At a Manhattan lunch, an accomplished actress rehearsing for a new production meets a younger, mysterious man. Told through two competing perspectives, the novel quietly investigates identity, the roles we play—partner, parent, creator, muse—and how performances can conceal private truths.

Omar El Akkad offers a personal reckoning with the gap between Western ideals and the realities faced by Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans and younger generations. Drawing on his experience as an emigrant and journalist, he frames a heartfelt "breakup letter" with the West, exploring how trust in Western institutions has eroded and how that rupture shows up on college campuses and city streets.

In her senior year, Jordan is drawn into the intoxicating world of two charismatic classmates, Sam and Yash, and becomes entangled in a charged triangle of friendship, desire, and ambition. Decades later, a surprise visit forces her to confront the choices and deceptions of her youth and reckon with how those decisions shaped her life. A spare, character-driven novel about love, loyalty, and the long reach of the past.

In near-future Kolkata, Ma, her toddler, and her elderly father are days from leaving for the U.S. when their visas are stolen. Told over one week, the novel alternates between Ma’s frantic search amid a worsening food shortage and the thief Boomba’s perspective, showing how his attempts to provide for his family spiral into escalating crimes. It’s a tense, character-driven portrait of two families confronting scarcity and the difficult choices they make to protect their children.

Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin examines how James Baldwin’s intimate and artistic relationships—including his mentor Beauford Delaney, his partner Lucien Happersberger, and collaborators Engin Cezzar and Yoran Cazac—influenced his life and writing. Using archival material, the book traces how geographic, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic ties shaped Baldwin’s work and its place in Civil Rights and Black and queer literary history.

A burned-out woman leaves Sydney to return to the rural community where she grew up and takes refuge in a secluded religious settlement, despite not being a believer. Her attempt at retreat is unsettled by a mounting wilderness problem, the reappearance of questions around her missing sister, and a visitor who forces her to face old wounds. The novel quietly examines grief, forgiveness, and what it means to withdraw from — and be drawn back into — the world.

G. W. Pabst, a celebrated European film director, flees the rise of Nazism for Hollywood only to find his reputation diminished. When he returns to Austria (renamed Ostmark) because of family illness, he and his family confront the regime’s brutality. Offered a role by Joseph Goebbels in the propaganda apparatus, Pabst faces a wrenching moral and artistic dilemma. The novel explores art, power, and the seductive illusions of the silver screen without revealing historical outcomes.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is a memoir in which Miriam Toews reflects on her sister’s suicide and the ways memory, language, and humor shape a life. Through short, inventive pieces she wrestles with grief, guilt, and the question of why artists write, offering an intimate, unsentimental exploration of loss without revealing plot details.

Maurice and Maralyn, an unlikely married couple, sell their possessions and set off to sea seeking a new life. When a whale smashes their boat and leaves them adrift in a tiny rubber raft, they must endure hunger, exposure, and rising tensions as they fight to survive. The story follows their physical struggle and the strains it places on their partnership, exploring endurance, obsession, and who people become under extreme pressure.

Sonia and Sunny are two lonely young people from India living on opposite sides of the Atlantic—Sonia a homesick college student in Vermont, Sunny a journalist trying to find his place in Brooklyn. Each wrestles with identity, desire, and dislocation while their extended families, back in India, try to shape their futures. The novel follows their separate journeys and the family ties, cultural expectations, and personal choices that bring them into uneasy contact.

The Wilderness follows five Black women over twenty years as they navigate the uncertain period between young adulthood and midlife. Sisters Desiree and Danielle are estranged, January is ambivalent about a relationship after a surprise pregnancy, Monique is a librarian who gains online attention after confronting her university, and Nakia tries to launch a restaurant without relying on her family. Set from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, the novel examines friendship, family, and home amid political, economic, and environmental instability.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood follows the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and one family’s search for a grandchild taken during Argentina’s 1976–1983 dictatorship. Centering on Rosa and her daughter Patricia—a pregnant activist who was disappeared—the book chronicles how the grandmothers investigate, confront officials, and help pioneer genetic tools to identify stolen children. It is a tightly reported, compassionate account of loss, resilience, and the fight to reclaim identity and justice.

