Universe of Grace
By Rachel Calnek-Sugin (Henry Holt & Co.)

Rachel Calnek-Sugin’s debut, a coming-of-age novel with touches of magical realism, depicts Grace Goldberg-Li as the daughter of a Chinese mother and Jewish father. At age 6, she and her Jewish grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, visit the Bronx Zoo where Grace encounters a green-eyed jaguar. Grace believes that she and the animal exchanged some “ancient knowledge,” and she is forever changed. Throughout her childhood and adulthood, she is able to see and know things other people do not.

The Bureau of Unknown Fates
By Gaëlle Nohant (St. Martin’s)

Based in history and memory, Gaëlle Nohant’s novel follows Irène, a newly married French woman who moves to Bad Arolsen, the small town in Germany where her husband grew up. She accepts a job—which lasts much longer than the marriage—at the International Tracing Service, an archive of victims of Nazi persecution that also connects survivors with traces of their family via facts or objects. Over time and through connections around the world, she confronts her past while uncovering stories of loss and resilience. The author of five award-winning novels in France, this is Nohant’s first published in the United States.

The Nuremberg Women: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice
By Natalie Livingstone (St. Martin’s)

Best-selling author and historian Natalie Livingstone examines the Nuremberg Trials through little-told stories of eight women whose work behind the scenes was critical to bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. Included in the eight are Harriet Zetterberg, an American lawyer; Dame Laura Knight, a British war artist; and Ingeborg Kálnoky, a Hungarian countess who hosted witnesses and Nazi perpetrators at the American-run Witness House.

Dreams and Reality: A Memoir
By Shifra Lipshitz. Translated by Julia Zarankin (Northern Illinois University Press)

Shifra Lipshitz was born in 1898 in a Polish shtetl, which she evokes in detail in her striking memoir, originally published in Yiddish in 1979. In her lifetime, she shifted from being passionate about the Soviet Union, where she moved in 1923, and the ideal of building a just society to total disillusionment with the reality of Communism. She spent 10 years imprisoned in the gulag on false charges and her later years in internal Soviet exile before being able to leave for Israel in 1972.

Female STEM Pioneers Who Survived the Holocaust
By Victoria Van Orden Martínez (Pen and Sword History)

Here are the stories of six female survivors who went on to make groundbreaking advances in male-dominated fields in science and medicine, after facing educational and career challenges of sexism, antisemitism and anti-refugee sentiment. Historian Victoria Van Orden Martínez also writes about the women’s experiences during the Holocaust, some in concentration camps or in hiding, and its aftermath. The group includes Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini and Dr. Eva Klein, a renowned cancer immunologist who passed away in 2025.

Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.