Category: Books

What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
The author of Atonement and, most recently, Lessons (2022), McEwan offers up a heady, intellectual tale that takes a searing look at how history is created–and distorted. (2025; Fiction)

The Lost Voice
by Greta Morgan
A poignant, tenacious memoir by musician Greta Morgan chronicles how she rediscovered her artistic voice after losing her ability to sing. (2025; Nonfiction)

The Traitor’s Circle
by Jonathan Friedland
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth. Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo. They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite. (2025; Nonfiction)

Playground
by Richard Powers
The tiny atoll of French Polynesia has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea; first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. (2024; Fiction)

The Life She Was Given
by Ellen Marie Wiseman
A vivid, daring novel about the devastating power of family secrets–beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s. (2017; Fiction)

The Instrumentalist
by Harriet Constable
A stunning debut novel of music, intoxication, and betrayal inspired by the true story of Anna Maria della Pietà, a Venetian orphan and violin prodigy who studied under Antonio Vivaldi and ultimately became his star musician–and his biggest muse. (2024; Fiction)

Careless People
by Sarah Wynn Williams
An insider account charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them. (2025; Nonfiction)

Night Watch
by Jayne Anne Phillips
The setting here is striking: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in rural West Virginia. In 1874, 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, who trauma has rendered mute, are dropped off there by a man ConaLee calls Papa, although he isn’t her father. They are brought inside by the night watchman, one of many characters with a hidden past. Contrary to reader expectations, the facility (an actual place) provides humane treatment for mental illness. Posing as her mother’s maid, ConaLee sees her make improvements under the compassionate doctor’s care. The story unflinchingly reveals the tragedy that befell them after Eliza’s husband never returned from the Civil War, and how a wandering con man invaded their isolated mountain sanctuary. (2023; Fiction)

Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” (2025; Nonfiction)

The Proving Ground
by Michael Connelly
Following his “resurrection walk” and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty. Representing the victim’s family, Mickey’s case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. (2025; Fiction)

Skylark
by Paula McLain
It’s 1664. Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette’s efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpãetriáere asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. (2026; Fiction)

The Road to Tender Hearts
by Annie Hartnett
At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back. (2025; Fiction)

Breakfast with Seneca
by David Fideler
The first clear and faithful guide to the timeless, practical teachings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Stoicism, the most influential philosophy of the Roman Empire, offers refreshingly modern ways to strengthen our inner character in the face of an unpredictable world. (2022; Nonfiction)

Migrations
by Charlotte McConaghy
Propelled by a narrator as fierce and fragile as the terns she is following, Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations is both an ode to our threatened world and a breathtaking page-turner about the lengths we will go for the people we love. (2020; Fiction)

Wild Dark Shore
by Charlotte McConaghy
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants… until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. (2025; Fiction)

A Fall of Marigolds
by Susan Meissner
Taryn Michaels specializes in hard-to-find patterns at an Upper West Side fabric shop. She is haunted by her failure to find a match for a scarf covered in bright marigolds, the same scarf she was holding when the Twin Towers fell in 2001. Unbeknownst to Taryn, the scarf began its life in New York on Ellis Island in 1911, when a very recently widowed Welshman carried it into the scarlet fever ward of nurse Clara Wood. Meissner seamlessly weaves a connection between Taryn and Clara, whose broken hearts have left them in an in-between place. (2014; F)

The Life We Bury
by Allen Eskens
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe’s life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran — and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder. As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. (2014; F)

One Good Thing
by Georgia Hunter
Hunter pens an unforgettable story of hardship and hope, courage and resilience, that follows one young woman’s journey through war-torn Italy. Hunter is also the author of We Were the Lucky Ones, published in 2017. (2025; F)

Memorial Days
by Geraldine Brooks
It was Memorial Day 2019, when Geraldine Brooks received news that her husband, Tony Horwitz, had collapsed and died, far from home, in the middle of his book tour. The complex tasks required in the face of such a sudden death left her no time to properly grieve for him. Three years later, still feeling broken and bereft, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. Alone on a rugged stretch of coast, she revisited a thirty-five-year marriage filled with risk, adventure, humor, and love. (2025; NF)

Raising Hare
by Chloe Dalton
A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare. (2025; NF)

Heartwood
by Amity Gaige
In the heart of the Maine woods, forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker, goes missing. She vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental. (2025; F)

Beautiful Ugly
by Alice Feeney
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life. He calls his wife, Abby, to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes when she sees something in the road ahead. Over Grady’s protests, Abby gets out of the car. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge, the headlights are on, the driver’s door is open, her phone is still there… but his wife has disappeared. A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny, remote Scottish island to try to get his life back. And then he sees the impossible: a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife. (2025; F)

Broken Country
by Clare Leslie Hall
Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager–the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident. As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise, and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to choose between the woman she once was and the woman she has become. (2025; F)

The Friend
by Sigrid Nunez
Becoming the guardian of her late best friend’s enormous Great Dane, a grieving woman is evicted from her no-pets apartment and forges a deep bond with the equally distraught animal in ways that initially disturb her friends. (2018; F)

Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
Questions linger about Theo, a pleasant, mysterious stranger, after he arrives in the southern city of Golden. Who is he, and why is he here? Levi spins a story about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the far-reaching possibilities of anonymous kindness. (2023; F)

Everything Is Tuberculosis
by John Green
Green intertwines the scientific and social aspects of tuberculosis (TB) with the story of Henry, a young man with TB whom Green met in Sierra Leone, to illustrate the human impact of the disease and the challenges faced by those affected. (2025; NF)

The Final Victory: Shattered Bodies, Broken Dreams, the Race to Win Back Hope
by Roger Jones
Tripp Avery, who is diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, coaches a team of 12 men and 8 women hoping to qualify for the mixed masters Dragon Boat National Championship. The team members each have their own cancer diagnoses and are looking to defy their prognoses as well as win the competition. But the physical and emotional strain of training soon takes a toll, and as the team begins to fall apart, Tripp must question his own motives and methods. (2024; F)

Time of the Child
by Niall Williams
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love — and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. (2024; F)

The Grey Wolf
by Louise Penny
A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading ‘this might interest you’, a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list–and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching. The 19th mystery in the bestselling Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. (2024; F)

The Summer Wives
Beatriz Williams
In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda is catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. (2018; F)

Jackie
by Dawn Tripp
“Three times that day someone pushed roses into her arms – yellow roses each time, until they reached Dallas. There, the roses were red. (November 22, 1963)” And so begins Jackie, a spellbinding, deeply researched novel which goes back in time to imagine Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is telling us the first-person story of her life. At the center of this book is the love story of Jackie and Jack, beginning when Jackie is 21 and meets the charismatic Congressman at a dinner party in Georgetown. She thinks he is not her kind of adventure: ‘Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.’ She dreams of living in France, as she did as a student. And yet: there is the intelligence, the energy, the chemistry between them. (2024; F)

All the Colors of the Dark
by Chris Whitaker
1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges–Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. (2024; F)

Lost & Found
by Kathryn Schulz
Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Kathryn Schulz met Casey, who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn’s father in a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery- from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love. (2022; NF)

The Sunflower House
by Adriana Allegri
In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé́. But it’s 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret- her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling. One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program. (2024; F)

Three Dreamers: A Memoir of a Family
by Lorenzo Carcaterra
At sixty-six, Lorenzo Carcaterra finds it easier to reflect on the past than ruminate on the future. “By the time you reach my age,” he writes, “you have witnessed too much loss to not be aware of what lies ahead.” This turn to the past inspired a poignant memoir about the women who made him the man he is today. His Italian grandmother, Nonna Maria, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find. The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. (2021; NF)

The German Heiress
by Anika Scott
For readers of The Alice Network and The Lost Girls of Paris, this is an immersive, heart-pounding debut about a German heiress on the run from British authorities, who discovers dark secrets about her family’s past in post-World War II Germany. (2020; F)

Never
by Ken Follett
“Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of a world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival in the next presidential election. (2021; F)

The Girl in His Shadow
by Audrey Blake
When Dr. Croft takes in orphan Eleanor Beady, he doesn’t realize that he’s gained an apprentice. Raised amidst his experiments, “Nora” becomes his most trusted assistant- an unthinkable and unlawful pursuit for a woman. Nora helps Croft’s research and his clinic gain recognition, and she finds she doesn’t mind working in the background, as long as she can continue to hone her skills. But the arrival of a new surgical resident threatens to undo all that Nora has strived for. (2021; F)

Homecoming
by Kate Morton
Called home to care for her grandmother after a fall, Jess, a journalist, discovers a book chronicling the police investigation into an old unsolved murder that has a shocking connection to her family. (2023; F)

The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family
by Ron Howard
By turns confessional, nostalgic, heartwarming and harrowing, the award-winning filmmaker and his brother, an audience-favorite actor, share their unusual family story of navigating and surviving life as sibling child actors. (2021; NF audiobook)

Being Henry
by Henry Winkler
Henry Winkler, launched into prominence as “The Fonz” in the beloved Happy Days, has transcended the role that made him who he is. Brilliant, funny, and widely regarded as the nicest man in Hollywood (though he would be the first to tell you that it’s simply not the case, he’s really just grateful to be here), Henry shares in this achingly vulnerable memoir the disheartening truth of his childhood, the difficulties of a life with severe dyslexia, the pressures of a role that takes on a life of its own, and the path forward once your wildest dream seems behind you. (2023; NF audiobook)

The Wife Upstairs
by Rachel Hawkins
A delicious twist on a Gothic classic, The Wife Upstairs pairs Southern charm with atmospheric domestic suspense. Meet Jane. Newly arrived to Birmingham, Alabama, Jane is a broke dog-walker in Thornfield Estates- a gated community. With delicious suspense, incisive wit, and a fresh, feminist sensibility, Hawkins flips the script on a timeless tale of forbidden romance, ill-advised attraction, and a wife who just won’t stay buried. (2021; F)