THE BOAT RUNNER, by Devin Murphy, is in the tradition of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE and THE NIGHTINGALE; an incandescent debut novel about a young Dutch man who comes of age during the perilousness of World War II. Library Journal writes: “Debut novelist Murphy lends authenticity to his story by drawing on the life of his Dutch maternal grandfather and his own experiences at sea, where Jacob crucially spends time…An effectively detailed, morally complex book that will appeal to all readers of historical fiction.”

HOW TO SURVIVE A SUMMER, by Nick White, is a searing debut novel centering around a gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi and a man’s reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen. Rolling Stone writes: “…what makes White’s novel feel so urgent and so fresh, is the startling compassion he evinces for the place on which it centers, the effort that is made to give breadth and humanity to a part of the world both he and his book’s narrator are from, and by which both of them were unavoidably shaped.”