Set in the Middle East – Write on the World

Some stories teach us about history by giving us facts. Others make us feel what it means to live through that history. Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm belongs firmly in the second category. This lyrical, unsettling debut follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the history of their family, the loss of their ancestral home in Haifa, and the supernatural consequences of a trauma that has never really been allowed to end.

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It is a heart-wrenching story, but it is also an important one. There are some subjects that fiction can illuminate in ways that straightforward nonfiction cannot, because fiction allows us to inhabit the emotional reality of an experience rather than simply learning about it. Helm uses the conventions of the haunted-house story to explore displacement, cultural erasure, generational trauma, and the complicated meaning of home. The result is a novel in which the supernatural elements are disturbing, but the real-world horrors behind them are even more so.

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The most unsettling part of Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar isn’t the violence—it’s everything that gets ignored in its wake. Releasing April 14, 2026, this literary novel follows foreign correspondent Rita Das as she chases the biggest story of her career in a war-torn Middle East, all while quietly unraveling under the weight of grief, guilt, and a life she refuses to apologize for.

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Rita is not an easy protagonist to pin down, and that’s precisely what makes her compelling. She is fiercely independent, deeply ambitious, and committed to living life on her own terms—even when those choices isolate her from nearly everyone around her. The double standard is impossible to ignore: if Rita were a man, her career-first mindset and emotional detachment would be praised. Instead, she’s judged at every turn, with only her late mother—a doctor who lived similarly on her own terms—offering any real understanding. That absence lingers, because grief is one of the novel’s most persistent undercurrents.