New Books in Literature

Nicole Paquin's Kate: The Secrets Within These Walls (Paquin, 2026) tells of a century of buried secrets surrounding the mysterious death of Kate Morgan have been trapped within the walls of The Hotel Del Coronado. Only assumptions could be made when her lifeless body was found near the tumultuous seaside. However, the curiosity of why an affluent young woman would be traveling alone in the year 1892, has sparked many elaborate tales. It's rumored that her spirit remains to linger the hallways of the elegant hotel.This is her story.

On the one-hundred-year anniversary of Kate's death, a young clairvoyant, Sofia, numinously draws Kate into materialization. For the first time, Kate communicates with the living- to help the girl from suffering a similar fate, and unravel the secrets preventing her unsettled spirit from eternal rest.

With the help from the ghost of Kate Morgan, Sofia reveals the truth of a small-town paradise where not everything is as it seems.

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Two women, bound by blood and betrayal, must break silence across centuries--or be silenced forever, in the dazzling new novel by New York Times bestselling author Madeline Martin. Lilith Legare's life is unraveling. Since her mother's death, strange things have been happening - plants turn toward her touch, animals linger in her path, and the birthmark on her arm has started tingling. Worse still is her recurring nightmare of being burned alive at the stake. Her search for answers brings her from Savannah to England, to the decaying Brackenmere Manor where the past blurs with the present. There, Lilith discovers a legacy she never asked for and along with it, the threat of peril. History must be rewritten, or she too will die. In 1645 Suffolk, Sybil Brantham stands accused as a witch. An educated, wealthy widow, she is branded a threat by men who fear her independence. As arrests begin and suspicion abounds, Sybil must protect her younger sister, even as betrayal takes root within her household. Across centuries, Lilith and Sybil are bound by blood and by danger. To save themselves, and each other, they must confront the silence that has stolen women's power for generations--and dare to claim their voices before it's too late. Listen to this interview about A Time of Witches (Hanover Square Press, 2026)

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When her family moves to a new country, Ren is heartbroken to leave Popo and her magical stories behind. In her new home, nothing feels familiar―until Ren discovers that, with her pencil, she can bring to life what she can’t find the words to say.

Through drawing, she bridges the gap between her two worlds and transforms her loneliness into a meaningful connection.

Tune in to this interview with author Bo Lu about Ren's Pencil: A Picture Book (Abrams, 2026)

Bo Lu is an author-illustrator, and winner of an Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Honor.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He writes Making People, a newsletter on parenthood through history.

Brian Van Zyl is a researcher and budding illustrator.  

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Waubgeshig Rice about his novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves (Penguin Random House Canada, 2023). 

In this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by Evan Whitesky ventures into unknown and dangerous territory to find a new home for their close-knit Northern Ontario Indigenous community more than a decade after a world-ending blackout.

For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.

Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the “land where the birch trees grow by the big water” in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature.

But it isn’t just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence.

WAUBGESHIG RICE grew up in Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay and now lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the short story collection Midnight Sweatlodge and the novels Legacy, Moon of the Crusted Snow, Moon of the Turning Leaves, and Early Bird. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his news media career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left full-time journalism in 2020 to focus on his literary career. He also holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Nipissing University, a diploma in Anishnaabemowin and Program Development from Georgian College, and a Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Hollay was also featured on the cover of issue 10 of The Ampersand Review. Learn more about Hollay here. 

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Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stakes psychological game of cat and mouse, where Yunus endures a mind-bending cycle of solitary confinement and interrogation. In their startlingly intimate exchanges, Yunus’s life begins to unfold—from his childhood memories growing up in a freer Iran to his heartbreaking betrayal of his only friend. As Yunus struggles to hold on to his sanity and evade Saeed’s increasingly undeniable accusations, he must eventually make an impossible choice: continue fighting or submit to the system of lies upholding Iran’s power.

Gripping, startling, and masterfully told, Then the Fish Swallowed Him (HarperVia, 2020) is a haunting story of life under despotism.

Amir Ahmadi Arian started his writing career as a journalist in Iran in 2000. He has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a book of nonfiction in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy.

Since 2013 Amir has been writing and publishing exclusively in English. In recent years his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, LRB, Harpers, Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, etc. He was the recipient of The Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow Fellowship for 2016 - 2018 from NYU. His next novel, The Season of Wild Poppies, will be published in 2027 with Heny Holt.

Recommended books:

• Vargas Llosa, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
• Jane Harper, The Dry
• Jeff Lemire, The Underwater Welder

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jason Pargin about his new novel, There Are No Giant Crabs in this Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs (St. Martin's Press, 2026).

New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin's nightmarishly hilarious John Dies at the End series is back to entertain all who dare enter.

A massive, sticky pile of severed human limbs suddenly appears in the parking lot of a vacant department store in a desolate small town. A set of footprints is found trailing away in the snow, as if a single pair of bare feet had wandered off the pile. If this wasn’t puzzling enough, the cops soon find that no one seems to be missing the limbs. Some of the fingerprints on the severed arms belong to living people with all their appendages intact, others match no one on file, and the rest of the limbs somehow have no prints at all.

This sounds like a case for local weirdos John, David, and Amy, partly because the cops don’t want the headache and partly because David’s own arm is in the pile, despite an identical copy of it still being attached to his body. When a mysterious man then shows up at David’s home claiming to be in pursuit of an entity he calls “the Penetrator,” it seems clear the trio is in for a long weekend.

In addition to stopping whatever this nonsense is, the gang will also have to quell the panicked headlines that threaten to ensue, which could prompt the feds to try to just wipe the whole town off the map (again). As such, the first thing you need to know is that, contrary to whatever ugly rumors you may have heard, there are no giant crabs in this novel.

