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In Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, a National Book Award finalist, Cyrus Shams is sleepwalking through life. He’s a poet, newly sober, obsessed with death, and deeply depressed. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother boarded a plane in Tehran to visit her brother in Dubai. A U. S. missile mistakenly shot it down, and she was gone.

Tommy Orange’s family saga, Wandering Stars, picks up where his 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, left off. In the wake of a 2018 shooting, high-school freshman Orvil Red Feather struggles to make sense of the violence he has endured. To better understand what Orvil is up against, Orange takes us back to 1864 to tell the story of Jude Star, the boy’s great-great-great-grandfather.

Juli Min’s debut, Shanghailanders, is an ambitious family drama told entirely in reverse. The novel begins in 2040 with Leo Yang, an aging Chinese real-estate investor who finds himself drifting apart from his elegant Japanese French wife Eko, their precocious eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko, and the baby of the family, aspiring actress Kiko.

What does utopia look like for Black Americans? It’s the question at the heart of essayist, editor, and translator Aaron Robertson’s The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, which explores the history and meaning of Black freedom movements in the U. S. The topic is a personal one for the author, whose paternal grandparents had a plot of land in Promise Land, Tenn., the historic all-Black town founded in 1870, five years after the Civil War ended.

Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, a captivating multigenerational tale set amid the 2008 financial crisis, begins with a frenzied proposal. Gary Geist, a wealthy and preternaturally lucky football player, asks Kismet Poe, his rebellious Ojibwe classmate, to marry him. This is much to the chagrin of Kismet’s superstitious truck-driver mom Crystal and her nerdy, homeschooled crush Hugo, who would also like to one day make her his bride, if only he could afford a car.

In her debut memoir, best-selling cookbook author and food TV icon Ina Garten admits she has a “low threshold for boredom.” This, she writes, has made her more than willing to take wild risks “just to get out of that miserable state.” In Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Garten lays out her journey to becoming the Barefoot Contessa, and the difficult, sometimes questionable decisions she made to get there.