New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

Egan takes the idea of a glamorous, carefree ’20s and shatters it, revealing its hateful reality and showing how this racism thing has really never left the U.S. It’s just changed form. It was during this decade that D.C. Stephenson, a grifter and a charlatan, slithered his way into a position of influence as the grand dragon of Indiana, ushering in a new era of the KKK. Together, new members of the hate group — who were everything from judges and politicians to ministers and bankers — engaged in all levels of violence against Black people, Jewish people, and any other group they viewed as being outside of themselves. At one point, the sway of the group was so strong that one third of white men in Indiana became members. But then Stephenson came down with a severe case of fuck-around-and-find-out when he sexually assaulted Madge Oberholtzer, who told authorities of his crimes before dying a month after the assault. It was thanks to the good sis that he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. This is an obvious one for history buffs, but usual fiction readers will appreciate the pacing and more thriller-like elements.

Take your usual Victorian romance, add an abolitionist and a Mexican heiress, and you’ve got a historical romance that brilliantly subverts the usual expectations for historical romances. When Ana María and her sisters get sent to London while Napoleon attacks Mexico, she expects to stay in the background as the obedient daughter. Instead, she’s thrust on to the social scene by her uncle, hoping her and her sisters will be demure representatives of Mexico and curry favor with the who’s who of British aristocracy. Then she meets Gideon Fox, a British politician who’s had to use his wits to rise to the position of Parliament member. It’s within this position that he hopes to stop people like his grandmother, who was enslaved in the U.S. before making her way to England, from being victimized. While Ana María and Gideon have an undeniable attraction, they both know that rules are a little different for them, and they’ll have to tread through their feelings carefully. This is for the girlies who want a slow burn historical romance that has a lot of depth to it.

In 2049 — which is somehow only 36 years from now — Rose is sent with a group of other sex workers to a depressingly cold build site in Canada. She’s made a deal to spy on the site’s architect in exchange for housing for her and her mother in an uncertain, climate change-ravished world. Then there’s Grant, a professor who’s looking to escape the legacy of his family by teaching at the new construction site. Both Rose and Grant will eventually realize there is more to the architect, and the site overall, than there initially seems. And as mysteries unfold at the site, a group of female scientists and soldiers have their own questions about what happened to the men who were assigned to the same Cold War station as them. Mysteries abound in this realistic dystopian novel.

Magnolia is 19 and going through it — she’s estranged from her mother, her father has been dead, and her grandmother just died. She’s essentially alone, broke, and has a predator of a landlord. One day, an odd stranger named Cotton comes in and offers her a job at his family’s funeral home as a model. Now, normally, I would say to not accept modeling jobs at funeral homes ran by strange men, but Magnolia is down bad for some money, and things go well. At first. Then things get increasingly weird, both at work and in Magnolia’s personal life. Let me just say that y’all aren’t ready.

The Richmond Theater Fire killed 72 people in 1811 in Richmond, VA. Here, Beanland imagines the event, and the people involved, through four perspectives. Once a forgotten candle sets the backdrop of a holiday play aflame, chaos ensues. The widow Sally Campbell and enslaved blacksmith Gilbert Hunt try to save people, as Hunt’s niece Cecily — who was attending the play in the “colored gallery” — tries to escape to her freedom. Then there’s the Gibson troupe, who try to blame a slave rebellion for the tragedy, and not their teen stagehand Jack forgot to put out the candle.

In this YA novel set in New Orleans, twins Cris and Clem are descendants of a powerful family that wield generational magic. But the family isn’t the unified force it once was — it’s been dethroned, their father has died, and their mother is sick. Once the siblings find out their mother has actually been cursed, Clem will have to conquer his feelings around abandonment, and Cris will have to come to terms with having cast the ancient spell that killed their father in order to stop whoever is trying to destroy their family. They’ll have to solve a 30-year-old murder and stop the city from seeing another massacre while they’re at it.