This month, the past and present collide in murder investigations in modern-day England and Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n
Bog Queen: A Novel<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\nAnna North (Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pp., $28.99, October 2025)<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n <\/span>The book cover for Bog Queen by Anna North.<\/figcaption><\/a><\/div>\nBog Queen<\/em><\/a>, Anna North\u2019s fourth novel, is many things: an intricate work of historical fiction, a tightly woven mystery reminiscent of the police procedural Bones<\/em>, and perhaps most of all, a transfixing excavation of the competing interests converging on the natural world in our present moment of ecological devastation, economic precarity, and historical forgetting.<\/p>\nNorth\u2019s novel is set between two periods: England in 2018, where Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is working in the market town of Ludlow to uncover what happened to a 2,000-year-old corpse recently unearthed from a peat bog; and ancient Britain, where a young druid from the town journeys to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the capital of Roman Britain, and back.<\/p>\n
The chapters alternate between the two women\u2019s stories, which each capture a pivotal moment in the town\u2019s history. The former takes place during \u201ca critical time for the moss\u201d that makes up the bogland, as one environmental activist puts it; after years of being harvested for peat, it\u2019s about to be turned into a housing development. The latter witnesses the transformation of Celtic society amid the expansion of the Roman Empire.<\/p>\n
North\u2019s prose reveals a genuine care for her characters\u2014all fully rendered individuals who are forced to confront their blind spots, even as they are devoted to their own causes. Agnes is mesmerized by the bog body, that \u201crare transfigured human being whom it is [her] privilege to know,\u201d which has an \u201calchemical quality \u2026 a human being turned to brightness beneath the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet Agnes is also aware of \u201cthe work she stands athwart in order to do her own.\u201d When she looks upon the bog\u2014its layers of peat stripped raw\u2014she \u201chas a feeling of vicarious pain, like looking at a burn or laceration in living flesh.\u201d As activists try to convince her to leave the dig behind, so that they can rewild the bog, she reflects on the climate crisis: \u201cShe has read the IPCC report, she knows the scale of what is possible \u2026 \u00a0And yet it has all been too large for her mind to hold, her attention cannot find a place to rest, it slides back into what she knows well, a broken tooth, the delicate precious goblet of a skull.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Bog Queen <\/em>comes to its satisfying end, it\u2019s clear that, as in the best of stories, there are no easy answers. Not even the developers or the peat company, the town\u2019s largest employer, come across as villainous. This expansive tale is about much more than a battle among scientists, environmentalists, and corporate interests. In confronting questions of duty, ambition, and community, North\u2019s magical novel renders the world\u2014both ancient and modern\u2014mysterious to us again.\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\nThis Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel
<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\nJaquira D\u00edaz (Algonquin Books, 336 pp., $28, October 2025)<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
\n ![\"The](\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Jaquira-Diaz-This-Is-the-Only-Kingdom-book.png\")
\n <\/span>The book cover for This Is the Only Kingdom<\/figcaption><\/a><\/div>\nToward the end of This Is the Only Kingdom<\/em><\/a>, Jaquira D\u00edaz\u2019s debut novel, one of her protagonists finally puts the book\u2019s title into context: \u201c[H]ell wasn\u2019t real, and heaven was no kingdom,\u201d she thinks, \u201cthis is the only kingdom<\/em>.\u201d It is the 1990s in Puerto Rico, and a Black gay man has just been killed and denied a Catholic funeral.<\/p>\nThe kingdom known to D\u00edaz\u2019s characters is the projects of Humacao, Puerto Rico. Her multigenerational novel is set in el Caser\u00edo Padre Rivera, a place \u201cpeople left \u2026 in a police car or a body bag or a celebration, their story all over the local papers.\u201d The community confronts racism, homophobia, poverty, and U.S. imperialism. In the process, they turn against each other.<\/p>\n
The novel begins in 1975. Maricarmen and her sister, Loli, are among the few white children in el Caser\u00edo, a mostly Black community. Their mother, Blanca, kicks Maricarmen out when she starts dating a Black boy named Rey. The \u201cwannabe Caser\u00edo Robin Hood,\u201d Rey has been in and out of juvenile detention but always looks out for his neighbors and enchants them with his musical talent.<\/p>\n
Maricarmen becomes pregnant with a daughter whom she names Nena, and Rey returns to his criminal ways and goes on the run from the police. His family must deal with the harrowing consequences of his actions. Maricarmen, by now a high school dropout, also becomes the caregiver for Rey\u2019s much younger brother, Tito.<\/p>\n
A decade and a half later, Tito and Nena\u2014who are like siblings\u2014live in the shadows of Maricarmen\u2019s and Rey\u2019s choices. Both struggle to come to terms with their identities in a hostile environment. \u201cTito was soft, and she loved him for it,\u201d D\u00edaz writes of Nena. \u201cBut it was the kind of soft the world would not accept, because the world was hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
