Blockers, by Michael Lewis (Norton). In the early months of 2025, Elon Musk, then a consultant for the Trump Administration, launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the aim of cutting two trillion dollars in federal spending. A cohort of a few dozen tech workers and entrepreneurs who “seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them,” as Lewis puts it, rallied to DOGE’s cause and led a “slash and burn” assault on U.S. government institutions. In this punchy history, Lewis chronicles the experiences of a handful of public servants on the receiving end of this onslaught who refused to comply with the often illegal mandates of DOGE personnel, even at the cost of their jobs, and careers, in government.

Exhibit G, by Fady Joudah (Milkweed). “What image of childhood is enough for a people to stay alive?” Mournful questions like this one undergird Joudah’s collection, a finalist for the National Book Award, which bears witness to violence in Gaza. The book’s poems and essays are interspersed with photographs, many of children: some hauling jugs of water; some, despite their circumstances, smiling and flashing hand gestures for victory or peace. Even as Joudah examines the ways that exile, destruction, and the “white noise of genocide” warp language and the experience of time, he also condemns the tendency to fetishize hope. “A child’s smile triumphs over terror as Icarus triumphed over gravity,” he writes.

Passengers, by Alexander Maksik (Europa). Ivan, a central character in this quietly surreal novel, is determined to show his cynical twentysomething daughter, Nina, “another way of being alive.” There’s no better place to do this than Paris, Ivan has resolved, and we meet the pair in a departures terminal at LAX. Nina, with whom Ivan has a strained relationship, is quick to kick off the banter that functions as their “common language.” While they exchange insults and memories, their flight—along with all the others due to take off—becomes infinitely delayed for reasons unknown. More troubling still is that their grasp on time, then their very consciousness, begins to break down. Completely cut off from the world outside, Nina and Ivan find themselves “bound together in ways they’d not been since she was a girl.”

Few and Far Between, by Jan Carson (Scribner). This work of alternative history tells the story of the Ark, an archipelago of islands created when Ireland’s largest lake, Lough Neagh, was partially drained, in the nineteen-sixties, as part of a plan to create a seventh county in Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, the Ark became a kind of utopian sanctuary inhabited by “families who’d been persecuted out of their communities” and by those who “upset the status quo.” In the wake of the peace process, however, the Ark depopulated, leaving but a few residents, who now live in fear of a new plan to flood the Lough in order to rid it of a toxic algae bloom. Carson draws parallels between the familial traumas of those who remain and the broader societal wounds of a province still healing from decades of sectarian violence.