Fiction Presenters
More presenters will be confirmed in the days and weeks ahead.
Alafair Burke
Alafair Burke is the Edgar-nominated New York Times best-selling author of fourteen suspense novels, including The Ex, The Wife, The Better Sister, and Find Me, and co-author of the best-selling Under Suspicion series. A former prosecutor, Burke is now a professor of criminal law. She recently served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and was the first woman of color elected to that position. She lives in New York.
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It was meant to be a harmless prank.
Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.
But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she’s had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry.
When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.
What had they gone and done?
Kira Jane Buxton
Photo Credit: Stanton J Stephens
Kira Jane Buxton's writing has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, and more. Her debut novel Hollow Kingdom was an Indie Next pick, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Audie Awards, and the Washington State Book Awards, and was named a best book of 2019 by Good Housekeeping, NPR, and Book Riot.
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From the author of Hollow Kingdom, a fantastically funny story featuring a cast of colorful characters in a dying Italian village and a giant truffle that changes their fate forever in this “deliciously absurd tale….I savored every page of this book.” (Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures)
After nearly losing the election to a geriatric donkey, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives.
Little do the villagers know that local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. A truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen.
Written in the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures, Tartufo is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.
Kyle Edwards
Photo Credit: Jemimah Wei
Kyle Edwards grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation and is a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation. A graduate of Ryerson University, he has worked as a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica, and Maclean’s, and has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford Universities. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his reporting and was named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2019. He is currently a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California.
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A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it’s like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city
Word on the street is that this is the Tigers’ last season. For Tomahawk “Tommy” Shields, an Indigenous, image-obsessed high school student from Winnipeg, the potential loss of his team serves as a stark reminder of his uncertain future. He can’t help but feel that each of his peers has some skill or gift that he lacks, yet each of their perceived virtues hides darker truths, too. Clinton is beloved by teachers, but his “good kid” disposition is a desparate attempt not to fall prey to the gang violence in which his older brother has become enmeshed. Floyd has incredible talent on the ice, yet behind that talent lies deep insecurity about his multiracial background. And the adults that populate Tommy’s life—his mother, who struggles with schizophrenia; Pete, the team’s wayward Zamboni driver; and elders Maggie and Olga—offer a mixture of well-intentioned but often misguided support and serve as a portent of what the future could hold.Set in Winnipeg’s North End, at the border of Canada’s eastern woodlands and central prairies, Small Ceremonies follows a community both at the edge of the world and at the center of something much larger than itself. As its richly drawn characters navigate the thrilling independence of adulthood and the loss of innocence that accompanies adolescence, one can’t help but root for Tommy and his community, even as Tommy wrestles with his place within it.
Nikki Erlick
Photo Credit: Federico Photography
Nikki Erlick is the author of The Measure, an instant New York Times bestseller, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and a “Read with Jenna” Book Club Pick on The TODAY Show. The Measure has been translated into 24 languages worldwide. Erlick previously worked as a travel writer and ghostwriter after graduating from Harvard University summa cum laude and earning her master’s degree from Columbia University. Her newest novel, The Poppy Fields, will be published in June 2025.
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Welcome to the Poppy Fields, where there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal.
Here, in a remote stretch of the California desert, lies an experimental and controversial treatment center that allows those suffering from the heartache of loss to sleep through their pain...and keep on sleeping. After patients awaken from this prolonged state of slumber, they will finally be healed. But only if they’re willing to accept the potential shadowy side effects.
On a journey to this mystical destination are four very different strangers and one little dog: Ava, a book illustrator; Ray, a fireman; Sasha, an occupational therapist; Sky, a free spirit; and a friendly pup named PJ. As they attempt to make their way from the Midwest all the way west to the Poppy Fields—where they hope to find Ellis, its brilliant, enigmatic founder—each of their past secrets and mysterious motivations threaten to derail their voyage.
A high-concept speculative novel about heartache, hope, and human resilience, The Poppy Fields explores the path of grief and healing, a journey at once profoundly universal and unique to every person, posing the questions: How do we heal in the wake of great loss? And how far are we willing to go in order to be healed?
Joseph Finder
Photo Credit: Joel Benjamin
Joseph Finder is the New York Times best-selling author of sixteen suspense novels, including House on Fire, The Fixer, and Suspicion. Two of his novels have been adapted into major motion pictures—Paranoia (starring Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman) and High Crimes (starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman). Four more have won the industry’s top best novel awards—Killer Instinct (the International Thriller Writers Award), Buried Secrets (the Strand Critics Award), Guilty Minds (the Barry Award), and Company Man (the Barry Award). Finder lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his security is breached, Paul is forced to flee into the New Hampshire wilderness to evade Russian operatives who can seemingly predict his every move.
Six years ago, Paul was a rising star on Wall Street who fell in love with a beautiful photographer named Tatyana—unaware that her father was a Russian oligarch and the object of considerable interest from several U.S. intelligence agencies. Now, to save his own life, Paul must unravel a decades-old conspiracy that extends to the highest reaches of the government.
Rivaling the classic spy novels of the Cold War, The Oligarch’s Daughter is built for the frightening world we live in now.
Allegra Goodman
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
Allegra Goodman is the author of six novels, including the national bestseller Sam, which was a “Read with Jenna” book club selection; two short story collections; and a novel for young readers. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes a unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island.
Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.
Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.
Gregg Hurwitz
Photo Credit: Melissa Hurwitz
Gregg Hurwitz is the author of the New York Times best-selling Orphan X novels. Critically acclaimed, his novels have been international bestsellers, graced top ten lists, and published in thirty-three languages. Additionally, he’s sold scripts to many of the major studios and written, developed, and produced television for various networks. Hurwitz lives in Los Angeles.
