For this week’s staff picks, news editor Drew Gillis recommends a seasonally appropriate debut novel from author Samantha Josephs, while staff writer William Hughes makes the case for the deeply replayable board game Spirit Island.
Drew Gillis: Carrying by Samantha Josephs
I haven’t read any book this year quite like Carrying, the debut novel from the author Samantha Josephs. The book, which officially went on sale a couple of weeks ago, is by turns funny and grotesque and always immensely readable. I’m not sure whether there’s a recent book that I’ve recommended to as many friends as this one; it’s totally unsurprising to me that there’s already a feature film adaptation in the works from Tommy Dorfman’s production company.
But let me back up. Carrying follows Martha, a trans woman married to a cis man who has no idea that she is trans. Only her friend and doctor Roger knows the truth. This character, Josephs writes toward the beginning of the book, has “hit some sort of transsexual lottery. Martha is fish, high-class expensive fish—bluefin tuna tartare at Nobu Malibu.” But Martha soon hits another lottery, one that is supposed to be a biological impossibility: She is pregnant. I really appreciate that Josephs doesn’t try to explain how this happened, but instead uses it as a jumping-off point for some truly absurd and disturbing body horror. It’s best to go in without too much more foreknowledge, but what follows has shades of David Cronenberg and John Waters with a fairly earnest and poignant conclusion.
Part of what makes Carrying land so well is that it works on multiple levels. It reads well as an allegory for attempting to “pass” as cisgender, as Martha does, and the personal sacrifices required to do that; it’s also a highly enjoyable read as a straightforward thriller. There are elements of Carrying that remind me of other 2026 best-sellers Fruit Fly and Yesteryear, especially the relationship between Martha and her husband Leon. However, of the three, I found Carrying to be the most original, and the one my mind has returned to most often since I finished reading.
William Hughes: Spirit Island by R. Eric Reuss
As a heavy board game nerd, it sometimes feels like you’re stuck fighting the last war—looking for the game that takes everything you like about the last big game you and your friends sunk a lot of time into, but with the problems that wound up making it feel repetitive or broken now fixed. So while it would be highly reductive, and probably even a little inaccurate, to describe R. Eric Reuss’ early Kickstarter hit Spirit Island as “Pandemic but improved on basically every axis,” it’s where my head went during my first several games recently with Reuss’ complex, gorgeous, deeply replayable game.
Originally released back in 2017 (but with expansions rolling out through 2023, and a digital version that gets updated to this day) Spirit Island plays a bit like that classic contagion containment simulator—except with the “virus” being the spread of European colonialism. There are dozens of design decisions baked into SI that keep both the imagination, and the tactical brain, thrumming—from the way it breaks big, complex decisions down into a series of smaller, more contained steps, to its smart division of your ability to affect the game board by “fast” and “slow” Powers. But the part that gets me excited to play it, whenever my buddies and I can find three hours to devote to a game, are the Spirits themselves—as in, the “characters” that players embody. I can’t remember the last time a board game gave me this powerful of a sense of discovery every time I start a new game, as I spend several minutes learning the unique mechanics of my new Spirit (pulled from a list that numbers nearly 40 at this point). Do I build up rage slowly as a volcano spirit? Haunt the nightmares of the Invaders as a spirit of terror? Build up a wounded spirit that can either turn to vengeful violence or calm control? Each Spirit has not just a strong narrative hook, but a powerful mechanical one that plays into its themes; for a game that, in essence, plays from very simple mechanics (get the bastards off your island before they can ruin it), the amount of expressiveness and story richness is staggering.
The only real quibble I have with Spirit Islands is that it can be tricky to get into, from a sheer cash-on-the-barrelhead point of view. (I was lucky enough to have a friend who decided to invest in the full set, spread out over multiple expansions.) But the game’s Steam version is a great way to dip your toe in and see if its blend of surprises and solid defense gameplay sparks for you. I’ll hop in for a solo game once every couple of days, just to put a new Spirit through their paces—even if the game only sings when you’re teamed up with your friends, each using radically different mechanics to keep your island safe.
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