The latest from Ian McGuire, author of the highly acclaimed THE NORTH WATER (named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize). WHITE RIVER CROSSING opens in 1766 at Fort Prince of Wales, Canada, built by the infamous Hudson Bay Company. In charge is Moses Norton, as the company deals with settlers and indigenous peoples who bring pelts, tobacco and other valuable items to trade. One of these peddlers meets privately with Norton and presents a lump of gold that he says comes from Indian territory further north near Churchill, which is known as the polar bear capital. A secret expedition is planned to this sub-arctic region which is inhabited by a native tribe thought to be unfriendly. A guide who speaks native language is enlisted. WHITE RIVER CROSSING captures the danger of operating in this wild time of history and in this frighteningly inhospitable landscape. Once again, McGuire masterfully conjures a breathtaking story of what the promise of great riches leads men to do and where treachery and murder are merely the prices to be paid.

Jess Row has drawn acclaim for charting the intricacies and absurdities of race in America in his novels Your Face in Mine and The New Earth and in his essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. Now, in his first collection of short stories in more than a decade, he evokes white America—specifically liberal, educated white Northeasterners—awkwardly (and at times hilariously) poised on the precipice of cultural and global collapse. From summer backyard parties in Princeton to post-apocalyptic Vermont, from a camp for disadvantaged youth in Boston Harbor to a deranged visit to John Cheever’s Connecticut, STORYKNIFE is a funny, troubling, indelible look at a culture whose rituals and expectations are dissolving into thin air.

Following her breakout mystery debut, THE GOOD ONES (HarperCollins, 2023), Polly Stewart’s THE FELONS’ BALL is a rural noir set in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Every October, the powerful Macready family gathers together for a party known as the “Felons’ Ball”. Though the Macready family has a violent past, they have rehabilitated their reputation, and see the party as an opportunity to benefit their family business. Stewart’s novel follows Natalie, a yoga teacher and the Macready’s youngest daughter and explores questions of crime, gender, and class in the South. The Macready family’s dark secrets set a chain of events in motion at their annual party and Natalie finds herself caught in the vortex of her family’s history and the Felons’ Ball’s deadly consequences.

Michael Clune is the author of the recently reissued memoir WHITE OUT, which The New Yorker called “dreamily exact…sensual and hilarious…one of the year’s best books.”  PAN is his first novel, centered on Nick, a weirdly brilliant teenager, who is kicked out of his Russian-born mother’s house for reasons he is not told and goes to live with his father in a low-grade apartment development optimistically called Chariot Courts.  And then, quite unexpectedly, panic and anxiety enter Nick’s life.  What brings some solace is his old paperback copy of IVANHOE and the work of Oscar Wilde, which he discovers by chance at the library when he’s researching anxiety panic disorders. The book is set in a northern suburb of Chicago in the mid-90s. It’s funny, sad, deeply moving, and timeless, joining the pantheon of literary coming-of-age novels alongside Paul Murray’s SKIPPY DIES and Douglas Stuart’s SHUGGIE BAIN.