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Summer State of Mind by Kristy Woodson HarveyAfter the worst day in her professional life, burnt-out NICU nurse Daisy Stevens runs to Cape Carolina, North Carolina, looking for a new life—and possibly new romance. On her first day at her “simpler” job, high school baseball coach Mason Thaysden discovers an abandoned baby, sending ripples through the entire tight-knit town of Cape Carolina. Mason is still struggling to reconcile the scars of the injury that kept him out of the big leagues, stuck in his hometown, and searching for a way out. This newcomer and the child they’ve saved together might be just the motivation he needs to stay put. Sparks fly as Mason acquaints Daisy with Cape Carolina, introducing her to his friends and family, including his batty Aunt Tilley, who is looking for relief from long-buried family secrets and her own fresh start. But as Daisy becomes increasingly attached to this abandoned child, and begins facing her own demons in the process, a startling discovery is made that threatens to rip the entire town of Cape Carolina apart, placing Daisy, Mason, and Tilley in the center of the storm. In a novel that proves that “Kristy Woodson Harvey is (the) go-to for elevated beach reads” (People), they will each learn that with love, understanding—and a community theater production of Hello, Dolly!—sometimes life conspires to bring us just exactly where we belong.
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The Mating Game by Lana FergusonContractor Tess Covington has spent her entire life as a regular non-shifter human, so after she lands in the Denver ER with flu-like symptoms, it comes as a complete shock to be told that, no, she’s not sick—she’s actually a late-presenting omega wolf shifter. With her family in dire financial straits and a contract for her own television show on the line, she can’t afford not to complete the renovation job she came for. And given that her newly emerged wolf is in danger of going into heat, she’ll just have to do her best to follow the doctor’s advice to keep away from alpha shifters. Alpha wolf Hunter Barrett has spent most of his adult life living by a routine, and a big part of that involves staying clear of omegas after having one stomp on his heart. So when the tiny contractor shows up at his place smelling like the one thing he’s determined to avoid, he thinks it must be some sort of cosmic joke. But with his lodge on the verge of failing and this sweet-smelling omega his only hope to turn things around . . . he’s left with few other options than to grin and bear it. Set on avoiding each other as much as possible, they find things unexpectedly starting to heat up between them enough to thaw even the frostiest of hearts. Though even with the pair going head over paws for each other, there’s no changing that their fling has an expiration date. The more time they spend together, the more they realize they’re playing a dangerous game—one where the only thing on the line is their hearts.
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The Exesby Leodora DarlingtonNatalie has only ever wanted one thing: a kind man and a chance to create the happy family she never had. There’s just one problem—her boyfriends keep turning up dead. Enter James. Handsome, wonderful, perfect James. Natalie is convinced her luck has finally turned. He’s everything she’s ever wanted. More importantly, he’s still breathing. But the harder Natalie tries to play the role of the normal, happy wife, the more her dark past threatens to tear her new life apart. As dangerous secrets and cryptic warnings arrive at her front door, Natalie is forced to question everything she knows about her own history. Is a villain toying with her from the outside? Or is there a monster lurking inside Natalie herself? To save her marriage—and her husband's life—Natalie must uncover the terrifying truth behind her dead exes. But in a game of toxic love and fatal secrets, does anyone really deserve to survive?
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The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn DixonIn a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years. With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.
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Kinby Tayari JonesVernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
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Love by the Book by Jessica GeorgeRemy is lucky. Her debut novel, based on her three best friends, became an instant bestseller when it was released, and her agent and publisher are clamoring for a follow-up. But just as Remy’s creative inspiration seems to leave her, so too do her friends: one moves to New York, one gets pregnant, and one gets back together with her (awful) boyfriend. After an ill-advised one-night stand complicates matters further, Remy is left deeply alone—and unable to find her next book idea. Simone is successful. A Kindergarten teacher with a passion for kids, and a well-paying side hustle that affords her all the material comforts she desires, she doesn't have time for a robust social life. All Simone needs is her close-knit family—but after the true nature of her work is revealed, they cut her off, and she realizes for the first time just how isolated she is.
