"Marie, a young single mother, lands a job at an upscale Dallas steakhouse. She is preternaturally attuned to the appetites of her patrons, but quickly learns to hide her private struggle behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. In a world of long hours and late nights, where everything runs on a currency of favors, cash, and cachet, Marie gives in to brutally self-destructive impulses. She loses herself in a tangle of bodies and the kind of...

This witty and resonant novel about our off-kilter days follows a week in the life of a young English teacher at a New York private school as she grapples with the pressures parenting, teaching, marriage and what's normal and what isn't in the wake of the pandemic.

Vega Gopalan is adrift. Still reeling from the death of her sister years earlier, she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega straddles many different worlds, eventually moving in and out of a series of relationships that take her through the striving world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and, ultimately, the loneliness of single motherhood. But it is the birth of Vega's...