Lauren Bufferd

Maria Adelmann turns the campus novel on its head with The Adjunct, a blistering examination of the gig economy at work in higher education, where employees with advanced degrees are hired as part-time educators, often without benefits or academic support. Though she has a doctorate, Sam is an adjunct professor at a public university, eking out a precarious living without health insurance or job security.

Rose Cutler is a brilliant entrepreneur with exquisite taste living outside of Chicago with her perfect Newfoundland dog, Walter. Rose is also a rigid micromanager with few friends who thinks she has the right answer to everything, especially when it comes to family and her nephew, 6-year-old Nathan.

Olivia Laing (Crudo) turns again to the world of artists and art making in their second novel, The Silver Book, a poignant and richly told story of Italian filmmaking during the Years of Lead—a two-decade period of political and social unrest that included the gruesome torture and murder of poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It’s 1974 and homosexuality has been decriminalized in Britain for less than a decade. British art student Nicholas Wade has come to Venice from London in a panic.