When Simone and Remy bump into each other (literally) in a bookstore, it isn’t exactly soulmates at first sight. Simone is guarded and prickly, Remy is insecure and heartbroken, and each woman is harboring a secret. And yet they might just be the missing piece the other has been searching for—if only they can let each other in. Can Simone help Remy make one of the most important decisions of her life—and can Remy help Simone recover all that she’s lost? In Jessica George’s heartwarming, funny, and soulful second novel, she explores the restorative nature of female friendship and the life-changing power of platonic love.
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American Fantasy by Emma StraubWhen the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous, nineties-era boy band and three thousand screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie, here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Call it memory. Call it nostalgia. Call it the chemical reaction of hormones, hope, and sexual reawakening. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members—not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend—she has accessed a new sense of possibility. In a smart and incisive book packed with laugh-out-loud reflections on fame, aging, and marriage, Emma Straub delivers a richly textured story that shows us real passion is never truly lost, that what we love makes us who we are, and that deep meaning can sometimes be found in a sea of screaming fans.
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Ruins by Lily Brooks-DaltonProfessor Ember Agni is a rising star in archeology, trying to balance an unfulfilling career in academia and a crumbling marriage, all while pursuing her true passion: unearthing a lost empire that no one else believes existed. Just as she’s about to give up on the ambitious expedition she spent a decade trying to fund, a message arrives from overseas. A former student claims to have found something extraordinary—an artifact that hints at the forgotten world lying beneath history’s tidy surface. With vindication finally within reach, Ember risks everything for the sake of discovery and undertakes an odyssey that will either make her name or ruin her. Driven by unwavering faith in her vision of the past, she challenges the limits of her nation, her colleagues, and herself in order to exhume the missing pieces of how humanity began. But as she journeys deep into an untouched wilderness, in dogged pursuit of a dead civilization, she collides with the wreckage of her own life. On the brink of either discovery or destruction, Ember must choose who she wants to be, and to what kind of world she wants to belong.
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Mass Mothering by Sarah BruniA. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed. Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life. Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother’s love.
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See You on the Other Side by Jay McInerneyThe celebration of the thirty-fifth wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway’s best friend, Washington Lee—the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow having become over the years a model husband and father—at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the Covid-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval—frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact—the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have anticipated as fatal consequences ensue.
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The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Susan PattersonBetween their busy lives and their far-flung residences, the Mother-Daughter Book Club—four longtime college friends and their five daughters—more often discuss the books on their nightstands via 2 a.m. texts than in-person meetings. And maybe it’s just as well, after what happened at their last get-together ...So it’s an emotional reunion when they finally gather again, this time on the spectacular shores of Italy’s Lake Como. Sightseeing excursions, reminiscing fueled by “Como-politans,” and a hint of vacation romance all build toward the book club’s trademark “Night of Secrets.” These friends, and sometime rivals, are close readers—of novels, memoirs, and of each other. But as the years and the distance cast shadows and doubt, confidences and sympathies turn into surprising revelations.
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The Bookstore Diariesby Susan MalleryJax has a slight issue with control—as in, she needs it. Always. Too bad she has power only over the Painted Lady Bookstore, the Victorian mansion turned bookshop she inherited. No one else listens to a word she says. Her ex gets engaged for questionable reasons. Her beloved sister, Ryleigh, wants to move away to find a husband. And the hands ome contractor Jax has chosen to convince Ryleigh to stay is only interested in Jax. Still, she’s living the bookworm dream—until an unhappy accident erases the names from the bookshop lockboxes where the town keeps their diaries. Which means the only way to find a diary’s owner is…to read it. As secrets spill and scandals surface, life at the Painted Lady Bookstore gets a lot more colorful and chaotic. But for a woman who’s always had to take charge, Jax will see that losing control—especially with the right wrong guy—can set you free.
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