Silas, a trapper, discovers a hidden altar from an ancient religion in a tunnel deep within the frozen ground. His prayers to the Hearthlord summon Senya, a girl with healing powers, who emerges from a supernatural portal. He becomes a priest—Father Silas—and as the religion grows, angels known as the Hearthborn arrive through the portal to free the Hearthlord from the tundra, leaving Senya behind in the cold. Meanwhile, in her homeland, a gradual shift is taking place from religious to political power—and warfare. Senya returns home to serve the Hearthlord, teaming up with Siegfried, a dispossessed soldier from Feracht House, and Nell, a rogue princess from Aesterland. The novel opens with plodding worldbuilding framed by an origin story and little exploration of characters’ emotions before eventually exploding into the horrific devastation of war. Shifting third-person points of view provide detailed backstories and clues about the central characters’ roles as victims of political power plays. Eventually, these perspectives come together even as the leads confront individual losses in their world’s new and dangerous landscape. Some plot points are left unresolved, leaving room for a sequel. In a white-presenting world, Senya stands out for having deep bronze skin, pale eyes, and white hair.

She’s bookish and friendless and barely speaks in public. Her sole companions are the imaginary dragonflies that silently guide and encourage her. Faced with the prospect of a yearlong move to New York with her parents and brothers, Guppie finds her anxiety manifesting as a frightening dragon only she can see. Inspired by a teacher’s advice, Guppie draws up a checklist of heroic qualities in characters from books and sets herself the task of acquiring them. But over the course of their road trip, Guppie discovers that becoming a hero and standing up to that dragon might be harder than she thought. Can she really become “Gupta the Brave” if she’s hiding from her “so cheap, it’s embarrassing” parents the fact that she got her brothers involved in a social media contest to win coveted cell phones? The brisk pace falters in the middle, and an abrupt transformation at the end feels unconvincing, but Deen’s engaging tale explores finding courage and embracing challenges, as well as noting the difference between hearing and listening. Guppy, with her wry voice and sarcastic commentary, is a likable narrator; readers will become invested in her troubles. The Persauds’ strong bond shines through in their amusing banter and the siblings’ reactions to their mother’s tall tales and overprotective nature.

Stylist and fashion influencer Clio Barnes has been estranged from her mother for years, as have her sisters. When their mother dies, she leaves her house to Leda, Daphne, and Clio. The elder two want nothing to do with the house, but Clio has visions of renovating the place, turning her DIY into content, and flipping it for a profit. One more detail: The house is possessed by a demon. In So Thirsty (2024), Harrison wrote a book about vampires that was also a novel about best friends trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Here, Harrison mines the potential of the haunted house to excavate the abuse that Clio and her sisters suffered as children. Clio is a terrific protagonist. She’s sharp and funny and a little less self-aware than she thinks she is. As she tries to reconcile her own memories with those of her family—including her mother, who left behind an annotated copy of the book she wrote about living in a demon-plagued split-level in the suburbs—and questions her own sense of reality, Clio unravels. But it’s a necessary unraveling, the kind of annihilation that makes real change possible. This novel delivers truly chilly scenes while also exploring the emotional depths that make horror meaningful. There’s a climactic scene at a family barbecue where Clio sees echoes of her mother in herself, Leda, and Daphne and thinks, “Her ghost is us.” There are many emotionally devastating moments in this novel, but this one captures the essence of them all. Harrison knows that we are, all of us, haunted.

In his boisterous and breezy memoir, Sheen starts with his birth, when he was nearly strangled by his umbilical cord, and goes on to a childhood in and around Los Angeles, where he made home videos with other showbiz kids. Along with his mother and three siblings, he frequently traveled to locations where his father, Martin Sheen, was filming, notably the set of Apocalypse Now. In an account laden with expletives and endearingly weird spelling choices (“dood,” “kool”), some of the actor’s most riveting chapters evoke his own stints on film sets, particularly his brutal experiences during the filming of Oliver Stone’s Platoon, in which the author starred. Though he went on to play parts in many more movies and in TV shows like Two and a Half Men, he turned his attention primarily to booze, drugs, gambling on sports, and encounters with sex workers. Don’t look for the usual redemption narrative here. Though Sheen does spend the last few pages of the book on what he says have been eight recent years of sobriety, undertaken for the sake of his children and grandchildren, he devotes most of the book to an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting survey of life on the edge. Despite many hours at meetings, he doesn’t have the respect for Alcoholics Anonymous—that “medieval gibberish club”—that he has for the many escorts he employed, whose charges he views as “a convenience-tax for a guaranteed outcome the other dating scenarios couldn’t offer.” Sheen’s three marriages zip in and out of the narrative with dizzying speed, leaving the reader no wiser about the women involved.

The author entered the Swiss military as a young man, and his time as a soldier greatly affected how he later chose to run his business (“here’s the thing about a country maniacally focused on executing at an elite level for its very survival: there’s a lot you can learn from that approach”). In these pages, Goodner assembles the tools he used to build his own company and highlights their connections to his military service. Incorporating personal stories of both failure and success, the author also offers case studies in each chapter of other businesses and colleagues, detailing how they overcame various problems. Each chapter starts with a difficulty rating and describes the ways in which his military service taught him skills he then transferred to the business world. His topics include an employee’s first day at a company, how to use existing employees to recruit for open positions, how checklists are boring but helpful tools, and how clear communication at all levels of a business prevents mistakes from happening. Goodner provides useful tips for businesses of all sizes and suggestions for how to implement the practices he outlines with real-world strategies. While the chapters do reference previous sections, each can be read on its own, and the author even supplies a guide to which chapters to focus on to address specific challenges businesses face. The well-organized text makes the advice easily digestible. In a crowded field, the author sets himself apart by using a unique angle to frame the issues of business: Goodner asks, how does a well-organized, world-renowned military run, and how can your business use the same methods to get ahead? Appendices include the author’s “Golden Rules,” recommended reading, a case study index, and a reading guide.