Tayari Jones, the award-winning author of American Marriage, is back with her first novel since 2018. Kin is the story of Vernice and Annie, who both grew up as friends and neighbors in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. The girls were bonded by their motherlessness, but in adulthood, their lives would go in very different directions. Vernice attends college at Spellman University in Atlanta, marries into an affluent family, and befriends a group of wealthy, powerful Black women. Meanwhile, Annie cannot let go of the mother who abandoned her, and Annie’s search for something to make sense of her mother’s absence sends her on a dangerous journey.

You might love Lauren Groff for her novels Fates and Furies and Matrix, but this author is also well-known for her short stories, and Brawler is Groff’s first short story collection since her award-winning collection Florida, published in 2018. These nine stories cover a wide range of settings, from the 1950s to the present day, from (of course) Florida to California. All of the stories explore human nature and “the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.” Just like Groff’s other works, you can expect these stories to be beautifully written and endlessly quotable.

Saara El-Arifi is the bestselling author of The Ending Fire Trilogy and the Faebound Trilogy. Now, El-Arifi is publishing a standalone novel that digs deeper into the story of Cleopatra, the last active pharaoh of Egypt. The novel is written from Cleopatra’s perspective and sets the record straight on what historians, playwrights, and poets might tell you about this larger-than-life historical figure… and what they might leave out.