From Iowa Writers' Workshop grad Brown, The Lowering Days tracks what happens when an about-to-reopen paper mill collapses in flames; for many working-class people in Maine's Penobscot Valley, the mill would have been an essential source of jobs, but for the Penobscot people, it's a source of pollution wrecking ancestral lands (50,000-copy first printing). With TV rights just sold to Heyday Films after a fierce auction, Day's In the Quick features the newly designated engineer on a space station, who believes that a spacecraft launched years ago and powered by her late uncle's supposedly failed fuel cells is still out there somewhere. From Brooklyn College MFA grad and middle school teacher Grattan, The Recent East unfolds the story of a woman who defected from East Germany and returns after the Wall falls, leaving upstate New York with her teenage children to reclaim her parents' mansion (50,000-copy first printing). Irish-born, London-based Nolan's unnamed narrator launches an affair with a charismatic but unstable writer and commits numerous Acts of Desperation to hold him (35,000-copy first printing). Won in an eight-way auction, Polzin's Brood is an intimate look at a woman ushering her four chickens through Minnesota cold and heat, tornados and predators. In The Northern Reach, Winslow portrays a small coastal Maine village whose residents are just getting by, with the narrative centered on a woman who lost her son at sea and is puzzled by a schooner under sail yet motionless across the water (75,000-copy first printing).

Vice contributor Nolan deconstructs a young couple's toxic relationship in her fierce and intelligent debut. Things open with an unnamed young woman catching sight of Ciaran, an art critic and "the most beautiful man had ever seen," at a Dublin art gallery in 2012. She appreciates how Ciaran seems "undeniably whole" amid a crowd of shallow social climbers. The narrator then describes their subsequent spiral into a torturous, obsessive romance. She's in her early 20s, a university dropout and aspiring poet who works in a restaurant and parties a lot. Ciaran, meanwhile, is passive-aggressive, insults the narrator's friends, makes cruel remarks ("Did you want me to say I'm falling in love with you? Because I'm not"), and carries on an ambiguous relationship with his ex. The narrator and Ciaran eventually break up, only to get back together a few months later and move in together. An idyllic glow surrounds them, until the narrator begins pushing Ciaran's boundaries, and things devolve. The story is intercut with dispatches from 2019 Athens, where the narrator tries to move toward a future without Ciaran while reflecting on the nature of vulnerability, self-loathing, and her addiction to love with stark frankness. The narrator is remarkable for her complete lack of self-pity and unflinching depictions of her own motives and needs. This mesmerizes from the first page. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc. (Mar.)