Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel ’11 (Viking)
This cleverly structured debut, longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, follows eight 18-and-under women boxers as they fight their way to the end of the two-day Daughters of America Cup. Set up like a tournament bracket, the prose hops in crisp bursts between the boxers’ interior thoughts. This compelling novel is not really about winning and losing, but more about what the future will hold for each of these young women. Bullwinkel is also the author of the 2018 story collection Belly Up.

After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City by Ken Conca ’82 (Oxford) Ellicott City, a small mill town on the Patapsco River west of Baltimore, was ravaged by two “thousand-year” flash floods in just twenty-two months—first in 2016, then again in 2018. Conca, a professor of environment, development, and health at American University, watched as, in the wake of the first flood, the debate over what to do, like deciding to develop a watershed master plan, ramped up after the second flood to include more extreme options, like drilling a huge runoff tunnel and tearing down the town’s historic center. Here Conca chronicles the various sides of the town’s emotional and political quest for solutions—a quest that other flood-prone communities are also grappling with.

Across a Bridge of Fire: An American Teen’s Odyssey from the Burn Ward to the Edge of the Cambodian Killing Fields by Scott Allen ’91 MD (Stillwater River Publications)
It’s 1972 and Scott Allen is 10, out behind his house in Connecticut with his brother trying to light a campfire. To speed things up they decide to add some gasoline—and the can explodes. Allen is severely burned, but he recovers—self-conscious about his scars and often feeling like an outsider. Then at 17, after reading about the Cambodian refugee crisis, he buys a one-way ticket to Bangkok—without telling his parents—and finds work in the refugee camps. Allen returns to the U.S. a few months later for college, eventually becoming a doctor and doing human rights work. This memoir centers on the fire and his flight to Thailand and how those events rippled out in unexpected ways.