Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley (Bloomsbury, $32.99)
You’ll want to remember this name: Leila Mottley. She’s an exciting new voice from Oakland, California, and her debut novel, Nightcrawling, mixes glorious, rhythmic language with urgent ideas such as racism, generational poverty, police violence, failures of the criminal justice system and, most affectingly, the desperate loneliness of young black women navigating modern America’s corrupt society.
Seventeen-year-old Kiara Johnson