After a summer night on a breakwater, ten-year-old Louisa is found near‑death and her father, Serk, has vanished. The novel follows Louisa and her mother Anne as they cope with his absence, unravel family secrets tied to Serk’s Korean‑Japanese past and Anne’s strained American roots, and confront the unsettling return of Tobias, Anne’s previously unknown son. Told in shifting perspectives across decades and countries, Flashlight explores memory, identity, and how a single mysterious event reshapes a family.

Set in 1932, Shadow Ticket follows Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private investigator hired to find a runaway heiress. What begins as a routine missing-person case becomes an international, often comic, odyssey—across an ocean and into Europe—dragging Hicks into political intrigue, criminal elements, swing‑era nightlife and eccentric characters as he tries to find the woman and make his way back home.

Yiyun Li reflects on the deaths of her two sons and her attempts to live alongside that loss. Through writing, gardening, reading philosophy, learning piano, and close attention to language and thought, she examines what it means to continue "being" after a loved one is gone, offering intimate, meditative observations without revealing private details.

On Black Sunday, a massive dust storm descends on the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. The story follows a group of residents—a “Prairie Witch” whose body stores other people’s memories, a Polish wheat farmer, his orphan niece who is a basketball player and witch’s apprentice, a talkative scarecrow, and a New Deal photographer with a time-traveling camera—as their secrets, losses, and the town’s past come to light. The novel blends folklore and magical realism with the harsh realities of the Dust Bowl and its human and environmental toll.

During lockdown, speechwriter Chloe Dalton rescues an orphaned leveret and forms an unexpected companionship with a wild hare. The memoir follows their evolving relationship and reflects on freedom, trust, loss, and our connection to the natural world, while also exploring hare behavior and their place in culture and folklore.

Ambitious graduate student Alice Law descends into Hell to rescue her mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes, after a fatal magical accident. Paired unwillingly with her rival Peter Murdoch, they must navigate a perilous underworld guided by myth and their own limited spells, facing dangers and secrets from their pasts. A dark academia fantasy about ambition, rivalry, and the costs of pursuing knowledge.

Set in the early days of Montana statehood, the novel follows Good Stab, a Blackfeet man whose unnaturally long life is revealed through a series of confessional interviews. The discovery of a century-old diary unearths a suppressed massacre and the long, haunted search for justice that follows. A spare, historical revenge tale told in vivid period voices.

In 1998 Austin, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel finds confidence at a neighborhood boxing gym before he vanishes. Years later his uncle Bob reopens the case, bringing him into contact with Charles (“X”), a teenager wrestling with identity, and a cast of fighters, a rookie cop, and a young immigrant with a false identity. The novel tracks their intersecting lives—about identity, belonging, and masculinity—building toward a tense confrontation in the ring.

Set between 2014 and a flooded near-future, the novel centers on a mysterious poem read at a dinner and a lone scholar, Thomas Metcalfe, who becomes obsessed with finding it. His search through archives and lives unearths love, loss and a violent secret, as the book probes how we piece together the past and what can truly be known across time.

We the People argues that the practice of amending the U.S. Constitution is central to American democracy. Jill Lepore challenges the idea that the Constitution is a fixed document or that interpretation should be left solely to the Supreme Court, showing that the framers expected future generations to tinker with and improve the nation’s governing framework. The book traces generations of Americans who sought constitutional reforms—from proposals to change the Electoral College to campaigns for new rights—framing amendment as a democratic tool for repairing and renewing government.

Roman Carruthers returns to his Virginia hometown after his father is badly injured and discovers his family is in deeper trouble than he expected: a brother owing dangerous money to criminals and a sister determined to uncover the mystery of their mother’s disappearance years earlier. Using his financial skills and ruthless determination, Roman must confront old secrets and new threats to protect his family before everything unravels.

Anna and Tom, a millennial expat couple in Berlin, live a glossy life of freelancing, nightlife and curated social media images. Beneath the surface, repetitive work, fading friendships and a failed attempt at political engagement leave them restless and searching for authenticity. Perfection follows their simmering dissatisfaction and the quiet unraveling of an idealized existence.

