Ajaz Ahmed Bhatt

In her sophomore romance One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston has managed to do what no one else has: Make the New York City subway sexy and magical — and make readers feel so five minutes ago for not having our own public transit meet-cutes. Even during rush hour, with cars brimming with jostling bodies, McQuiston's characters seem to find defining moments of intimacy on the Q line. When August moves to New York for college, the last thing she expects is to become best friends with her roommates, find a community with the drag queen crowd in NYC, become a waitress at a pancake diner despite zero experience, and fall for Jane, a time-traveling, leather jacket-wearing, kissable punk rocker from the 1970s who's stuck on the Q train for all of eternity. Sparks fly from the moment August locks eyes with Jane, by which I mean actual electrical impulses caused by the chemistry that August's friend Myla surmises has tethered them to each other. Jane has no idea why or how sh

ANIMAL By Lisa Taddeo “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.” So says Joan, the barely hinged, 30-something narrator of “Animal,” the propulsive, fiercely confident debut novel by Lisa Taddeo. Voracious and obsessive, Joan is addicted to love and its analogues — in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else. The novel opens with an actual bang: Joan’s married boss, with whom she’s had a protracted affair, bursts into a restaurant where she’s having dinner with another man and shoots himself in front of her. (No spoilers here: It literally happens in the first paragraph.) The dead man is Vic, the avuncular creative director of the Manhattan ad agency where Joan works, a besotted sugar daddy who mentored, promoted, bedded, spoiled and stalked her. The memory of their affair hangs like Spanish moss over the first half of the book. “I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not at