SIX PACK

Feline ponderings, knotty love, and more fresh novels

REPRODUCTION

A novelist considers birth and art—suffering morning sickness, Louisa Hall miscarrying, conceiving of a novel about Mary Shelley, abandoning it—in this visceral, chimerical genre bender from Louisa Hall. (Ecco)

MADDALENA AND THE DARK

Julia Fine's beguiling fairy tale dwells in 18th-century Venice, where teen girls—driven, orphaned Luisa and charismatic, wealthy Maddalena—collide at a rigorous music school. (Flatiron)

HOLDING PATTERN

PATTERN Newly single and on leave from her PhD program, Kathleen JENNY XIE Cheng moves into her mom's Oakland home and takes a job at a "cuddle clinic" in Jenny Xie's luminous, physical debut novel. (Riverhead)

FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE

Beginning with Farrell seducing Nate at Yale, through movie stardom and the AIDS epidemic, Paul Rudnick chronicles half a century of complex love. (Atria)

OPEN THROAT

TH|C4T "I probably wouldn't eat a child," muses Henry Hoke's mountain lion narrator. This lyrical story of loneliness and kinship in Los Angeles is, by turns, delightful and melancholy—and inventive throughout. (MCD/FSG)

EVERYTHING'S FINE

Cecilia Rabess spins a smart, tangly romance at Goldman Sachs between Jess, feminist mag employee turned lone Black woman analyst, and white, conservative Greenwich-born Josh. (Simon & Schuster)

Keziah Weir