June 6, 2025
Our June First Novel Fridays Event explored the many forms of family—including those we’re born into and those we choose. We were thrilled to welcome author Glory Edim (Well-Read Black Girl) as the evening’s moderator.
June’s Featured Debuts:
There Are Reasons for This by Nini Berndt
Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart, Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother, questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found. There Are Reasons for This is a modern love song about the fallibility of love—in all its iterations—about the denial and tethering of desire, about the family we are given and the one we find for ourselves, and to what comes next, whatever that may be.
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born. Clashing over this stranger who burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together. In The Catch, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization.
Mazeltov by Eli Zuzovsky
At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam has been bracing for his special day, mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction. In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming-of-age in Israel: his newly devout father and the mystic rituals he practiced on his young son; his best friend, Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khalil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world. At once tender and lustful, a work of scathing satire and piercing insight, Mazeltov is a wholly original vision of a young man’s quest to know his own heart.
Featured Books
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There Are Reasons for This
By Nini Berndt
Published by Tin House Books
Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and, most distressing of all, she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected—and who has no idea who Lucy really is.
As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart, Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother, questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found.
There Are Reasons for This is a modern love song about the fallibility of love—in all its iterations—about the denial and tethering of desire, about the family we are given and the one we find for ourselves, and to what comes next, whatever that may be.
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The Catch
By Yrsa Daley-Ward
Published by Liveright
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.
As with most things, Clara and Dempsey cannot see eye to eye on the confounding appearance of this woman. Clara, a celebrity author with a penchant for excessive drinking and one-night stands, is all too willing to welcome the confident and temperamental Serene into her home. But cloistered Dempsey, who makes a modest living doing menial data entry work from the confines of her apartment, is dubious of the whole situation, believing this all to be the insidious ruse of a con woman. Clashing over this stranger who burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together.
In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”
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Mazeltov
By Eli Zuzovsky
Published by Henry Holt and Co.
At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood—and the verge of a nervous breakdown—Adam has been bracing for his special day, mired in family neuroses and national dysfunction.
In a chorus of voices, a fractious cast of well-wishers narrates Adam’s coming-of-age in Israel: his newly devout father and the mystic rituals he practiced on his young son; his best friend, Abbie, who points the way to joyful transgression; Khalil, a Palestinian poet, who offers a glimpse of a different way to be; and Adam himself, filled with shame and desire as he faces the brokenness of his world.
At once tender and lustful, a work of scathing satire and piercing insight, Mazeltov is a wholly original vision of a young man’s quest to know his own heart.
Featuring
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Nini Berndt
Nini Berndt
Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.
Photo Credit: Kyla Fear
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Yrsa Daley-Ward
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a poet, writer, and actress. She is the author of The How, bone, and The Terrible, for which she won the PEN Ackerley Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Eli Zuzovsky
Eli Zuzovsky
Eli Zuzovsky holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. In 2022, he was selected for the Forbes Israel 30 Under 30 list and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, and he is the winner of the 2025 Einstein Fellowship. His films and plays have been shown at the New York Jewish Film Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the American Repertory Theater, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, among others. He currently lives in London. Mazeltov is his first novel.
Photo Credit: Ilya Melnikov
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Glory Edim
Glory Edim
Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a book club and digital platform that celebrates Black literature and sisterhood. The author and editor of Well-Read Black Girl, Edim won the 2017 Innovator’s Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
