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Fiction A to Z February 2026 |
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| Crux by Gabriel TallentIn California's Mojave Desert, two high school seniors share a tight friendship and a passion for rock climbing, though neither has money for good gear. While Dan dreams of college and his mom sacrifices to pay for it, Tamma wants to be a pro climber but must help her troubled family. For fans of: Allegra Goodman's Sam; suspenseful, richly detailed novels; character-driven stories about friendship. |
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Inharmonious
by Tammye Huf
A compelling love story--inspired by the author's own family history--set in the segregated South during and after World War II, perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah's The Women and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half.When three young Black men enlist in the US Army hoping to serve their country with honor, their lives are forever changed.When Pearl Harbor is attacked in 1941, Cora's brother, Benny, rushes to enlist against the wishes of Cora and their mother. Able to pass as white due to his pale skin and light eyes, Benny reports for duty only to realize he's been mistakenly enlisted as a white man in a racially segregated military.Lee has been friends with Benny ever since he was a troubled teenager, and he's been sweet on Cora for nearly as long. When Lee enlists without telling Cora, she is heartbroken and feels betrayed by the man she expected to spend the rest of her life with.Meanwhile, family friend Roscoe, encouraged by Benny, offers to marry Cora in order to ensure that she and her mother--who both remain home--will be provided for should Benny not make it back.Benny does return, but his new white identity leaves him struggling to find his place in between, in a country that only sees race. As America promises postwar prosperity to white veterans through the GI Bill, Black soldiers are excluded.While the war may be over, the fight has only just begun for Cora, Lee, Benny, and Roscoe.
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The Jills
by Karen Parkman
Virginia is a Jill--a professional Buffalo Bills cheerleader--living the life she's always dreamed of. She spends her weekdays practicing, her weekends cheering, and her nights hopping between events and bars and clubs with her close-knit band of teammates, especially her best friend, Jeanine, whose dynamic friendship has given Virginia confidence in spades and allowed her to put aside her troubled past with her sister, Laura. But one Sunday, Jeanine fails to show up for a game, and all her calls and texts go unanswered. Aided by a worried network of Jills, ex-boyfriends, and seedy fixtures of Buffalo's criminal underground, Virginia embarks on an investigation into Jeanine's disappearance. But as her search grows increasingly dangerous and spirals into obsession, disturbing questions about who Jeanine really is begin to emerge. Soon, Virginia finds herself wondering how well she knows her friend, if she can trust the people and institutions she thought were protecting her, and whether--when trying to save the people she cares about most--she's capable of saving herself, too.-- Provided by publisher.
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Keeper of Lost Children
by Sadeqa Johnson
In this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, one American woman's vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way. Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American Officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI's, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes. Philadelphia born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948, eager to make his mark in the world. While serving in Manheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, Jelka, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever. In 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity. Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman's vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms--familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self--can be transcendent.
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Kin
by Tayari Jones
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage--Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy. Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I'm always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones's very best work. --Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake Vernice 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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Laws of Love and Logic
by Debra Curtis
A STUNNING DEBUT NOVEL FROM JENNA BUSH HAGER'S NEW VENTURE, THOUSAND VOICES A woman finds herself torn between her first love and her devoted husband in this extraordinary debut novel that asks the question: Can one heart hold two great loves? A magnificent, spellbinding love story.--Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country In the serene town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Lily Webb is deeply in love with a charismatic boy, a college-bound quarterback whose spectacular athletic talents are matched only by his fierce devotion. But their dreams of a life together are cut short when his passionate protectiveness leads to an irrevocable choice--one that tears them apart and leads Lily down a path of heartbreak from which she may never recover. Lily already knows the sting of loss, beginning with the death of her mother, a tragedy that left deep scars on both her and her gifted younger sister, Jane. Jane seeks escape in the abstract world of mathematics and quantum mechanics--when she can keep the demons that fuel her addictions at bay. As the years pass, Lily buries her twin griefs deep in her heart, finding solace and a new beginning with Marshall Middleton, a renowned ornithologist whose love is as steadfast as the migration patterns he studies. Yet the shadows of her past linger. When the boy who was once everything to Lily reappears in her life, she struggles with questions around that terrible night in high school. Can she reconcile the wild wonderment of her first love with the comfort and safety of her second? Laws of Love and Logic explores love's enduring power and the human spirit's capacity for forgiveness and redemption.
