Books

Reading List: New Fiction by Alums Ha Jin, Stewart O’Nan, Diana Rodriguez Wallach

Plus, Sasenarine Persaud’s latest poetry collection

Outside the LinesSibylline Press, 2025
By Helen Fremont (LAW’82)

In her memoir, Fremont revisits an old love affair, with 1980s Boston as its backdrop. Fremont, an attorney in a public defender’s office and the daughter of immigrants, and Maddie, married scion of a blue-blooded New England family, fall in love against all odds at a writing class, where their illicit connection is bolstered by dual legacies of secrets and tragedy.

EvensongGrove Press, 2025
By Stewart O’Nan (ENG’83)

O’Nan, best-selling author of nearly 20 works of fiction, introduces the Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of women who care for the sick and elderly through countless small acts of service, as they, too, experience the highs and lows of getting older.

The SilencedDelacorte Press, 2025
By Diana Rodriguez Wallach (COM’00)

During an innocent school research project on the Oakwell Farms School for Girls, an abandoned facility for troubled teens, Hazel Perez gets more than she bargained for when she becomes possessed by the vengeful spirit of a former young inmate.

Alias Agnes: the Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age SpyUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2025
By Elizabeth A. DeWolfe (GRS’96)

The outlandish, true story of Jane Armstrong Tucker, a humble stenographer turned undercover detective charged with tracking down Madeleine Pollard, a congressman’s mistress intent upon suing him for abdicating his promise to marry her. DeWolfe follows the action from Tucker’s 10-week mission to the sensational trial that followed.

End Emotional Outsourcing: How To Overcome Your Codependent, Perfectionist, and People-Pleasing HabitsBalance, 2025
By Beatriz Victoria Albina (SPH’07)

Albina, a licensed family nurse practitioner, somatic therapist, and life coach featured in goop, HuffPost, and Cosmopolitan, coined the term “emotional outsourcing” to define the process of looking to others to define one’s own sense of self-worth and security, which can often take the form of codependency and self-subjugation. In her first book, she explains how to break the cycle, regain agency, regulate anxiety, and rebuild self-esteem.

Blood in the Water: the Untold Story of a Family TragedySourcebooks, 2025
By Casey Sherman (COM’93)

In this nonfiction saga of murder, money, and revenge, award-winning journalist Sherman takes readers to the Atlantic Ocean, where a 22-year-old autistic man claims to authorities to have been stranded at sea after his fishing boat sank with his mother onboard.

Looking for Tank ManOther Press, 2025
By Ha Jin (GRS’94)

From a National Book Award winner comes a reflection on the legacy of the Tiananmen Square uprising. His book follows Pei Lulu, a Chinese student in America, as she comes of age and comes to terms with her country’s authoritarian history and her own family’s involvement in China’s struggle for political reform.

Red UltimatumBeaufort Books, 2025
By Ed Fuller (Questrom’68) and Gary Grossman (MET’75)

The fourth installment in Fuller‘s Red Hotel series follows freelance CIA operative Dan Reilly—a hotelier by day—as he maneuvers ever closer to Russia’s President Nicolai Gorshkov, the most dangerous man on the diplomatic map. Will Reilly come out on top, or will Gorshkov succeed in his plot to re-form the Soviet Union?

For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in AmericaZondervan, 2025
By Dorothy Littell Greco (COM’83)

A faith-based appraisal of misogyny’s shadow over contemporary America, Greco‘s book calls out the covert ways in which women’s oppression has embedded itself in 21st-century courtrooms, doctors’ offices, houses of worship, workplaces, and private homes. Far from a relic of the 20th century, Greco argues, misogyny persists because it has become more subtle—and easier to ignore.

A Scent of IndiaMawenzi House, 2025
By Sasenarine Persaud (GRS’06)

This poetry collection, from “one of those rare poets who gets the recipe of humanness exactly right” (Canadian Literature journal), captures the ineffable vibrancy of the Indian subcontinent by channeling the diasporic influences of spice, color, architecture, science, art, and language.