There Is No Place for Us follows five Atlanta families who work but struggle to keep a roof over their heads as rising rents, low wages, and gentrification push them into cars, motels, and other precarious housing. Through intimate, narrative reporting, Brian Goldstone traces how these parents and children manage jobs, school, and daily life while facing displacement, highlighting a broader “working homeless” crisis often hidden from official counts. The book outlines the causes and human consequences of this trend and raises questions about access to stable housing.

Murderland investigates the surge of serial killings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s and 1980s, profiling figures such as Ted Bundy and other notorious perpetrators. The book examines how social forces and regional industrial pollution—notably smelter emissions—may have intersected with those crimes, offering a historical, spoiler-free look at violence in that landscape.

István, a shy teenager in Hungary, becomes increasingly isolated after a formative incident and drifts away from his family and classmates. The novel follows intimate episodes across decades as he is shaped by encounters with strangers, unresolved trauma, and the pressures of modern life, tracing his uneasy passage into adulthood and the lasting effects of loss.

Arundhati Roy reflects on her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, exploring how childhood in Kerala and her mother’s fierce presence shaped her life and work. Written after Mary’s death, the memoir navigates complex feelings—love, anger, grief and admiration—without revealing plot details. Intimate, candid, and often quietly humorous, it examines how personal history forms identity and writing.

Orphaned and dispossessed, Marguerite is taken by her unpredictable guardian to New France. After a forbidden relationship is discovered, she and her companion are punished and left on a remote island, where she must endure harsh elements, confront dwindling hope, and find the inner strength and faith needed to survive.

Sybil Van Antwerp spends her days composing letters—to friends, public figures, and to one person she never sends them—using writing to order her thoughts and life. When letters from her past resurface, they force her to confront a long‑buried pain and consider whether she can find forgiveness and move forward.

Girl on Girl looks at how late-1990s and early-2000s pop culture—from music videos and fashion to tabloids and the early internet—fostered sexualization, competition, and hostility toward women. Through close cultural analysis, the book traces how these trends normalized objectification and left lasting effects on how women are seen and treated.

After her partner’s sudden death, a writer is left grappling with practical demands and little space to grieve. She later retreats to a remote Australian island to mourn, reflect on mourning practices from other cultures, and search for rituals and ways to rebuild a life around the absence. The memoir is an intimate, spare exploration of love, loss, and the work of grieving.

An Oral History of Atlantis is a short-story collection of sixteen inventive, deadpan tales that blur reality and performance while probing memory, identity, and the transitory nature of youth and art. Through witty, often surreal vignettes—from a college actor whose role begins to overtake him to a man confronting his life through forgotten passwords—Ed Park illuminates how ordinary, absurd moments become unexpectedly meaningful.

Dark Renaissance traces Christopher Marlowe’s rise from a humble background to become a provocative Elizabethan dramatist whose bold poetry and plays challenged religious, political, and moral conventions. The book examines his ties to the queen’s intelligence service and the intellectual circles around him, showing how his daring imagination and skepticism helped reshape English literature, language, and culture without revealing plot details.

Kōrero, a young girl from a remote Tongan island, is chosen to save her people and undertakes a perilous seafaring journey across the Tu’i Tonga maritime empire. The novel follows her rise to leadership and explores cultural survival, ecological strain, and personal discovery without revealing key plot twists.

After losing her job and facing family pressure, Zelu writes an experimental science-fiction novel about androids and AI in a post‑human world. As her book takes on a life of its own, the boundaries between her fiction and her reality begin to blur, forcing her to reckon with love, loss, and the power of stories.

Three sisters of Swedish–Tunisian background—Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia—follow very different lives: Ina the orderly planner, Evelyn the charismatic dreamer, and Anastasia the volatile, shape‑shifting presence. Their lives and loves unfold across Sweden, Tunisia and beyond, and over three decades their paths cross with Jonas, a man of similar mixed heritage. The novel traces how personal histories, identity and family secrets shape who they become.

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment after World War II creates a secret that binds two families and reverberates across generations. The story follows a woman who can conjure the dead, a husband serving at sea, and their children as the hidden past reshapes identities, relationships, and the town’s future.

Set in the middle years of the American Revolution, The Fate of the Day follows George Washington and the Continental Army as they struggle with shortages, harsh winters, and the pressures of sustained war while diplomats like Benjamin Franklin work to secure foreign aid. It covers major campaigns and battles—including Brandywine, Saratoga, and Charleston—and the winter at Valley Forge, highlighting the military, political, and diplomatic challenges of the conflict. The narrative focuses on leadership, sacrifice, and the hardships involved in forging a new nation.

