The Star Society
By Gabrielle Saab
In this searching novel, the aftershocks of war reverberate beneath the klieg lights of postwar Hollywood. Ada Worthington-Fox, once a resistance operative in occupied Arnhem, the Netherlands, has exchanged coded messages and prison cells for studio contracts and publicity. By 1946, she is cinema’s newest ingénue, until her sister Ingrid — presumed dead — shows up on her doorstep as a private investigator dispatched to expose Communist sympathisers in the film industry. Her assignment carries a bitter irony: Ada’s name sits on the list. Gabrielle Saab braids espionage with intimacy, scrutinising the moral vertigo of the late 1940s, when patriotism became spectacle and suspicion turned into civic duty. In an era demanding allegiance, can familial devotion survive the machinery of war?
Take What You Can
By Naima Coster
See also: By the book
The Dominican-American writer considers the tensile strength of female friendship under the pressures of class, ambition and motherhood. Val and Milly met as the only Black students on a study-abroad programme in France, where their bond — fortified by an older benefactor’s patronage — felt both charmed and invincible. Years later, newly reunited in Brooklyn and pregnant at the same time, they attempt to entwine their adult lives with similar certainty. Yet success has altered their trajectory. Milly, now a polished influencer married into restaurant wealth, yearns for autonomy; Val, a journalist wrestling with her first book, bristles at invisible hierarchies. Naima Coster discusses what it means to mother without models and to remain someone’s chosen family when history refuses to stay buried.
More Than Enough
By Anna Quindlen
See also: Red letter day
Having made a literary home out of the subtle dramas embedded in ordinary lives, Anna Quindlen returns to familiar terrain with undiminished grace in this wise, tender work. Polly Goodman, a high-school English teacher, regards the book club she founded — three women privy to the particulars of her marriage, uneasy rapport with her mother and protracted struggle with IVF — as her surest confidantes. However, when a joking gift of an ancestry test produces a baffling genetic match with a stranger, Polly finds herself re-examining the narrative she has always told about her origins. As the quartet’s equilibrium shifts in unforeseen ways, Quindlen reflects on how identity is not merely inherited but revised, shaped by loss, loyalty and the sustaining — if delicate — bonds that anchor us.
Famesick
By Lena Dunham
The creator of the mega-hit sitcom Girls revisits the period that first made her a generational lightning rod but with a harder-won candour. Structured in three acts that chronicle her ascent from the sale of her TV series to the disorientation of notoriety, the memoir weaves cultural critique with corporeal reckoning. Lena Dunham writes of chronic illness as both impediment and strange companion, likening the maintenance of her body to hauling a wrecked car through the pageantry of premieres, award shows and political galas. Hospital corridors sit uncomfortably alongside red carpets; creative triumph blurs with physical exhaustion. Frank without being self-exonerating, Famesick interrogates the bargain the actress struck with visibility, asking what remains when acclaim fades and the body refuses to cooperate — and whether wisdom can be wrested from the wreckage.
Kin
By Tayari Jones
With Kin, Tayari Jones extends the moral and emotional inquiry that distinguished her earlier award winner An American Marriage, turning her gaze to the long shadow cast by maternal absence. Set between the tight-knit confines of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, and the broader territories its daughters dare to inhabit, this gripping fiction follows the diverging paths of Vernice and Annie, neighbours and intimates since girlhood. Shepherded by a formidable aunt, the former enters a sphere of cultivated ambition where privilege and precarity exist in uneasy tandem; the latter pursues a more perilous search, one that carries her towards danger as readily as revelation. Expect a blend of wit and gravity as Jones counts the ways Southern womanhood can both gird and undo the self.
For more lifestyle, arts and fashion trends, click here for Options Section
Sisters in Yellow
By Meiko Kawakami
Set in the raw-edged Tokyo of the 1990s, the book finds Meiko Kawakami exploring the volatile chemistry as well as the intersection of adolescent yearning and financial insecurity. Known for her attention to women living on the margins, she sketches a city where opportunity flickers faintly and safety is largely imaginary. Fifteen-year-old Hana lives in a cramped apartment with her mother, a nightclub hostess whose wages barely sustain them. Their routine is interrupted by the arrival of Kimiko — older, magnetic and composed — who enters the frame. Together, they establish Lemon, a scrappy neighbourhood bar that becomes a kind of rehearsal space for adulthood, offering Hana income and the intoxicating sense of self-invention. But adolescence, Kawakami suggests, is easily exploited. As loyalties fray and authority bares its teeth, Sisters in Yellow discloses how the impulse to flee one’s circumstances can bind the young to more menacing forms of dependence.
Last Night in Brooklyn
By Xochitl Gonzalez
Brooklyn in 2007 hovers at a certain pitch: cranes in the distance, townhouses appreciating and dinner parties thick with plans. Xochitl Gonzalez places her heroine within this atmosphere of upward drift. At 26, the cautious and dutiful Alicia Canales Forten is saving for a wedding to a future doctor. However, a night in Fort Greene complicates that circumstance. From her apartment window, she studies her fashion designer neighbour La Garza, whose glamorous gatherings attract artists, financiers and the merely curious. Gradually absorbed into this milieu of taste and money, particularly after her banker cousin settles nearby, Alicia moves from observer to participant. Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Gonzalez’s latest explores the darker compromises of the seductive American Dream.
Prodigal Tiger
By Samantha Chong
The Malaysian author makes an assured debut with this contemporary fantasy, drawing deeply from the mythic textures of Penang while grappling with the emotional dissonance of diaspora. Chong infuses her story with the rhythms of local folklore, such as vengeful spirits, ancestral duty and the charged atmosphere of the Hungry Ghost Festival, without sanding down their symbolic resonance for a Western gaze. The premise opens with Caroline Chua spending five years at a magical academy in New York, exiled from the northern island she once called home. When her brother, heir to a sacred protectorate, vanishes, she is summoned back to a Penang that feels at once intimate and estranged. What ensues is a breathless race across a spirit-haunted landscape where old loyalties must be rekindled and first love reconsidered.
