New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

A razor‑sharp debut novel of three best friends navigating love, sex, faith, and the one night that changes it all.

It’s always been Malak, Kees, and Jenna against the world. Since childhood, under the watchful eyes of their parents, aunties and uncles, they’ve learned to live their own lives alongside the expectations of being good Muslim women. Staying over at a boyfriend’s place is disguised as a best friend’s sleepover, and tiredness can be blamed on studying instead of partying. They know they’re existing in a perfect moment. With growing older and the stakes of love and life growing higher, the delicate balancing act between rebellion and religion is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

Malak wants the dream: for her partner, community, and faith to coexist happily, and she wants this so much she’s willing to break her own heart to get it. Kees is in love with Harry, a white Catholic man who her parents can never know about. When he proposes, she must decide between her future happiness and the life she knows and family she loves. Jenna is the life of the party, always ready for new pleasures, even though she’s plagued by a loneliness she can’t shake. Through it all, they have always had each other. But as their college years come to a close, one night changes everything when harsh truths are revealed.

As their lives begin to take different paths, Malak, Kees, and Jenna — now on the precipice of true adulthood — must find a way back to each other as they reconcile faith, family, and tradition with their own needs and desires. These Impossible Things is a paean to youth and female friendship — and to all the joy and messiness love holds.

Reasons to read it: For a flashback to the early 2000s! Three British Muslim friends navigate the complications of life and figuring out where and how they can fit all they want into it. The novel has a lightness and humor, despite some of its heavier themes, that keep it fun, as well as well thought out female characters. It’s a great, contemporary look into the lives of Palestinian, Egyptian, and Pakistani women.

Beneath the streets of York, the goblin market calls to the Wickett women — the family of witches that tends to its victims. For generations, they have defended the old cobblestone streets with their magic. Knowing the dangers, they never entered the market — until May Wickett fell for a goblin girl, accepted her invitation, and became inextricably tied to the world her family tried to protect her from. The market learned her name, and even when she and her sister left York for Boston to escape it, the goblins remembered.

Seventeen years later, Lou, May’s niece, knows nothing of her magical lineage or the twisted streets, sweet fruits, and incredible jewels of the goblin market. But just like her aunt, the market calls to her, an echo of a curse that won’t release its hold on her family. And when her youngest aunt, Neela, is kidnapped by goblins, Lou discovers just how real and dangerous the market is.

To save her, both May and Lou will have to confront their family’s past and what happened all those years ago. But everything — from the food and wares, to the goblins themselves — is a haunting temptation for any human who manages to find their way in. And if Lou isn’t careful, she could end up losing herself to the market, too.

Reasons to read it: This is a dark fantasy coming-of-age story adventure that’s got a bit of horror. It uses backstories as well as the present to build what turns out to be a rich story with complex characters. There is plenty of action and blood, but none of it feels mindless. Read for a queer — the protagonist is asexual — diverse, and bloody retelling of “The Goblin Market!”

A sweeping debut novel about first love, complicated family dynamics, and the pernicious legacy of racism, This Place Is Still Beautiful follows two estranged teen sisters who reunite in their small Midwestern town when their family becomes the victim of a hate crime.

The Flanagan sisters are as different as they come. Seventeen-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet, and self-conscious, whereas nineteen-year-old Margaret is sharp and assertive. Margaret looks just like their mother, while Annalie passes for white and looks like the father who abandoned them years ago, leaving their Chinese immigrant mama to raise the girls alone in their small, predominantly white Midwestern town.

When their house is vandalized with a shocking racial slur, Margaret rushes home from her summer internship in New York City. She expects outrage. Instead, her sister and mother would rather move on. Especially once Margaret’s own investigation begins to make members of their community uncomfortable.

For Annalie, this was meant to be a summer of new possibilities, and she resents her sister’s sudden presence and insistence on drawing negative attention to their family. Meanwhile Margaret is infuriated with Annalie’s passive acceptance of what happened. For Margaret, the summer couldn’t possibly get worse, until she crosses paths with someone she swore she’d never see again: her first love, Rajiv Agarwal.

As the sisters navigate this unexpected summer, an explosive secret threatens to break apart their relationship, once and for all.

This Place Is Still Beautiful is a luminous, captivating story about identity, sisterhood, and how our hometowns are inextricably a part of who we are, even when we outgrow them.

Reasons to read it: This YA novel accomplishes a lot in an understated way. In addition to covering the tricky time right before heading off to college — and all of the messy relationship details it brings — it also tackles the issue of racism from multiple victims’ perspectives. There’s a lot of reality in the characters and their situations — as well as the nuanced resolutions that come about.

For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mona Awad, this fearless debut chronicles one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination.

Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the voice that reminds her of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three’s Company.

When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose vision — to completely shuck off her own troublesome identity — takes shape. She plans a drastic move to an isolated mountain retreat where she can re-create the iconic apartment set of Three’s Company and slip into the lives of its main characters: no-nonsense Janet Wood, pleasantly airheaded Chrissy Snow, and confident Jack Tripper. While her best friend, Krystal, tries to drag her back to her old life, Bonnie is determined to transcend pain, trauma, and the baggage of her past by immersing herself in the ultimate marathon-watch.

Reasons to read it: Pick this one up for an interesting look at obsession and its causes. A woman winning the lottery and using the winnings to recreate a show she’s obsessed with seems like a lot, and it is, but Hutson’s precise writing allows readers to see where Bonnie’s infatuation started and why it took such a strong hold on her — which is all done without slipping into ridiculousness. This is an examination of trauma with a unique premise.

The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the #1 New York Times best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist.

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: how do we talk to our children about it? How do we guide our children to avoid repeating our racist history? While we work to dismantle racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists?

After he wrote the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, readers asked Ibram Kendi, “How can I be antiracist?” After the bestsellers How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, readers began asking: “How do I raise an antiracist child?” Dr. Kendi had been pondering the same ever since he became a teacher — but the question became more personal and urgent when he found out his partner, Sadiqa, was pregnant. Like many parents, he didn’t know how to answer the question — and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He didn’t want to educate his child on antiracism; he wanted to shield her from the toxicity of racism altogether. But research and experience helped him realize that antiracism has to be taught and modeled as early as possible — not just to armor our children against the racism still indoctrinated and normalized in their world, but to remind adults to build a more just future for us all.

Following the model of his best-selling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines vital scholarship with a compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent to create a work whose advice is grounded in research and relatable real-world experience. The chapters follow the stages of child development and don’t just help parents to raise antiracists, but also to create an antiracist world for them to grow and thrive in.

Reasons to read it: How to Raise and Antiracist is part memoir, part researched how-to. Kendi inserts his own childhood experiences and his efforts in raising his child, making the instructional guide feel more relatable. His message that antiracism must always be strived for is absolute, but he demonstrates how this is something to work towards, as he never hesitates to show his own flaws.