When experienced hiker Valerie Gillis vanishes on the Appalachian Trail in Maine, game warden Beverly leads a ground search while Valerie, stranded in the woods, writes fragmented letters to her mother. From a Connecticut retirement community, seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher Lena follows the mystery from afar as clues raise questions about whether Valerie’s disappearance was accidental.

Stag Dance is a collection of one novella and three stories that probe gender, desire, and community. The title novella follows a crew of winter loggers who plan a dance where some will present as women, setting off a rivalry and emotional upheaval that reframes identity and relationships. The three linked stories—imagining a gender-triggered upheaval, a tense boarding-school romance, and a Las Vegas weekend between a young crossdresser and two contrasting guides—explore transition, power, and longing with sharp humor and emotional intensity.

Journalist Julia Ioffe explores modern Russia through the lives of its women. Drawing on her own return to Moscow and on stories from revolutionary feminists, wartime fighters, single mothers, and contemporary activists, she traces how women's roles shifted from Soviet-era professionals to post‑Soviet expectations of domesticity and how those social changes relate to broader political developments. Part memoir, part reportage and history, the book uses personal and historical vignettes to illuminate Russia’s recent transformations without revealing its outcomes.

Ruth follows a woman raised in a closed Christian commune where daily rituals and communal rules shape every aspect of life. As she moves through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, her growing curiosity and doubts about the community’s beliefs force her to reckon with obedience, identity, and what it means to belong.

Ukraine, 2022: Yeva, a solitary biologist living out of a mobile lab, is obsessed with saving a rare snail species while funding her work by entertaining Western “romance tour” visitors. When two sisters—posing as a bride and translator while searching for their activist mother—join her, the trio sets off on a risky journey across the country with a last-of-its-kind snail named Lefty in tow, only to have their plans upended by the Russian invasion.

A multi‑generation family saga that ranges from coastal Scotland to a human colony on Mars. When fusion scientist Hannah is visited by Roban, a young man traveling backward in time from the Colony, several family members must confront a warming Earth and the difficult choices between staying and leaving. The novel explores time, memory, hope, and the costs of escape, without revealing key plot events.

In a post-industrial Connecticut town, nineteen-year-old Hai is stopped from jumping off a bridge by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia. He becomes her caretaker, and over the course of a year their unlikely friendship reshapes his sense of family, identity, and belonging. The novel traces memory, loss, and the quiet ways connection can offer a second chance.

A candid, often darkly funny memoir from a former Facebook executive that offers an insider’s look at life inside a tech giant. Wynn-Williams recounts elite encounters, workplace sexism, the strains of working motherhood, and how decisions and company culture at the top shaped both employees’ lives and broader events—without revealing specific outcomes.

Abundance argues that many modern shortages—from housing and workers to clean energy and chips—stem not from conspiracies but from a failure to build and adapt: past rules and fixes have become obstacles to new solutions. Klein and Thompson examine political, regulatory, and cultural barriers across sectors and call for a mindset and institutions that prioritize construction, scaling, and practical problem-solving over preservation and restraint.

Three linked stories across 1532, 1827, and 2019 follow María, Charlotte, and Alice as hunger, longing, and rage push them into desperate choices. Weaving historical and contemporary threads, the novel examines desire, freedom, and the cost of survival without revealing key twists.

On the day of the fiftieth Hunger Games — a special Quarter Quell — Haymitch Abernathy is taken from District 12 alongside three other tributes. Torn from his family and the girl he loves, he must survive an arena designed to break him, and his choices in the Games threaten to reach far beyond his own fate.

Helm follows a fierce, almost supernatural wind that shapes lives and stories across centuries in Northern England. Through linked episodes — a Neolithic tribe, a Dark Age priest, a Victorian engineer, a farmer’s daughter, and present-day scientist Dr. Selima Sutar — the novel traces human attempts to placate, banish, harness, love, and study this elemental force as people confront environmental change. It’s a lyrical, spoiler-free exploration of the relationship between people and the natural world.