A tragedy rocks el Caser\u00edo, underscoring this hardness and upending Maricarmen\u2019s and Nena\u2019s lives. They move to Miami, where Blanca and Loli had relocated years earlier. In addition to patching up familial wounds, Nena must navigate a U.S. high school where her peers taunt her for being gay and pelt her with ignorant comments: \u201cI didn\u2019t know they had Black people in Puerto Rico.\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. colonial presence in Puerto Rico is a subtle throughline in This Is the Only Kingdom<\/em>. The residents of el Caser\u00edo ended up there because \u201cthe American government didn\u2019t recognize\u201d their land titles. Maricarmen works on a pharmaceutical assembly line in Humacao, where \u201cAmerican factories \u2026 covered the air with black smoke, dumping their toxic waste outside of the poorest neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\nIf Nena and her peers learn one lesson in the course of the novel, it is that they don\u2019t matter to the United States. \u201cThe second they find out you\u2019re from el Caser\u00edo, those gringos want nothing to do with you,\u201d D\u00edaz writes.\u2014Allison Meakem<\/em><\/p>\nOctober Releases, in Brief<\/strong><\/h3>\nPostmodern giant Thomas Pynchon returns with Shadow Ticket<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a noir that moves from 1930s Wisconsin to a ship filled with shadowy figures from interwar Europe. In Hungarian author Krisztina Toth\u2019s dystopian Eye of the Monkey<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, a doctor-patient love affair isn\u2019t quite what it seems. Gish Jen crafts a mother-daughter tale for the ages in Bad Bad Girl<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, set between midcentury Shanghai and New York. Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov\u2019s meditation on grief and fatherhood, Death and the Gardener<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, is translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. In Megha Majumdar\u2019s A Guardian and a Thief<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a near-future Kolkata faces famine and climate extremes.<\/p>\nNorwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse embarks on a new trilogy with Vaim<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Damion Searls. Pulitzer Prize-winning Adam Johnson weds myth, Polynesian oral history, and research into the Tu\u02bbi Tonga Empire in The Wayfinder<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em> Catalina Infante Beovic\u2019s debut novel The Cracks We Bear<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Michelle Mirabella, revisits post-Pinochet-era Chile. In Sonora Jha\u2019s satirical Intemperance<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a divorc\u00e9e in a U.S. town holds a contest for her hand based on an ancient Indian ritual. And Mattia Filice transposes his real-life experience of running high-speed trains into fiction in Driver<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated from the French by Jacques Houis.\u2014CH
\n <\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n <\/span>
Bog Queen<\/em><\/a>, Anna North\u2019s fourth novel, is many things: an intricate work of historical fiction, a tightly woven mystery reminiscent of the police procedural Bones<\/em>, and perhaps most of all, a transfixing excavation of the competing interests converging on the natural world in our present moment of ecological devastation, economic precarity, and historical forgetting.<\/p>\n North\u2019s novel is set between two periods: England in 2018, where Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is working in the market town of Ludlow to uncover what happened to a 2,000-year-old corpse recently unearthed from a peat bog; and ancient Britain, where a young druid from the town journeys to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the capital of Roman Britain, and back.<\/p>\n The chapters alternate between the two women\u2019s stories, which each capture a pivotal moment in the town\u2019s history. The former takes place during \u201ca critical time for the moss\u201d that makes up the bogland, as one environmental activist puts it; after years of being harvested for peat, it\u2019s about to be turned into a housing development. The latter witnesses the transformation of Celtic society amid the expansion of the Roman Empire.<\/p>\n North\u2019s prose reveals a genuine care for her characters\u2014all fully rendered individuals who are forced to confront their blind spots, even as they are devoted to their own causes. Agnes is mesmerized by the bog body, that \u201crare transfigured human being whom it is [her] privilege to know,\u201d which has an \u201calchemical quality \u2026 a human being turned to brightness beneath the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Agnes is also aware of \u201cthe work she stands athwart in order to do her own.\u201d When she looks upon the bog\u2014its layers of peat stripped raw\u2014she \u201chas a feeling of vicarious pain, like looking at a burn or laceration in living flesh.\u201d As activists try to convince her to leave the dig behind, so that they can rewild the bog, she reflects on the climate crisis: \u201cShe has read the IPCC report, she knows the scale of what is possible \u2026 \u00a0And yet it has all been too large for her mind to hold, her attention cannot find a place to rest, it slides back into what she knows well, a broken tooth, the delicate precious goblet of a skull.