Our regular Book Digest segment spotlights new books by Stephanie Wambugu, Tigest Girma, Sarah Uheida, and I.S. Jones.
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: July 29, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Little, Brown and Company
Stephanie Wambugu
Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya in 1998 and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She is an editor of Joyland Magazine. Lonely Crowds is her first novel.
Lonely Crowds
Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.
While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.
Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class, and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.
Eternal Ruin by Tigest Girma
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Date: November 4, 2025
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Where to find it: Tigest Girma Website
Tigest Girma
Tigest Girma is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Immortal Dark. She is an Ethiopian writer based in Melbourne, Australia, and splits her time between writing and teaching. Passionate about exploring East African characters and myths, she weaves Black stories with the dark and fantastical in her work. In her free time, she can be found rewatching her comfort shows where the villain gets the girl.
Eternal Ruin
The breathtaking sequel to the #1 New York Times bestseller, Immortal Dark!
Like all ruinous things, he came from the abyss.
Kidan Adane has finally embraced her darkness. She’s killed without remorse, lied, and broken Uxlay University’s most sacred law by inviting elusive rogue vampires, the Nefrasi, into Uxlay.
Trapped with a violently unstable vampire, and reeling from her sister’s return, Kidan wields her anger like a weapon. She vows to master her house and protect the sacred artifact hidden inside, even if it means forging an alliance with the depraved leader of the Nefrasi, Samson Sagad–and betraying Susenyos.
A dangerous new philosophical text seems to hold the answers and promises the very thing Kidan has lost: control. Even as the dark pages consume her, Kidan knows no soul at Uxlay is trustworthy—least of all Susenyos. For Kidan and Susenyos, the lines of loathing and attraction may blur, but the quest for power rules them both. And neither is willing to surrender.
As devastating secrets resurface from the past, Kidan and her sister, June, must finally confront each other and take their rightful places in the looming war.
Not This Tender Book by Sarah Uheida
Publisher: Dryad Press
Publication Date: May 21, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: Dryad Press
Sarah Uheida
Sarah Uheida is a Libyan-born poet and essayist, living and working in Cape Town. She holds a BA Honours degree in English literature and a Master of Arts in English Studies specialising in poetry from Stellenbosch University, both with distinction. Her MA was funded following the award of a Margaret McNamara Education Grant. In 2021, Sarah was the recipient of the internationally renowned Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship. She is also the recipient of the 2020 Dan Veach Prize for Young Poets, which adjudicates poetry from college age students across the United States and internationally. Sarah’s poetry and lyric essays have been widely published both locally and abroad. She is a regular contributor at readings by poetry groups such as Off the Wall and The Red Wheelbarrow. Not This Tender is her debut collection.
Not This Tender Book
Sarah Uheida’s poetry collection Not This Tender is a profound exploration of memory, navigating the landscape of the war-torn North Africa she was forced to flee as a child. It is a mythical yet deeply personal examination of longing and belonging, estrangement, loss and the influence of family and language, presented through immersive portraits and the lens of a fractured landscape.
Here, poetry is wielded as both refuge and rupture in an excavation of the past – not to preserve it, but to make sense of the future. Through its vivid, evocative imagery, the collection offers a powerful journey through the restless search for home, and the fragile yet unrelenting hope of return.
Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Date: September 9, 2025
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Where to find it: American Poetry Review, Copper Canyon Press
I.S. Jones
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf where she was the 2023 Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Since 2019, she has served as an editor at 20:35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, the longest running anthology for living African poets. Currently, I.S. is a senior editor forPoetry Northwest where she runs her column, “The Legacy Suite”, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024-2025 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium.
Bloodmercy
Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a must-read debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters.
“Violence is a failure of communication” opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a family exiled from Eden. In I.S. Jones’s stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught—the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve’s sin while coming into their own sexuality.
Grounded in the remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood. Along the way, they discover the limits of power and control, spite and sex, faith and death, and man’s dominion over the earth. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God. Lyrical, lush, and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.
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