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More Than Enough
by Anna Quindlen
High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they've become her closest friends and, along with the support of her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her private school students, her fraught relationship with mother, her struggles with IVF-Polly's book club friends have heard it all. But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. Despite it seeming clear that this match is a mistake, Polly cannot help combing through her own family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways-- Provided by publisher.
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So Old, So Young
by Grant Ginder
A Most Anticipated Novel of 2026 by Time, Town & Country, Bustle, Zibby Media, & B&N Reads - February Book Club Pick by Good Housekeeping Grant Ginder has written The Big Chill of our times...and possibly done an even better job. So Old, So Young is a triumph. I will never forget these characters. --Elin Hilderbrand So Old, So Young is a story of romantic love, professional jealousy, misplaced longing, and--above all--the gift of lifelong friendship. You will laugh on every page, except for when you find yourself moved to tears. --Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street Six Friends. Five Parties. Twenty Years... How did we get So Old, So Young? From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a generation-defining novel that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of twenty years bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we run from and cling to our friends in love, life, and death. For Marco and Mia, Sasha and Theo, Richie and Adam, the one constant in life after college together has been change. New jobs. New cities. New spouses. New children. Through it all, one thing they thought would always stay the same is their friendship. But time has a way of breaking even the strongest bonds, and testing what we thought we knew. From East Village apartment parties and disastrous destination weddings, to fortieth birthdays and suburban backyard barbecues, Grant Ginder's resonant, funny, and deeply moving novel is a story about the growing pains of the Millennial generation, and a celebration of how love can shift, stumble, and grow into something bigger than we ever could have imagined.
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This Book Made Me Think of You
by Libby Page
A woman receives an unexpected gift from the man she loved and lost--a year of books, one for every month--launching a reading-inspired journey to live, dream, and love again in this glimmering and heart-stopping novel. Twelve books. Twelve months. One chance to heal her heart... When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there's a birthday gift from her husband waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn't come as more of a shock. Partly because she can't remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. But mainly because Joe died five months ago.... When she goes to pick up the present, Alfie, the bookshop owner with kind eyes, explains the gift--twelve carefully chosen books with handwritten letters from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him. At first Tilly can't imagine sinking into a fictional world, but Joe's tender words convince her to try, and something remarkable happens--Tilly becomes immersed in the pages, and a new chapter begins to unfold in her own life. Monthly trips to the bookstore--and heartfelt conversations with Alfie--give Tilly the comfort she craves and the courage to set out on a series of reading-inspired adventures that take her around the world. But as she begins to share her journey with others, her story--like a book--becomes more than her own.
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Where the Wildflowers Grow (Deluxe Edition)
by Terah Shelton Harris
From acclaimed author Terah Shelton Harris comes a poignant story of survival and redemption that questions what it means to stop existing and start living.Leigh is the last of the Wildes. She knows this because she watched them all die.Grief never truly fades and even as the tragedy haunts her, Leigh carries on, because survival is in her blood. So, when the transport bus taking her to prison careens off the road, killing everyone onboard except her, she does what's in her nature. She survives. While searching for a place to hide, Leigh stumbles upon an unexpected sanctuary: a flower farm in rural Alabama tucked away from the world. What Leigh doesn't expect is the found family there who have built something from the wreckage of their own lives. Especially Jackson, the farm's owner, who sees through Leigh's defenses, offers her small moments of tenderness, encourages her to face her own tragedies. Slowly, Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. Maybe she's not beyond redemption, not too broken for something good. And maybe, just maybe, Leigh starts to heal.But the past isn't so easily buried.No matter how far she runs, the truth of who she is and the ghosts of the Wildes follow. And when those secrets catch up to her, threatening everything she's come to love, Leigh will have to truly face what she can survive.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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