Jason Pargin used to write under the pseudonym David Wong. He is the New York Times bestselling author of the John Dies at the End series and the Zoey Ashe novels. He is the former Executive Editor at Cracked.com and now writes fiction full time.

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Hollay was also featured on the cover of issue 10 of The Ampersand Review. Learn more about Hollay here.  

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Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman might not only have set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but have also crossed the path of a prince from the House of Osman begs to be told.

Christina Ståhle tackles this problem with aplomb in Before He Was Red (Pebble Press, 2025), her debut novel. The title refers to Abdulhamid’s later nickname, Red (in the sense of bloody), reflecting his use of terror and violence to suppress his enemies. Here he goes by the name Hamid, a choice made in part out of necessity (heirs to the Ottoman throne in the 1870s are not supposed to leave the palace) and in part to conceal his true identity from Flora and from the numerous rebels, mostly students, massing in the streets of Istanbul to protest the actions, or lack thereof, of the government.

It’s a tense time, with the Russian Empire stirring up rebellion among the Christian populations of the Balkan states, still officially under Ottoman rule, and the British Empire doing its best to control the Turks both financially and politically. Ståhle does a wonderful job of juggling the historical, political, and romantic plot lines, maneuvering a large cast of characters, some of whom have multiple identities, without ever losing sight of the drama inherent in the romance between Flora and Hamid.

Born in London to Swedish parents, Christina Ståhle grew up in various countries—including the UK, Italy, and Saudi Arabia—and speaks four languages. A political scientist, she has lived in Belgium for the last thirty years. Before He Was Red is her debut novel. 

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her latest book, Song of the Silk Weaver, appeared in September 2026.

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Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.

Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences of his life. Written by a neuroscientist and practising clinician, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer (Bloomsbury, 2023) follows Chekhov along this extraordinary route, drawing on his own account to reveal the doctor, humanitarian and observer behind the celebrated author. The result is a richer portrait of Chekhov, one that asks us to see his medicine and literature not as competing lives, but as different expressions of the same searching attention to human experience and the determination to not ‘do nothing’ to improve human lives.

Professor Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP, FTPS), is a British consultant clinical neurophysiologist, author, and researcher known for combining neuroscience with first-person patient narratives. He serves as a consultant at the University Hospital in Dorset, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University, and has served as the President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Inspired by his mentor and friend Oliver Sacks, Cole’s work heavily emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of individuals surviving rare or severe neurological conditions.

Jonathan is one of those rare scientists who combines both the rigor of scientific investigations with literary endeavours and even theatre.  I will include both Jonathan’s personal website and his website for his collaborations in theatrical productions.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy. 

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Norrin M. Ripsman (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1997) is the Monroe J. Rathbone Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. His primary research interests include crisis prevention; democracy and national security; postwar peacemaking; the construction of regional stability; the political economy of national security; neoclassical realism; crises and pre-crises; and the impact of globalization on national security.

Norrin M. Ripsman writes in two genres: academic and literary fiction. He has published a short-story collection, Song Book, and a novel, The Oracle of Spring Garden Road. His latest novel is Bullet Holes (2026).

Bullet Holes (Next Chapter, 2026) is a novel that deals with school shootings. It is a novel that reminds us that for decades, Americans have been struggling with the urgent need to address the scourge of school shootings while protecting constitutionally enshrined freedoms. Too often, the conversation is more of an echo chamber, where people talk past each other without really listening or understanding each other's legitimate points of view.

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Describing the plot of a Tom McCarthy novel requires some caveats about the scale and the projection of the thing. One might begin with a description of a man who after suffering a head injury decides to recreate and reenact a day in his life again and again ad absurdum to the point of violence, but this would be insufficient as a depiction of the novel Remainder’s electrical currents of feeling and its intellectual conduits that flip switches on and off in literary theory and philosophy. Likewise, a gloss of Satin Island might rest on the project of its narrator, a corporate archeologist preparing an all-encompassing ethnography of our human era. But such a distillation misses the humor, intrigue, and dreamwork that make the novel an island unto itself. And these baffling plots give way to novels that as the AV club has written, “are more entertaining than [they] have any right to be”.

Such is the case with McCarthy’s latest novel, The Rhyl Poster (New York Review Books, 2026), a thriller punched through with intrigue, violence, international skullduggery, and a flawed hero weighing his personal code against the ethical nature of global law and community making. Our protagonist, Stanton, the author of legal decisions of great acclaim for The European Court of Justice, is renowned for his digressive logic and absolute professionalism, but he has got himself into some trouble. When an addiction to pain killers puts him in the crosshairs for espionage at the court, Stanton will have to consider how the ideals of the court and his own language of ethical responsibility collide with his actions in a case that has world reorganizing implications.

But this description fails mightily to describe the experience of reading The Rhyl Poster, a novel that plays in the theater of many different forms of logic and representation. Stanton will, for example, fall into the game world of Grand Theft Auto and experience himself as an infinite chameleon of the open world mode, he will process his own childhood stutter as a means of introducing doubt and reconsideration into his speech and writing, and he will explore the possibilities of other means of thinking and being as far afield from his everyday life as kite concerts and Indonesian shadow puppetry. To read The Rhyl Poster is to surrender to its thinking processes and to understand that literature need not be monolithic in its representational instincts. It is a book that challenges as it entertains, and as such, it finds good company with classical works of philosophical fiction, Dostoyevsky, Elliott, Joyce. 

Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the Believer Book Award. His third novel, C, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the Europese Literaturrprijs and his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Literature Prize. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin.

Recommended Books:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• George Eliot, Middlemarch

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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