Set between Tokyo, Houston, and Jamaica, Palaver follows a young man working as an English tutor in Tokyo who spends his nights at a gay bar and maintains a complicated relationship with a married man. Estranged from his family, he is surprised when his mother arrives unannounced after ten years, prompting tense, candid encounters—often mediated by his cat, Taro. As they share meals, conversations, and a trip to Nara, both confront past hurts and reassess what “home” and family might mean. The novel quietly explores forgiveness, identity, and the fragile bonds that reconnect people.

Mother Emanuel recounts the history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—from its founding in 1817 through enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era—culminating in the 2015 shooting that killed the pastor and eight worshippers. The book traces how the congregation helped shape a distinct Black Christian tradition, and shows how its members' resilience, faith, and acts of forgiveness reflect larger struggles and changes in American racial history.

Strangers in the Land follows Chinese migrants who came to “Gold Mountain” in the mid-19th century, the violent backlash and exclusionary laws they encountered on the American West Coast, and the community leaders who resisted. It recounts episodes of racial terror, legal exclusion, and forced expulsions, and traces the long arc to mid-20th-century immigration changes and the persistent legacy of being treated as “strangers” in the United States.

After his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to an inherited farm in decline. Over one hot summer he grows close to Chuan, the manager’s son, as family tensions and larger social changes force them to confront desire, loss, and what they will carry forward.

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s Claire McCardell is a concise biography of the American designer who reshaped midcentury womenswear by prioritizing comfort, practicality, and independence. The book traces McCardell’s innovations—separates, accessible fastenings, pockets, and relaxed silhouettes—alongside her professional rise and personal choices that challenged gender expectations and helped define American sportswear.

After quitting an adjunct teaching post, a narrator named Sebastian Castillo vows to spend a year without speaking, passing the days with exercise and self‑improvement videos. On New Year’s Eve he breaks his silence to attend a reunion—largely to see a former classmate and love interest, Maria—and a single snowy night unspools into a compact, philosophical meditation on memory, literature, academia, and the slow erosion of youthful hope.

Set in 1996 as the US prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, Deep House follows Jeremy’s relationship with a British lover and the precarious choices they make to stay together when the law denies same-sex couples federal protections like immigration. The narrative moves through cities, clandestine apartments, and nightlife scenes while tracing a lineage of gay men who found ways to live and love outside legal recognition. Blending tenderness and sharp humor, the book examines intimacy, domesticity, and the systems that decide which relationships are legitimized.

Neko Case’s memoir traces her journey from a poverty-stricken childhood in rural Washington to her emergence as a musician, exploring how solitude, nature, music, and friendships shaped her identity. It’s a candid, lyrical reflection on creativity, resilience, and making space for oneself.

Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives is a compact memoir tracing the experiences that shaped her voice — a nomadic childhood in the forests of northern Quebec with scientifically minded parents, pivotal relationships (including life with writer Graeme Gibson), and the moments that fed her imagination. Through linked episodes and reflections, she shows how place, memory, and people influenced her work, without revealing the plots of her novels.

Black Moses chronicles Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and political leader who promoted founding a state within the Union governed by Black people. Set during and after the Civil War and Reconstruction, it follows his efforts to recruit Black settlers to Oklahoma and to lobby politicians, and examines the racial, political, and economic obstacles his movement faced as Black Americans sought land and self-governance.

When It All Burns follows wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas through a brutal six-month season with the Los Padres Hotshots. Blending frontline, vividly rendered firefighting experiences with ecological and historical context, Thomas examines how Indigenous dispossession, federal forestry practices, and the growth of industrial firefighting have reshaped wildfire into a new climate-era threat. The book is an immersive, human portrait of crews, communities, and the forces driving today’s megafires.

King of Kings examines the collapse of Iran’s Pahlavi monarchy in the late 1970s and the rise of a religious revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Through archival research and interviews, the book traces the Shah’s rule, the social and political tensions inside Iran, and the miscalculations of American policymakers that helped set the stage for a dramatic transformation in Iranian and regional politics.

Cece arrives early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finalize wedding plans with her fiancé Charlie. Over the weekend she grows close to Charlie’s old friend Garrett—an airport baggage handler carrying a shared trauma—which makes her reconsider the life she thought she wanted. The story follows the consequences of that summer across decades, exploring friendship, marriage, regret, and the changing landscape of Montana.