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Evan Smoak is a highly trained former government assassin who has survived for years by keeping his circle to a few trusted confidants and a strict code he calls “The Ten Commandments.” But when Evan suddenly finds himself at odds with his oldest friend, all the rules he lives by shatter―and the consequences are murderous.
Tommy Stojack might be Evan's best friend in the world. He’s a gifted gunsmith who has created much of Evan's own weapons and combat gear. But now, he has apparently crossed one of Evan's hardest lines and their argument explodes into open warfare. Now Evan has no choice but to track and face down his only friend.
In the meantime, Tommy has left town in order to honor his own promise to help a dead friend's son. While Tommy is fighting to save the son with everything he’s got, Evan arrives with vengeance in mind.
But as deadly as the former Orphan X is, there is an even more dangerous threat about to arrive on the scene. The only question left is will any of them get out alive.
Eowyn Ivey
Photo Credit: Aurora Ivey
Eowyn Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She worked for nearly a decade as a bookseller at independent Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, and prior to that, as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Frontiersman. She is the author of the novels The Snow Child—which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—and To the Bright Edge of the World. Her new novel, Black Woods, Blue Sky, was published by Random House in February 2025.
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Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.
Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well.
Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains, on the far side of the Wolverine River.
It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic and she can picture a happily ever after: Together they catch salmon, pick berries, and climb mountains so tall it’s as if they could touch the bright blue sky. But soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have ever imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.
Black Woods, Blue Sky is a novel with life-and-death stakes, about the love between a mother and daughter, and the allure of a wild life—about what we gain and what it might cost us.
John Kenney
John Kenney is the author of two novels and four books of poetry. His first novel, Truth In Advertising, won the Thurber Prize for American humor. He is also the author of Talk to Me, which received a starred Kirkus review, and the New York Times bestseller Love Poems for Married People. He is a long-time contributor to The New Yorker.
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"Razor-sharp, darkly comedic, and emotionally piercing. With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Kenney’s vivid prose transforms the mundane into unexpected hilarity."
—Booklist (starred review)An Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick for April
Winner of the AudioFiles Earphones AwardThe Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy in this coming-of-middle-age tale about having a second chance to write your life’s story.
Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.
As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer who is now confined to a wheelchair, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.
Thurber Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author John Kenney tells a funny, touching story about life and death, about the search for meaning, about finding and never letting go of the preciousness of life.
Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling writer of mostly science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. Her debut novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Nnedi has since won World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, Eisner, Hugo, Lodestar, and Nommo Awards, amongst others, for her work. Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and the Shuri series. She holds a PhD in literature, master’s degrees in journalism and literature, and lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her daughter, Anyaugo.
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THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Recommended by New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • Rolling Stone • Los Angeles Times • Reader's Digest • and more!
“This one has it all.” — George R.R. Martin • “As delicious as it is disorienting.” — Zakiya Dalila Harris • “Suspenseful, timely, and heartfelt.” — People • “Mind-bending.” — New York Times Book Review
In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative—a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human. This is a story unlike anything you’ve read before.
The future of storytelling is here.
Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister’s lavish Caribbean wedding, she’s unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It’s a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.
When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey—one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu’s novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.
A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.
“An ambitious, inventive tribute to the power of storytelling itself.” — Nikki Erlick, New York Times bestselling author of The Measure
“A deeply felt dazzle. A blaze. It is true deep to the bones.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels
"There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes." — Ursula K. Le Guin
Nnedi will also be presenting her Middle Grade book, The Space Cat.
Adam Roberts
Photo Credit: Emil Cohen
Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet, Secrets of the Best Chefs, and Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and hosts the podcast Lunch Therapy. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, as well as for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.
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Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare collaborator: hungover, flaky, shallow, and—worst of all—indifferent to food. But between Molly’s bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly’s charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly’s heart and stomach? Or will Isabella’s devotion to her culinary idols and Molly’s monstrous ego send the entire cookbook—and both of their careers—up in flames?
A mouthwatering, hilarious debut peppered with insider food world detail—the real writers behind celebrity chef cookbooks, the hot restaurants that run on the backs of their sous-chefs, the secret to perfect blinis à la Russe—Adam Roberts’s Food Person is a literary soufflé—a deceptively light, deliciously rich, showstopping confection.
Karen Russell
Karen Russell is the author of six fiction books, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote is her second novel.
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The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
Maggie Stiefvater
Photo Credit: Stephen Voss
Maggie Stiefvater is the New York Times bestselling author of the Shiver trilogy, The Raven Cycle, and The Scorpio Races, among dozens of other YA fantasy novels. Her latest books are The Listeners, her adult debut, and a graphic novel adaptation of The Raven Boys, both hitting shelves in 2025. Steifvater’s books have sold over five million copies around the world, and she lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and their two children.
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January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.
Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.
Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.
June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.
Maggie will also be presenting her Young Adult book, The Raven Boys.
Shelby Van Pelt
Photo Credit: Karen Forsythe
Shelby Van Pelt was an instant New York Times bestseller and a “Read With Jenna” book club pick in 2022 with her debut novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. In 2023, she was awarded the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize from The Writer’s Center. Remarkably Bright Creatures has sold over two million copies. It has spent, in aggregate, over a year on the NYT Hardcover Bestseller list and debuted at #2 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list and #1 on the Indie Bookstore list. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Chicago area with her family.
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A New York Times Bestseller * A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick
Soon to be a Netflix Film
“Remarkably Bright Creatures [is] an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut. . . . Memorable and tender.” —Washington Post
A charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus
After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.
Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.
Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.
Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.