New Books in Literature

Jaclyn Gilbert's Butter Road (Acre Books, 2026) is a searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence. In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an "English" outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population. At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they've accumulated caring for Emma's disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara's husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars--a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own. Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can't control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one's heart. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Her clothes shredded and disrobed by her own teeth, Lucy finds herself draped over a high tree branch in the quad of her college, naked but unafraid, a wild leopard more than any humankind. So begins Emeline Atwood’s starling debut novel, A Real Animal (Catapult, 2026). We know early on that Lucy will never be able to reach back to that precise feeling of being the leopard, powerful and at one with the natural world. Instead, she will swim in the harsher waters of a society that scorns and shames her, that seems to revel in her abuse, with a family that would prefer that she silence herself.A Real Animal exists in a tremorous first person, the reader watching through Lucy’s eyes her attempts at intimate partnerships, with good men, horrible men, indifferent men, each relationship cast off or dissolved by the incoherence of her interior life. In sexual dramas for which she is but a prop, and family spectacles that treat her like so much wallpaper, Lucy seeks an experience of life that abandons performance for something like the sensuousness of the imminent now. A bildungsroman that throws redemption and assimilation on the trash heap, A Real Animal does what the Russian Formalists hoped literature would do: it shakes you awake and rejects the comforts of your habitual life in favor of something as friction-full as a dirty razor. The waves come hard, and you can but experience the drowning.Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T, Hooper Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. A Real Animal was just shortlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize for a debut novel.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Samantha: The Next Chapter (American Girl Publishing, 2026). From American Girl and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis comes the next chapter of Samantha Parkington's story--now an adult searching for justice after her legacy is stolen in New York City in 1920. It’s 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them to vote in their first presidential election that fall. But when Samantha’s large inheritance, including her childhood Mount Bedford home, is stolen in a shocking scheme, she goes from socialite to shop girl overnight and experiences a very different side of New York City living in a boarding house. Searching for clues regarding the theft of her inheritance, she infiltrates the business of a notorious criminal in New York City. Determined as ever, Samantha will do whatever it takes to find answers and save her family’s legacy. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and Mahoney discuss the historical, literary, and cultural significance of MARCH 1917. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Nancy Jo Cullen about her new novel, Dish (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).In this smart, sexy romp of a novel, Nancy Jo Cullen explores the joys of second chances – at life and at love.Frida Davis-Lefebvre is back in her hometown of Lakeland, BC, sober and recovering from the sale of her popular, but debt-ridden, Toronto restaurant La Grange before she heads off to greener pastures when things get complicated. It’s hard enough settling in at home with her mothers, but then Perry, the sperm donor she’s never met, moves onto her mothers’ property to recover from his own difficulties and Frida discovers that her still-hot ex-fiancé, Charlie, is working at the hotel restaurant that just hired her. For his part, Perry is just trying to patch his life together enough to get back to the big city where he knows he belongs, until he is caught up in the whirl of the Davis-Lefebvre family and this young woman he finds an unexpected connection with. As Frida explores a frenemies-with-benefits situation with Charlie and Perry finds himself drawn into dog sitting for the local film producer and picking up his paintbrush for the first time in years, they both start to question the paths they had planned for themselves and whether or not what they really want is right in front of them.Nancy Jo Cullen’s poetry and fiction have appeared in several Canadian literary journals and anthologies, including Journey: Celebrating the Journey Prize. She is the 2010 recipient for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. Her first novel, The Western Alienation Merit Badge, was shortlisted for the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Dish, is forthcoming in the fall of 2026 with Wolsak & Wynn. Nancy Jo Cullen has published a collection of short stories, Canary, with Biblioasis and four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Nothing Will Save Your Life, was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2022.Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.