A concise portrait of cartoonist Robert Crumb that follows his life from a troubled childhood in 1950s suburbia to his central role in the 1960s underground-comics scene. The book explores Crumb’s distinctive artwork, cultural influences (popular music and the counterculture), and how his work helped shift comics into a medium for adult expression. It offers a measured, spoiler-free look at a complex artist and the eras he shaped and reflected.

At a jazz‑age murder‑mystery themed New Year’s Eve party at a country house, a tight‑knit group of friends wake to a shocking incident that upends their relationships. Abigail, one of the hosts, must navigate grief and suspicion as an enquiring detective probes the household where everyone becomes a suspect. Part whodunnit, part character study, the novel blends a clue‑driven mystery with an intimate exploration of loss and loyalty.

Lina and her father arrive at The Sea, a liminal enclave between migrations, where time and eras seem to meet. There she befriends neighbors from different periods—a Jewish scholar in 17th‑century Amsterdam, a philosopher fleeing 1930s Germany, and a Tang dynasty poet—whose conversations and teachings help Lina face revelations about her family’s past. The novel moves across centuries to explore migration, memory, guilt, responsibility, and the search for home.

Bug Hollow is a decades-spanning family saga about the Samuelsons, whose lives are upended when their son Ellis disappears as a teen and later returns from Bug Hollow, a back-to-the-land commune. His reappearance — and the arrival of Julia with a child — forces each family member to confront grief, secrets, and the compromises of adulthood. The novel follows their attempts to heal, reconcile, and find meaning over the years.

Imani Perry uses the color blue as a lens on Black history, culture, and feeling, tracing its meanings from indigo-dyed cloth and the phrase “Blue Black” to blues music and personal memory. Blending history, art, and memoir, the book explores how blue carries sorrow, hope, and remembrance across time.

Bread of Angels is a lyrical memoir by Patti Smith that traces her life from a working‑class childhood into young adulthood as she discovers poetry, music, and the impulse to create. It follows her relationships, marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the building of a family and home, while also facing loss and the long return to writing. Through vivid memories and reflective scenes, the book explores art, imagination, grief, and renewal without revealing key plot details.

Sixty-three-year-old Raja, a beloved high-school philosophy teacher known in his Beirut neighborhood as a gay man, shares a tiny apartment with his insistent octogenarian mother, Zalfa. Craving solitude after a string of personal and national upheavals, he accepts a writing residency in America, only to find himself revisiting the very events he hoped to escape. Told in Raja’s witty voice and spanning six decades, the novel follows his mistakes, losses, and gradual self-discovery while exploring family, identity, and the possibility of forgiveness.

April, a young mother living in a house of unspoken secrets and constant arguments, copes by numbing herself—until a sudden urge sends her buying a one-way bus ticket and walking away. Her ten-day escape into wilderness and uncertainty becomes an intense, sometimes dangerous search for herself, a reckoning with desire, grief, and the patterns that bind her family. Told as a letter to her daughter, the novel is a lyrical, sharp account of a woman learning what freedom and responsibility might mean.

Ruth, the only child of recent immigrants, and Maria, a beautiful orphan, form an intense friendship at a Catholic school that carries them into college and the early‑1990s New York art world. Maria finds early success as an artist while Ruth drifts toward a quieter life, and their bond is tested by ambition, class, desire, and time. The novel follows their volatile intimacy across decades and culminates in a final, fateful confrontation.

In Paper Girl, Beth Macy returns to her Ohio hometown of Urbana as her mother’s health declines and finds a community transformed by job loss, fading local institutions (including the newspaper she once delivered), worsening mental-health and school outcomes, and the rise of conspiratorial thinking. Blending personal memory with reporting, Macy examines how these forces have reshaped families and neighbors while also tracing small moments of resilience. The book is a clear, non‑spoiler portrait of a small American town in flux.

In a near-future world where dreams are monitored, Sara is detained by a government agency after an algorithm predicts she will harm the person she loves. Held in a retention center with other women whose dreams are used as evidence, she faces shifting rules and prolonged confinement. A new arrival unsettles the facility’s order and sets Sara on a path that forces her to confront the surveillance systems controlling her life.

