“The shoes were packed. ‘Daddy loves you,’” Josie’s father tells her, “glancing around—had he left anything?” Martin Brier is halfway out the door, first wife cast aside for the younger model destined to become his second. Shorr’s latest novel is a mid-20th-century, Midwestern, nearly father-free coming-of-age story that follows Josie, her two brothers, and their mother as they try to build a life for themselves in Martin’s cavernous absence. Shorr favors a close third-person point of view which hovers, hummingbird-style, outside her characters’ windows. It’s an effective strategy, especially in Shorr’s fluidly engaging prose style, which allows readers to access the thoughts of even the most difficult characters—Martin included. He shows us in the passage above, for instance, that he can’t focus on his daughter long enough to tell her he loves her without simultaneously wondering if he’s adequately packed his belongings. His selfishness is astounding. So is the psychological astuteness with which Shorr has loaded the sentence—and the rest of the book—which is, in the end, the portrait of a girl and her wider family as they adjust to a world whose parameters they have not set themselves. Shorr picks up the narrative in the mid-’50s and sets it down half a century later, when Cleveland has changed irrevocably and Josie’s family has scattered. If the book putters out in the last two or three chapters, that seems a small price to pay. The larger missed opportunity is that Lora, Josie’s mother, doesn’t seem fully rendered. As a momentarily penniless single mother of three, she has to act decisively—and does. Still, Shorr has cast her sights elsewhere, and the result is a remarkable success.

Tennis isn’t the only thing weighing on Leo: He’s gay and not out to anyone. He doesn’t always agree with his father, legendary tennis player Johnny Chambers, who retired to coach Leo after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis cut his own career short. After Johnny suffers a stroke that keeps him from traveling as much as usual, Leo switches up his game, and the success he finds in his father’s absence drives a silent gap between them. When Gabe comes out, becoming the first openly gay male tennis pro on tour, his coach quits and he attracts the homophobic attention of Sascha Volkov, a Russian player who consistently ranks No. 1. Gabe and Leo are eventually able to bury the hatchet long enough to start practicing together, only to find that their chemistry doesn’t stop at the tennis court. Even after realizing they play for the same team, their secret romance is not without barriers. The things that divide Leo and Gabe become the things that bring them together: Sascha, the media, and their own fear. This is a well-written (very) slow burn that focuses much more on sports than on romance, though the gradual thaw from enemies to lovers is highly satisfying. While the spice is relatively mild, fans of gay sports romances will appreciate the snappy dialogue, compelling characters, and high-stakes pacing.

In 1930, the Rosenthals were a bustling, happy family. Friedel and Gina were two of six children, their father a successful small businessman who managed three corner shops throughout Dusseldorf. Antisemitism was on the rise, however, and Hitler eventually came to power. The Rosenthals were systematically stripped of their businesses, property, possessions, and humanity. The 13-year-old twins, like other Jewish students, were forced to leave school. The story follows the girls as they experienced the agony of being torn from their family members, forced into degrading conditions in the Czestochowa ghetto, and ultimately hauled off to concentration camps. Dronfield explains the historical facts simply and directly, presenting painful truths and not minimizing the horrors of Nazi Germany. His well-drawn portrayal of Friedel and Gina is compelling; he shows them to be creative, brave, tenacious, and somehow, despite it all, hopeful. Readers will be engrossed by each turn of their tale, each new atrocity they somehow survive, and will cling desperately to the hope that the sisters get a chance at the beautiful lives they should have had all along. This is a historical page-turner with two remarkable, inspiring women at its center that deserves a place on library and classroom shelves.

“Welcome to Shipikisha Club,” goes the traditional Zambian saying for women who are about to be married. “Shipikisha,” meaning “to relentlessly endure,” is also a synonym for marriage, whose peaks and valleys the novel follows through the stories of three generations of women: Peggy, the preacher’s wife; her daughter, Sali, a secondary-school teacher; and her daughter, aspiring actress Ntashé. When Sali finds out she’s pregnant, she’s sure that her married lover, a famous cardiologist she calls Doc, will leave his wife to marry her. On her way to tell him the good news about the baby, however, Sali gets into a car accident with—of all people—Doc’s wife. Sali emerges relatively unscathed, and Kasunga, the starched-collared policeman who was at the scene of the crash, takes an interest in her. His emergence in her life at first seems like a blessing, saving her from a life of shame as an unmarried mother. Convinced he can have no children of his own, he willingly accepts Ntashé, Sali’s child with Doc, as his own. As Ntashé grows up, though, the sweetness of her parents’ relationship sours as “her mother’s tongue grew venomous and her father’s temper shredded.” The poison escalates for decades until all three women find themselves in a courtroom while Sali is tried for her husband’s murder. Truths and half-truths flicker throughout the trial as each woman fights to persuade the audience—and perhaps themselves and each other—of their story. Against the courtroom backdrop unfolds the women’s struggle to survive amid the complexities of Zambian modernization, folk tradition, religion, and a political system in which victims have few rights.

In Fourspires, familiars exist to serve their arcanists, wresting power from bone, botanicals, blood, and stone until overexertion kills them. Taro, a bone familiar with an “unhealthy obsession with black eye liner” and an “attitude problem,” dreams of running away with Nixie, the love of her life. Nixie, familiar to the head botanic arcanist, despises Taro, but she needs her skills to escape. On the night they intend to enact their plan, the Thaumaturge drops dead, triggering the countdown to the Slaughter, a battle to the death for the crown between the four head arcanists and their familiars. Magically bound to the ritual, Taro and Nixie will die if they try to leave. Their only hope of freedom is to find four lost relics before the Slaughter begins and break an ancient curse on their city, but to succeed, they need the help of a blood arcanist and a stone arcanist. This darkly humorous fantasy trilogy opener, which will appeal to fans of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Room trilogy, starts strong with a fast pace driven by imminent life-or-death stakes, irresistibly self-destructive characters, and absorbing worldbuilding. An exploration of gender leans into a born-in-the-wrong-body narrative, and one of the few brown-skinned characters in the largely white-presenting cast has an arc in this volume that echoes an unfortunate trope. A cliffhanger ending creates high anticipation for the sequel.