Literary Fiction, Jul. 2023, Pt. 2 | Prepub Alert

Wide-ranging literary voices for July. 

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Bilal, Aaliyah. Temple Folk. S. & S. Jul. 2023. 256p. ISBN 9781982191818. $26.99. CD. SHORT STORIES

Blum, Hila. How To Love Your Daughter. Riverhead. Jul. 2023. 240p. tr. from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. ISBN 9780593539644. $27. Downloadable. LITERARY

Chau, C.K. Good Fortune. HarperVia. Jul. 2023. 416p. ISBN 9780063293762. $29.99. CD. LITERARY

Chin-Tanner, Wendy. King of the Armadillos. Flatiron: Macmillan. Jul. 2023. 320p. ISBN 9781250843005. $28.99. LITERARY

deWitt, Patrick. The Librarianist. Ecco. Jul. 2023. 352p. ISBN 9780063085121. $30. lrg. prnt. CD. LITERARY

García, Cristina. Vanishing Maps. Knopf. Jul. 2023. 272p. ISBN 9780593534748. $28. LITERARY

Hornsby, Daniel. Sucker. Anchor. Jul. 2023. 256p. ISBN 9780593469675. $27. LITERARY

From a daughter revealing her hair in public when she suspects her father of infidelity to a mother reflecting on a near-death experience, Bilal’s debut collection, Temple Folk, illuminates the lives of contemporary Black American Muslims in the Nation of Islam and Sunni Orthodox communities. A woman thousands of miles from home secretly watches the grandchildren she’s never met, still struggling to understand why she and her beloved daughter have become estranged in How To Love Your Daughter, from Israeli best-selling author Blum. Debuter Chau’s Good Fortune sets Pride and Prejudice in contemporary New York’s Chinatown, with Elizabeth Chen suspicious of Darcy Wong, the wealthy young Hong Kong man who just bought the neighborhood’s rundown community center (50,000-copy first printing). Chin-Tanner draws on family history for her debut, King of the Armadillos, in which 15-year-old New Yorker Victor Chin is sent to quarantine in 1950s Louisiana owing to Hansen’s disease, otherwise known as leprosy (100,000-copy first printing). DeWitt’s Librarianist is retired Bob Comet, who has always lived through books but whose life—and complicated past—open up after he begins volunteering at the local senior center. Cristina García’s Vanishing Maps tells the story of Cuban matriarch Celia del Pino family's, scattered to the United States, Germany, and Russia. In Hornsby’s second novel, following the attention-getting Via Negativa, a putative Sucker named Chuck Gross, the errant son of a rich, exploitative industrialist, tries to make his own way by joining a medical startup that’s promising to sell immortality.

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Barbara Hoffert

Barbara Hoffert (bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com, @BarbaraHoffert on Twitter) is Editor, LJ Prepub Alert; winner of ALA's Louis Shores Award for reviewing; and past president, awards chair, and treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, which awarded her its inaugural Service Award in 2023.

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