates a chaotic household of rivals, artists, and strangers with competing agendas. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls it “a masterful novel… a luminous exploration of a woman’s desperation and resilience.”

Set against the city’s gritty tabloid heyday, this novel follows a reporter investigating the long-ago disappearance of a relative, a search that exposes buried truths and unhealed rifts. “A wild ride and an immersive Chicago novel, in which the town threatens to toddle off its axis,” writes Kirkus Reviews.

In Chernihiv, a boy spends his days helping on his grandfather’s sunflower farm, sketching, and secretly falling for his best friend in a place where such love is forbidden. When Russian forces invade, killing his mother and grandfather, he flees with his little brother across a ravaged country in search of their father.

In 2006, after several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, seeking meaning in the wake of loss. Seventeen years later, the award-winning author of Surrender retraces her route, weaving memoir, reportage, and environmental writing into a portrait of America’s beauty, horror, and contradictions.

From the author of We Refuse to Forget comes the story of Edward McCabe, a 19th-century leader who envisioned a self-governed Black state in what is now Oklahoma. Campaigning to bring Black settlers west, he faced white supremacist violence, political infighting, and the limits of the nation’s promises.

A longtime nanny works for a wealthy Beijing family, caring for their son and keeping their secrets. When a government investigation destroys their fortunes, her own hidden past comes to light. "These characters may live in your head for some time due to Zhang's fine pacing and quirky scenes," observed Kirkus Reviews.