Hi dearest reader,

A week of drizzle-drazzle approaches. Notoriously, Bay Area residents freak out when it rains and get into a lot of car crashes. Also notoriously, California has been in drought, so it’s not really our fault. And yet, it would seem this year the hills have remained green for many months and drought “has improved by 1-3 categories.”1 Indeed this is good news, for it provides more days to stay inside and blame the weather. More days to read a book with the sound of rain on the window. With this in mind, here’s a suspenseful bunch to choose from:

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

Literary Fiction, Speculative, 304 pages, published in 2025, pre-ordered online.

The Wilderness is a brilliant, unsettling book. My only gripe with it is that I would’ve loved to spend more time with each character, Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia. I would’ve eaten up 500 pages, nay, 600 pages detailing their lives—a testament to how vivid they come through on the page. I was worrying about these five women throughout my day like they were real people I knew in my real life.

The Wilderness, with its kaleidoscopic POV’s, reads like a collection of vignettes and moves in a nonlinear fashion, forward and backward through time, in the end taking us to the near future. It can take a minute to understand which POV you’re in, and sometimes more than a minute, but when you’re in it you’re glad you stayed. The opening 25 pages with the leading character, Desiree, could be its own short story and is quite moving. I had to think about it for a couple days before picking up the book again. This novel is perfect for fans of Parable of the Sower and Insecure. It’s a remarkable depiction of how friendship and family might endure our current era.

The ideal mood for reading The Wilderness:

The group chat has been quiet lately and you miss the drama.

Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Literary Fiction, Speculative, 432 pages, published in 2024, purchased online.

If you considered reading Chain Gang All-Stars when it first came out in 2024 but haven’t had the chance yet, this is your sign to pick it up. Meet Octavia Butler’s contemporary: the award-winning author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, who, like Butler, is a master of the speculative form.

In the imagined realm of Chain Gang All-Stars, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are major figures in the Hard-Action Sports world, but “sports” is a nice name to normalize the brutality Loretta and Staxxx contend with as prisoners of the CAPE program, short for Criminal Action Penal Entertainment.

To earn their freedom, prisoners are forced to fight to the death for entertainment, gladiator-style, at a chance to win freedom. What’s stunning is how readily the rest of society accepts this new brutal “sport,” not only accepts it but cheers for it. Viewers spend money to watch these fights in person at a stadium like they were baseball games. Additionally, they enjoy CAPE’s twisted reality show depicting life for the prisoners.

When Hurricane Staxxx is made to battle others, she yells to the audience, “I love you.” She tells viewers “I love you,” any chance she gets. In my upcoming podcast interview with Adjei-Brenyah, when I ask him why he chooses to repeat this phrase for her, he says love is something that is all hers that they can’t take away from her.

It’s important for Staxxx to show the world that she has compassion to give and deserves to receive it too, and that even after so much violence it’s possible to choose compassion over brutality. Well, viewers of Hard-Action Sports need to start choosing compassion ASAP. And so do societies with private prison industries.

Let me speak from the heart about this novel, because in this current political moment, it has personally meant a great deal for me to read. As I ask, “Where is the compassion?” Chain Gang All-Stars questions the same. As I ask, “What are we capable of?” Chain Gang All-Stars offers receipts. It’s a beautiful piece of writing in conversation with all that’s come before in American history, and all that will come after. Chain Gang All-Stars is a future classic.

The ideal mood for reading Chain Gang All-Stars:

When you’re like: “Damn, I wish I had a smart, thrilling, funny, heartfelt book to read.”

Universality by Natasha Brown

Literary Fiction, 176 pages, published in 2025, requested local book store to order it then picked it up.

Universality is the first novel I’ve read that had me accurately reevaluate my media literacy for the attention-economy. By reading Brown’s novel you’re shown firsthand why the attention-economy should be the first thing on your mind whenever you read an article, or a blog, or watch a video on the internet, even from trusted sources, but especially from dubious ones.

After reading Universality my media-literacy has improved. Whenever I read or watch anything online, first I ask myself how and why is this piece getting my attention? How are the words constructed to stop me in my tracks? Which facts are twisted to capture me in an emotional vice, to squeeze me of my concentration? Are they using my attention for good, such as alerting me something truthful? Or are they manipulating my fears for engagement. Are they attempting to siphon my time, for a few extra seconds to show me advertisements, or longer, much longer, a week, a year, forever…? Do they ask me to depend on them, and only them, to know what’s real about the world?

Propaganda is the most obvious threat in an attention-economy, but what I love most about Universality is how it lays bare the inner workings of everyday click-bait journalism, and how this kind of media is pretty insidious and can galvanize people against their best interests. Media literacy is an urgent skill we need to learn and yet vastly don’t have.

I could tell you the plot of this book is about a young man who is almost bludgeoned to death by a gold bar and the journalist who sets out to investigate the incident, but then that wouldn’t be the whole truth, and perhaps it’d be better for you to discover the story for yourself.

The ideal mood for reading Universality:

You need a short book to shake you up.

Honourable Mentions

Bloodfire, Baby by Eirinie Carson

Literary Fiction, 304 pages, out February, 17th, 2026, pre-ordered and got a review copy from Penguin Random House.

I’m currently reading this eery, gorgeous novel by Eirinie Carson, whose memoir, The Dead Are Gods, I gushed about on the newsletter a couple years ago. Carson’s debut novel is perfect for a chilly February day and I adore the main character’s voice, Sofia, who struggles postpartum when her husband travels for work and leaves her alone with their new baby. She soon becomes haunted by a shadowy figure that troubles the eldest daughters in her family. My gosh, I’m particular about stories on motherhood and this one is a winner. While I read I can’t stop thinking about the book Lusterby Raven Leilani, there’s an authorial similarity here that’s a bit of me: women reckoning with their lives and the world that made them.

Weavingshaw by Heba Al-Wasity

Gothic Fantasy, 464 pages, review copy from Penguin Random House.

I need a good balance of literary and genre fiction, it keeps me curious. Here’s the gothic fantasy I’m reading this month. Weavingshaw thrusts you into Leena’s story at break-neck speed, as she urgently searches for the Saint of Silence, a merchant who she can sell secrets to in exchange for medicine her brother needs to live. But what is a gothic tale without a gothic house? Weavingshaw is the creepy estate she must find a certain ghost within to succeed in her dealings with the merchant Saint. Though the plot is plotty, I’m here for the old house and the moors.

Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi

Historical Fiction, 352 pages, out February, 24th, 2026, review copy from Penguin Random House.

Ancient Egypt is back in a new way, aimed to be told by the famous Cleopatra herself. I love this concept, and in the first couple chapters I wasn’t sure if I could buy into it, feeling like I could sense the author’s hand more than the character, but then quickly the following chapters bloom with sensuous details that put the “historical” in historical fiction, and El-Arifi’s Cleopatra becomes a fascinating character to read. There’s much to be enjoyed despite the promise of betrayal and Cleopatra’s untimely end. But knowing that El-Arifi completed a master’s degree specializing in Cleopatra’s myth and her impact on Black women, I trust this author to take me there.