\u201d<\/p>\n As Bog Queen <\/em>comes to its satisfying end, it\u2019s clear that, as in the best of stories, there are no easy answers. Not even the developers or the peat company, the town\u2019s largest employer, come across as villainous. This expansive tale is about much more than a battle among scientists, environmentalists, and corporate interests. In confronting questions of duty, ambition, and community, North\u2019s magical novel renders the world\u2014both ancient and modern\u2014mysterious to us again.\u2014Chloe Hadavas<\/em><\/p>\n Jaquira D\u00edaz (Algonquin Books, 336 pp., $28, October 2025)<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Toward the end of This Is the Only Kingdom<\/em><\/a>, Jaquira D\u00edaz\u2019s debut novel, one of her protagonists finally puts the book\u2019s title into context: \u201c[H]ell wasn\u2019t real, and heaven was no kingdom,\u201d she thinks, \u201cthis is the only kingdom<\/em>.\u201d It is the 1990s in Puerto Rico, and a Black gay man has just been killed and denied a Catholic funeral.<\/p>\n The kingdom known to D\u00edaz\u2019s characters is the projects of Humacao, Puerto Rico. Her multigenerational novel is set in el Caser\u00edo Padre Rivera, a place \u201cpeople left \u2026 in a police car or a body bag or a celebration, their story all over the local papers.\u201d The community confronts racism, homophobia, poverty, and U.S. imperialism. In the process, they turn against each other.<\/p>\n The novel begins in 1975. Maricarmen and her sister, Loli, are among the few white children in el Caser\u00edo, a mostly Black community. Their mother, Blanca, kicks Maricarmen out when she starts dating a Black boy named Rey. The \u201cwannabe Caser\u00edo Robin Hood,\u201d Rey has been in and out of juvenile detention but always looks out for his neighbors and enchants them with his musical talent.<\/p>\n Maricarmen becomes pregnant with a daughter whom she names Nena, and Rey returns to his criminal ways and goes on the run from the police. His family must deal with the harrowing consequences of his actions. Maricarmen, by now a high school dropout, also becomes the caregiver for Rey\u2019s much younger brother, Tito.<\/p>\n A decade and a half later, Tito and Nena\u2014who are like siblings\u2014live in the shadows of Maricarmen\u2019s and Rey\u2019s choices. Both struggle to come to terms with their identities in a hostile environment. \u201cTito was soft, and she loved him for it,\u201d D\u00edaz writes of Nena. \u201cBut it was the kind of soft the world would not accept, because the world was hard.\u201d<\/p>\n A tragedy rocks el Caser\u00edo, underscoring this hardness and upending Maricarmen\u2019s and Nena\u2019s lives. They move to Miami, where Blanca and Loli had relocated years earlier. In addition to patching up familial wounds, Nena must navigate a U.S. high school where her peers taunt her for being gay and pelt her with ignorant comments: \u201cI didn\u2019t know they had Black people in Puerto Rico.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. colonial presence in Puerto Rico is a subtle throughline in This Is the Only Kingdom<\/em>. The residents of el Caser\u00edo ended up there because \u201cthe American government didn\u2019t recognize\u201d their land titles. Maricarmen works on a pharmaceutical assembly line in Humacao, where \u201cAmerican factories \u2026 covered the air with black smoke, dumping their toxic waste outside of the poorest neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n If Nena and her peers learn one lesson in the course of the novel, it is that they don\u2019t matter to the United States. \u201cThe second they find out you\u2019re from el Caser\u00edo, those gringos want nothing to do with you,\u201d D\u00edaz writes.\u2014Allison Meakem<\/em><\/p>\n Postmodern giant Thomas Pynchon returns with Shadow Ticket<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a noir that moves from 1930s Wisconsin to a ship filled with shadowy figures from interwar Europe. In Hungarian author Krisztina Toth\u2019s dystopian Eye of the Monkey<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, a doctor-patient love affair isn\u2019t quite what it seems. Gish Jen crafts a mother-daughter tale for the ages in Bad Bad Girl<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, set between midcentury Shanghai and New York. Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov\u2019s meditation on grief and fatherhood, Death and the Gardener<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, is translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. In Megha Majumdar\u2019s A Guardian and a Thief<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a near-future Kolkata faces famine and climate extremes.<\/p>\n Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse embarks on a new trilogy with Vaim<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Damion Searls. Pulitzer Prize-winning Adam Johnson weds myth, Polynesian oral history, and research into the Tu\u02bbi Tonga Empire in The Wayfinder<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em> Catalina Infante Beovic\u2019s debut novel The Cracks We Bear<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated by Michelle Mirabella, revisits post-Pinochet-era Chile. In Sonora Jha\u2019s satirical Intemperance<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a divorc\u00e9e in a U.S. town holds a contest for her hand based on an ancient Indian ritual. And Mattia Filice transposes his real-life experience of running high-speed trains into fiction in Driver<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, translated from the French by Jacques Houis.\u2014CH This Is the Only Kingdom: A Novel
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\n <\/span>October Releases, in Brief<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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