It’s off to the races in the explosive eighth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. As chaos and mass panic spread outside the dungeon in the wake of Faction Wars, Carl and Donut find themselves on the tenth floor, where they’re forced to compete in a surprisingly normal set of tasks. Well, normal for the dungeon. Races. Get from point A to point B, and don’t come in last. After each race, they pick an upgrade for their vehicle and the track gets more challenging. It all seems a little too normal, a little too simple. Ignore those strange glitches that are occurring with increasing frequency. Don’t listen to those whispers about what’s happening on the mysterious eleventh floor, something the system AI calls A Parade of Horribles. Nobody, not even the showrunners, knows what that means. Just that the AI has ominously dubbed it “a coming-out party for the ages.” Everything is fine, Crawler. I repeat, everything is fine. Carl hates that it’s business as usual. The rules of this floor have taken away his agency. That just will not do. So Carl is planning a party of his own. It’s a plan so dangerous, so insane, he can’t even consult his friends lest the AI put a stop to it. Because if it goes wrong, it’s not just the end of Carl and Donut. No. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

A darkly comic suspense in the vein of All’s Well and Yellowface, She’s a Lamb! is an edgy and incisive novel that marches toward showtime with a growing unease about the dangers of magical thinking and the depths of delusion Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver’s smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that’s why the part of Maria in the theater’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it’s going to be. Jessamyn may have been relegated to the position of childminder for the little brats playing the von Trapp children, but it’s so obvious she’s there for a different reason — the director wants her close to the role so when Samantha, the lead, inevitably fails, Jessamyn will be there to take her place in the spotlight. This must be it. Because if it isn’t, well, then every skipped meal, every brutal rehearsal, every inch won against a man attempting to drag her down will have all been for nothing. Sharp, relentless, and darkly funny, She’s a Lamb! is a cutting satire about the grotesque pall patriarchy casts over one woman’s delusional quest to achieve her dreams and the depths she will sink to for a chance at the life she’s convinced she deserves.

From the author of Natural Beauty, set in the fiercely competitive art world, a novel about an obsessive friendship upended by a cutting-edge technology purported to enhance empathy and connection Enka meets Mathilde in art school. Mathilde is a dizzyingly talented yet tortured artist whose star is on the rise—and Enka, struggling to make art that feels original, is immediately drawn to her. The two strike up an intense bond that soon turns codependent. But when Mathilde’s fame reaches new heights, Enka becomes desperate to keep her best friend close—no matter the cost.   Enka quickly falls in love with and marries a billionaire whose family’s company is funding an unconventional technology purported to heighten empathy, which could allow someone else to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and absorb the trauma from her brain. Soon, the boundaries between Mathilde and Enka begin to blur even further, setting in motion a disturbing series of events that forever changes their lives. Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception deftly navigates big questions of art, technology, authorship, and what makes us human. Ling Ling Huang offers us a portrait of close friendship—achingly tender and twisted—that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“I loved it…and have never read anything like it”—Elizabeth Gilbert) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites—starring an apparition of Monica Lewinsky    Forty-five-year old Jean Dornan cannot escape the shadow of something she did several decades ago. On a study abroad program to France in the summer of 1998, she embarked on a deeply inappropriate relationship with her professor. When the professor contacts her out of the blue to invite her to his retirement ceremony, she is jolted out of her malaise and filled with the need to understand why the affair derailed her life.    Rereading her old diaries, she is shocked to realize her relationship with the professor occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, she finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky—as if she were some kind of secular saint, the patron of persecuted and demonized women, perhaps?—and begging Monica’s forgiveness for not understanding everything they had in common. To her shock, Saint Monica appears to her—like a saucy Ghost of Christmas Past—and leads her back in time to reassess what happened. Had Jean merely been weak, stupid, blind, as she has told herself for years? What was it about her that led her into the affair? What did she really do that summer?     Told in flashbacks of those sun-lit six weeks that changed Jean's life, interspersed with irreverent accounts of real female martyrs and visitations from Saint Monica offering insight about Jean’s younger self, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and thought-provoking examination of desire and how it shapes us. It is also a timely examination of what grace and forgiveness look like, in our lives and throughout history.