The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

This is highbrow horror disguised as literary fiction (or maybe literary fiction disguised as a haunting), and it absolutely worked on me. A grieving therapist buys a home in an isolated development, hoping the blank slate will help her rebuild—only to realize the house’s history isn’t just “creepy vibes,” it’s something real and complicated and growing teeth. What I loved is how Fu refuses to make grief simple or haunting simple. The book holds trauma, responsibility, isolation, and the strange weight of adulthood all at once, and it still manages to keep you turning pages like you’re reading a thriller.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

The Disappointment by Scott Broker

A queer couple goes to the Oregon coast carrying resentment, insecurity, and a literal baggie of a dead mother’s ashes, and the whole trip becomes a pressure cooker. This one is sexy in that emotionally dangerous way—where you can feel the characters reaching for connection and missing by inches, over and over. The narrator is unreliable in a way that feels true to how people justify their behavior when they’re unraveling. There’s also this slow recalibration of what you think you know about the relationship, which made me keep rereading scenes in my head like, “Wait, was that tenderness… or was that control?

You can get a copy on Amazon.

The Golden Boy by Patricia Finn

This is a second-chances novel with wit and bite, centered on a wealthy retired media guy whose carefully maintained life gets disrupted by the return of something he never properly faced. It has that delicious tension of a couple who’ve been married forever and know exactly where to poke each other, but still share history and loyalty underneath the sniping. I also loved how the book looks at the way money can soften consequences until it can’t—and how the past doesn’t care how polished your present is.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden

This one is searing. It’s about the aftermath of sexual trauma in a way that is unflinching but also deeply compassionate, and it uses multiple perspectives to show how harm ripples outward—not neatly, not fairly, and not in a straight line. A sex offender’s murder sets off a chain reaction that forces survivors, loved ones, and even the perpetrator’s mother into reckonings they’ve avoided for years. It’s propulsive, but it’s also emotionally heavy, and I think it’s best approached with care and space to breathe afterward.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley

This is a fascinating portrait of an artist who wants love and connection but is also prickly, self-centered, and unreliable in the way people can be when they’re protecting their own version of events. Inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, it’s set in New Mexico and follows Agatha as she narrates a romance that grows increasingly unsettling. I love books that make you question what you’re being told without waving a flag that says “UNRELIABLE NARRATOR HERE,” and this one does that beautifully. It’s about ambition, aging, mental illness, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

This is a big love story between two women that keeps finding and losing itself across decades, and it’s one of those books that understands how intimacy can be both sanctuary and threat. Hargrave writes the consequences of choices so clearly—how you can want two lives, two versions of yourself, and still have to pick. It’s lyrical, yes, but it’s also sharp-eyed about the cost of denial, the ache of timing, and the quiet devastation of turning away from your own heart.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin

An astronaut on an unprecedented mission looks back on his life, and the result is quiet, poignant, and deeply human. This isn’t a “space action” book—it’s a memory-and-ambition book, about what people sacrifice in the chase for greatness and how time bends your understanding of the past. The emotional through line (love, family, belonging) is what makes the cosmic setting land. It’s melancholy in a clean, luminous way, like a novel written in starlight and regret.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

Lerner doing what he does best: taking something simple (an interview assignment) and turning it into a meditation on integrity, miscommunication, technology, and the weird performance of identity. The plot spark is almost comically small—his phone breaks before the interview—but that’s the point. It’s about what happens when the tools we rely on vanish, and how quickly our sense of control was an illusion. It’s slim, tart, and surprisingly potent, with some moments that felt more tender than I expected.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Like This, But Funnier by Hallie Cantor

This book is hilarious in a way that made me gasp-laugh, and also unsettling in the way it portrays insecurity spiraling into obsession. An out-of-work screenwriter sells the worst idea she’s ever had and gets trapped inside the machine of her own bad decisions, and the Hollywood satire is so precise it hurts. What makes it more than just comedy is the emotional undercurrent: marriage, ambition, self-worth, and the way women get boxed in by cultural narratives about time, motherhood, and success.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

This is bold, weird, and brilliant—structured like a saints’ life and threaded with art history and myth as a woman revisits an affair from her past with “Saint Monica Lewinsky” as her guide. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also serious about female desire and male power, and about how the late ’90s shaped the stories women were allowed to tell about themselves. The invention here is so confident, and the payoff feels strangely mythic, like it turns private pain into something larger and clarifying.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki

A taut, funny, poignant debut about a Hungarian teen who arrives in Los Angeles and the older version of herself years later as a guarded single mother in suburbia—two timelines that slowly reveal what happened and why she became who she is. The voice is brisk and knowing, with that spiky vulnerability that makes you root for her even when she’s defensive. It’s also a book about bifurcations—how life changes because of one decision, and how you can never fully see the alternate worlds you cut off.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen

This one is a gut punch, but also oddly hopeful—an astonishing portrait of grief after infant loss. Cleo is furious, alienated, spiraling, and then (almost accidentally) ends up working at a funeral home, where the community she finds begins to stitch her back together in small, awkward, tender ways. Nguyen captures grief’s agony and its absurdity—the way you can be shattered and still find yourself laughing at something stupid five minutes later, then hating yourself for it. It’s emotionally intense, but it’s also an ode to survival.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew

A family saga, cultural history, and detective story braided into one rich Brooklyn tapestry. A fire in 1978 haunts a block for decades, and when a young reporter discovers her family’s possible connection to it, she starts digging into everything her ancestors buried to survive. This book is about community memory—who gets blamed, who gets displaced, what gentrification tries to erase, and how the “American dream” gets sold versus what it costs. It’s vivid and savory and full of urban life.

You can get a copy on Amazon.

The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Oliva

A family saga with a sci-fi twist: extraterrestrial contact changes the world, and we follow the long arc of a family across decades and then more than a century. What grabbed me is the emotional core—especially the damaged mother-daughter thread—and how the book keeps zooming out to remind you how small one human life is against cosmic time. It’s thought-provoking without being cold, and it gave me that particular feeling of finishing a book and staring into space (pun intended).You can get a copy on Amazon.