New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week 

Josefa is an unapologetic and charismatic thief, who loves the thrill of the chase. She has her eye on her biggest mark yet — the RMS Titanic, the most luxurious ship in the world. But she isn’t interested in stealing from wealthy first-class passengers onboard. No, she’s out for the ultimate prize: the Rubiyat, a one of a kind book encrusted with gems that’s worth millions.

Josefa can’t score it alone, so she enlists a team of girls with unique talents: Hinnah, a daring acrobat and contortionist; Violet, an actress and expert dissembler; and Emilie, an artist who can replicate any drawing by hand.

They couldn’t be more different and yet they have one very important thing in common: their lives depend on breaking into the vault and capturing the Rubiyat. But careless mistakes, old grudges, and new romance threaten to jeopardize everything they’ve worked for and put them in incredible danger when tragedy strikes.

While the odds of pulling off the heist are slim, the odds of survival are even slimmer…

Reasons to read it: When I tell you I have been waiting for this one! Jaigirdar, a former Book Riot writer, describes it as “a sapphic heist novel set on the Titanic.” If that doesn’t get you hype to read it, it’s also told from the perspective of different characters with distinct personalities and motivations. It’s the shifting between these perspectives that helps build up to the high-stakes climax.

Spoiled, fickle, and prissy are only a few of the adjectives that have been used to describe Morgan Redford. Though she’s never had to worry about money, she’s determined to make a name for herself on her own terms. Her new venture won’t be an epic fail like her former professional cuddling service or the short-lived pet hotel. This time, through the nonprofit she cofounded, Morgan is doing something meaningful — helping teens who are aging out of foster care — and she’s got her eye on a property that could house these kids. But the competition is steep, and one of the bidders is someone she never expected. . . .

When real estate developer Drake Faulkner learns that his ex — the one who ghosted him years ago — is a potential buyer for the property his eccentric mentor is selling, his competitive streak amps up. No way is he letting her win the property he wants. Bitter? Yes. Petty? Probably. But his mentor has a stipulation: potential buyers must participate in an Ironman competition of sorts for the property. Drake refuses to play along with this ridiculous demand, until he discovers Morgan has signed up. If Little Miss Can’t Run a Block Without Gasping for Air is doing it, he will too. But as the gauntlet of games heats up and forces them to face the past, they are met with a pull that feels all too familiar.

Now, if only they could keep their eyes on the prize instead of on each other — but who’s to say they can’t do both?

Reasons to read it: Between Drake’s teenage siblings — who he had to raise since they were two — and Morgan’s plans to help foster kids, this is a second-chance romance with a lot of heart. While this light read’s plot lines may be a little out there, it’s super fun nonetheless. Plus, the spiciness is *chef’s kiss*.

A lyrical, moving novel in the spirit of Transcendent Kingdom and A Burning — and the most awarded debut title in South Africa — that tells the story of a multiracial family when the Immorality Act is passed, revealing the story of one family’s scattered souls in the wake of history.

In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between “Europeans” (white people) and “natives” (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment — for men of up to five years; for women, four years.

Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is Black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.

At first, Alisa and Abram question how they’ll be affected by the Act, but then officials start asking questions at the girls’ school, and their estate is catalogued for potential disbursement. Abram is at a loss as to how to protect his young family from the grinding machinery of the law, whose worst discriminations have until now been kept at bay by the family’s economic privilege. And with this, his hesitation, the couple’s bond is tattered.

Alisa, who is Jamaican and the descendant of enslaved people, was adopted by a wealthy white British couple. But as she grew older and realized that the prejudices of British society made no allowance for her, she journeyed to South Africa where she met Abram. In the aftermath of the Immorality Act, she comes to a heartbreaking conclusion based on her past and collective history — and she commits her own devastating act, one that will reverberate through their entire family’s lives.

Intertwining her storytelling with ritual, myth, and the heart-wrenching question of who stays and who leaves, Scatterlings marks the debut of a gifted storyteller who has become a sensation in her native South Africa — and promises to take the Western literary world by storm as well.

Reasons to read it: This is a poetic and lyrical novel that shows the toll racist policy takes on families. The writing can be as dreamy as it can be scathing, and South African lore is worked in beautifully.

A taut psychological thriller for fans of Shari Lapena and Megan Miranda about a woman who asks her estranged son to move home, only to confront memories of his disturbing adolescent behavior when a local woman is found dead.

Valerie has been forgetting things. She suspects that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, just like her mother had — but if she is, she thinks stubbornly, best not to involve doctors. She wants to live as many years as she can on her own terms. Valerie’s daughter Kendra worries about her being all alone in her big Victorian home, one rumored to be haunted after a tragedy decades earlier, and truth be told, she is a little lonely. With few options, she asks her estranged 25-year-old son Hudson to move in. It’s not quite the reunion she expected. He’s taciturn, moody, and frequently gone to hang out with his deadbeat friends. But it’s a start.

Then, a week later, a young woman is found murdered in her home a block from Valerie’s place. A woman they’d been introduced to a few nights before. Val remembers the way Hudson looked at her. And, she recalls nervously, the night of her death, Hudson had been out until after three in the morning, after receiving and ominous texts from a woman he’d dubbed “Blondie.”

It’s a horrible thing to even wonder…but this isn’t the first suspicious case Hudson’s been tied to. Valerie is now forced to confront all the memories of odd behavior she’d discounted when her son was younger. Preoccupied with her career and a secret affair with a band mate, she’d chalked it up to normal boy behavior. A phase he’d grow out of. But now she wonders if she’s enabled a monster. A monster she is living with, alone.

Reasons to read it: Shifting perspectives and twists keep this mystery/thriller engaging, and the creepy Victorian house adds a nice touch. Pick this one up for interesting characters and intriguing histories — and to find out if Valerie’s house is really the hot mess the blurb hints at.

A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migrations — another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.

In what she calls “a film for the hands” and “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: “Black pages, black space, black time — the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”

Reasons to read it: I love books that promise a look into intimate histories — especially when the history is of Black Americans, whose stories have a history of being silenced. This collection is a creative celebration of Blackness.