My Next Four Reads

Yes, I know I have more than thirty books next to my nightstand waiting to be read. Here are four more that I am adding to the stack.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, is the timeliest pick: a taut, 2025 National Book Award finalist set in a near-future Kolkata ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, following two families forced into conflict as they try to protect their children. It's also only 200 pages of tightly wound tension, so it won't demand a long commitment.

Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo, moves at the opposite pace: a patient, generous portrait of a small upstate New York town and the decades-long friendships that shape it.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, rewards that same patience. It's a Booker-shortlisted Australian novel about a woman who abruptly leaves her life for a cloistered religious community, told through a journal-like structure as she reckons with unresolved grief and guilt. Quiet, but it stays with you.

Cursed Daughters is the most propulsive of the four, Oyinkan Braithwaite's follow-up to My Sister, the Serial Killer, about three generations of Nigerian women bound by a family curse and a daughter believed to be her dead aunt's reincarnation.

Together they cover very different registers: thriller-paced literary fiction, slow-burn small-town saga, contemplative memoir-in-fiction, and family-curse drama. Worth adding to the to the nightstand stack.