A biography of William F. Buckley Jr. that traces his rise from the 1951 publication of God and Man at Yale to his decades as founder of National Review, columnist, television personality, and influential figure in the conservative movement. It examines his public career, personal relationships, and the internal struggles that reshaped conservatism in the late 20th century, presented without revealing major surprises.

A profile of Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime producer of Saturday Night Live. Based on extensive interviews with Michaels and many SNL writers and performers, it explores his personality, his approach to finding and nurturing talent, and how he built and sustained a show that transformed American comedy.

After discovering her husband’s affair, a woman is soon diagnosed with breast cancer and nicknames the tumor “Maggie.” Told in fragments over months, the narrator converses with the tumor and the other woman, reworks bedtime stories from Chinese folklore for her children, and uses wry, intimate humor to navigate grief, healing, and reclaiming her life.

In 18th-century Little Nettlebed, five Mansfield sisters become the focus of fearful gossip when villagers claim to see them turning into dogs. Told through multiple local perspectives, the novel explores how superstition, rumor and intolerance escalate into suspicion and danger for those who stand apart. Moody and unsettling, it follows the mounting pressure on the sisters as the community’s anxieties intensify.

After her father’s sudden death, Alice returns to the family’s private Rhode Island island expecting to leave after the funeral. Instead, he has left an ultimatum: the family must stay on the island for a week and complete a series of tasks to inherit his estate. Forced to live under one roof, the siblings confront old secrets, rivalries and grief while their relationships and futures are put to the test.

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who runs a pygmy-goat sanctuary in Vermont, grapples with climate anxiety, social unrest, and her own privilege. After a previous memoir is adapted into a successful TV series, Alison grows envious and considers using storytelling—even imagining a makeover-style show—to push people toward more ethical, less consumer-driven lives. The novel is a sharp, humorous, and introspective look at creativity, envy, and the impulse to change the world without losing oneself.

Ian Leslie examines the twenty-three-year relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, showing how their intense, shifting personal bond—affectionate, competitive and often turbulent—shaped The Beatles' music. Tracing their shared life before, during and after the band, the book explores how their private language, emotional dynamics and collaboration fueled creativity and songwriting.

Winifred Notty takes a position as a Victorian governess at the gloomy Ensor House, where the household’s eccentricities and her own troubled past begin to unsettle her. As she cares for the children and navigates the family’s secrets, her dark imagination and compulsions start to blur the line between fantasy and reality, leading to a tense and unsettling climax around Christmas.

Annie, nine months pregnant, is at IKEA when a major earthquake devastates Portland. Cut off from her husband and without phone or money, she must cross the chaotic city on foot. Along the way she encounters danger, compassion, and an unlikely ally, while confronting fears about her marriage, career, and impending motherhood as she tries to reach safety.

Minerva, a graduate student researching an obscure horror writer, uncovers a manuscript that links a decades-old disappearance at her Massachusetts university to stories her great-grandmother told about a witch in early 1900s Mexico. As she digs deeper, eerie parallels emerge across three women in different eras, suggesting a lingering, dangerous force haunting their lives.

In near-future San Francisco, a group of abandoned food-service robots in a ghost kitchen take over a delivery app, rebrand themselves as a neighborhood lunch spot, and begin serving hand-pulled noodles. When their feedback page is flooded with fake bad-service reviews, the bots must uncover who’s sabotaging them before their ratings destroy everything they’ve built.

Against the backdrop of China’s one‑child policy, this book follows identical twins born in a rural bamboo grove who are separated—one growing up in China, the other adopted to the United States. A journalist’s investigation uncovers coerced relinquishments and child trafficking and examines the human costs of state policy, the ethics of international adoption, and the assumptions that shape how East and West view family and value.

John J. Lennon, who killed a man in Brooklyn in 2001, became a journalist while serving a 28-to-life sentence and wrote immersive profiles of four men who have killed. Interweaving his own story with the lives of others, Lennon traces the circumstances, backgrounds, and choices that led to violence and follows what happens to those convicted after the cell gate locks. The book examines our fascination with true crime and asks whether knowing a person’s full life story changes how we understand their crime.

