Sarah Bird’s fiction, including The Gap Year, The Yokota Officers Club, and The Flamenco Academy, contains “such energy and snap, her novels seem to be in motion” (The Dallas Morning News). In her new book Above the East China Sea, the devastating Battle of Okinawa looms large in the lives of two young women—one who lived through the carnage, another who is absorbing its spiritual reverberations. When a wayward contemporary U.S. Air Force brat sees an alarming vision of a dying woman and child one night on a quiet beach, is she hallucinating or witnessing something far graver?

Named one of “Fiction’s New Luminaries” by the Virginia Quarterly Review, Cristina Henríquez is the author of the novel The World in Half and the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her new book The Book of Unknown Americans tells the tragic story of the love between a Panamanian boy and a Mexican girl living in a Delaware apartment complex. Filled with hope yet aware of the reality of life without status, money, and friends, the novel gives voice to the stories of the displaced and unknown, offering a resonant new definition of what it means to be an American.