Anders, a teenage idealist, enlists and reenlists during the Civil War and adopts a new identity to navigate shifting loyalties. Living among a Black Union regiment of eccentric comrades, he confronts questions of belonging, power, and who gets to be called American. Dennard Dayle’s novel uses dark humor and sharp satire to explore war, identity, and the contradictions of a nation.

Dominic Salt and his three children care for Shearwater, a remote island that shelters the world’s largest seed bank. When a stranger washes ashore during a violent storm, her arrival forces the family to confront isolation, hidden secrets, and urgent choices about protecting the seeds and one another as the climate closes in. An atmospheric story about survival, trust, and family.

Joan Goodwin, a thoughtful physics and astronomy professor, answers NASA’s call for women astronauts and is selected to train at Johnson Space Center. As she bonds with a diverse group of fellow candidates, Joan discovers new passions and unexpected relationships that lead her to rethink her place in the world. Atmosphere is a character-driven, emotional novel about ambition, friendship, and how life-changing experiences reshape identity.

Keith McNally’s memoir follows his journey from a tough London childhood and early acting to becoming a defining New York restaurateur. He recalls his travels, the founding of landmark restaurants such as Balthazar, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern, his family and relationships, a life‑changing stroke, and his later social media presence — all delivered with candor and irreverent wit.

Set during the pandemic, Dream Count follows four women whose lives span Nigeria and the United States: Chiamaka, a travel writer in America reckoning with past relationships; Zikora, a successful lawyer forced to confront betrayal; Omelogor, a driven cousin in Nigeria questioning her identity; and Kadiatou, a housekeeper raising her daughter while facing an unexpected crisis. Through their intersecting stories the novel explores love, choices, motherhood, and what it means to know oneself, all without revealing plot details.

When theater critic Alex Lyons gives a scathing one‑star review to a struggling actress he slept with, she transforms the humiliation into a bold, viral reworking of her show that targets him. As Alex insists on his own version of events to a colleague, the novel follows the fallout through conflicting perspectives, exploring art, power, misogyny and the blurred line between performance and reality.

After Kyungha responds to an urgent call from her injured friend Inseon and travels to Jeju to save Inseon’s cherished white bird, a brutal winter storm and a fraught return home set the scene for a haunting, dreamlike exploration of their friendship. The novel intertwines the intimate bond between the two women with the slow uncovering of a suppressed episode of Korean history, tracing how memory and love confront past violence without revealing its specifics.

After a painful long-term breakup, Melissa Febos spends a year of celibacy examining patterns in her romantic life. Blending personal narrative with reflections on historical women and communities, she explores solitude, self-worth, creativity, and how stepping away from romantic entanglement reshapes desire, relationships, and daily life.

In a world where reality and illusion intertwine, a young woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery, navigating the complexities of love, identity, and the pursuit of happiness. As she delves deeper into her own psyche, she encounters a series of enigmatic characters and surreal landscapes that challenge her perception of truth and existence. Through a blend of introspective narrative and vivid imagery, the story explores the delicate balance between the tangible and the ethereal, ultimately questioning what it means to find paradise within oneself.

When Eniiyi is born bearing an uncanny resemblance to her dead cousin, her family insists she is Monife reborn and bound by a generations‑long curse that dooms relationships. As she falls in love with a young man she rescues, Eniiyi must confront family myths, secrecy, and spiritual traditions in Lagos to decide whether she will repeat the same tragic patterns or find a way to break free. The novel mixes sharp humor with questions of love, rivalry, and what it means to inherit — and resist — a family story.

In 1928, Theodore Roosevelt’s sons led a scientific expedition into the Himalayas and Tibetan borderlands to search for the elusive panda. Facing extreme terrain, brutal weather, illness, and banditry, they documented a disappearing natural world while collecting specimens and observations that helped introduce the animal and its habitat to Western science. The book blends exploration, natural history, and the challenges of early conservation efforts.

Wyeth, a gay Black painter who moves from the South to New York, struggles with artist’s block while navigating the competitive Manhattan art world and working part time restoring paintings. After he meets Keating, a former seminarian, he begins to reassess how he sees people and his work, confronting questions about race, the white gaze, artistic compromise, and intimacy. The novel offers a quiet, character-driven portrait of creativity, friendship, and the challenges of making art.