LibraryAware October 2025

Adult Fiction

Wreck ; : a novel
by Catherine Newman

In Western Massachusetts, Rocky juggles family life with her husband, adult children and aging father, until her fixation on a local accident and an ominous medical concern stirs up anxieties that threaten to upend her fragile sense of normalcy.

Twice : a novel
by Mitch Albom

Young Alfie Logan can rewind any moment for a do-over -- but must accept the results of his second try -- and having navigated through adolescence and finding seemingly lasting love with Gianna, he must confront an impossible choice when his power unravels during a casino arrest.

The Irish goodbye : a novel
by Heather Aimee O'Neill

Three adult sisters grapple with a shared tragedy over a Thanksgiving weekend spent in their childhood home, navigating complex relationships and old tensions. A first novel.

Too Old for This
by Samantha Downing

In Samantha Downing’s wry, twist-filled new novel, 75-year-old Lottie Jones -- once a notorious serial killer -- lives quietly under a new identity. But when a journalist starts digging into her past, Lottie must confront old crimes and consider new ones to stay hidden. Murder, however, isn’t so easy at her age.

The Wasp Trap
by Mark Edwards

At a glamorous London dinner party, six old friends are forced into a deadly game: confess their darkest secrets or face elimination. Tied to a long-buried psychological experiment from 1999, their past resurfaces with chilling consequences. The Wasp Trap is a fast-paced, suspenseful thriller about truth, betrayal, and hidden psychopaths.

Heart the lover : a novel
by Lily King

Decades after a tangled college love triangle shaped her life, a woman is forced to confront her old choices and hidden truths in this intimate novel of friendship and desire from the bestselling author of Writers & Lovers.

Shadow Ticket
by Thomas Pynchon

Milwaukee 1932, private eye Hicks McTaggart searches for a Wisconsin cheese fortune heiress, but he's shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner to Hungary; before he finds her he will be entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal and outlaw motorcyclists.

Remain
by Nicholas Sparks

When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia’s deathbed revelation—that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family—sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.

It's me they follow : a romance
by Jeannine A. Cook

In a magical bookshop where stories guide hearts, a bookseller who helps others find love through fiction confronts her own long-buried longing for a vanished customer and discovers that her story may still hold a happy ending.

Buckeye
by Patrick Ryan

On Victory in Europe Day, 1945, while her husband is away in the Pacific, beautiful Margaret shares a celebratory kiss with married hardware store clerk Cal Jenkins, whose physical disability kept him from enlisting. This leads to a connection between their small-town Ohio families for decades, where their sons grow up together but take different paths in the Vietnam era. For fans of: Read with Jenna books; vivid, heartfelt novels about families and war.

Whatever happened to Lori Lovely? : a novel
by Sarah McCoy

In 1991, college student Lu Tibbott investigates her aunt Lori Lovely's sudden transition from Hollywood starlet to cloistered nun, uncovering hidden ambitions, forbidden love, and dark secrets behind Lori's dramatic life change amid scandal and mystery.

The Ordeals
by Rachel Greenlaw

Trapped by a blood bond to her cruel uncle, Sophia DeWinter risks everything to enter Killmarth College, where alongside botanist Alden Locke she must survive deadly magical trials and uncover the killer preying on her competitors before she becomes the next victim.

The Incredible Kindness of Paper
by Evelyn Skye

As a lonely child, Chloe makes a yellow origami rose for her new pen pal, whispering details about herself to the paper. When Oliver receives it, he somehow understands. The correspondents grow close as they grow up, until they lose touch. Years later, Chloe leaves paper flowers across Manhattan, where Oliver finds one in this heartwarming, magical tale exploring love and belonging. For fans of: Lynda Cohen Loigman’s The Matchmaker’s Gift.

The Everlasting
by Alix E. Harrow

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion's greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children's books and recruiting posters-but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten. Centuries later, Owen Mallory-failed soldier, struggling scholar-falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives-and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs. But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una's legend-if they want to tell a different story--they'll have to rewrite history itself.

The black wolf
by Louise Penny

Weeks after foiling an attack in Montréal and arresting the so-called Black Wolf, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, confined by his injuries to Three Pines, quietly leads a covert investigation with agents Beauvoir and Lacoste, fearing the conspiracy he uncovered is only a deliberate misdirection.

Adult Nonfiction

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
by Moudhy Al-Rashid

In her accessible and illuminating debut, historian Moudhy Al-Rashid utilizes eight artifacts, including cuneiform tablets and weapon fragments, to explore everyday life and culture in ancient Mesopotamia. Further reading: The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World by Selena Wisnom.

Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
by Bench Ansfield

Historian Bench Ansfield's thought-provoking exposé details the ongoing legacy of the 1970s arson epidemic, exacerbated by corrupt landlords and predatory insurance companies, that plagued urban neighborhoods throughout the United States, particularly in the South Bronx. Try this next: The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood by Stacy Horn.

Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
by Caleb Gayle

Journalist Caleb Gayle's compelling and well-researched history offers a nuanced portrait of Black separatist politician and entrepreneur Edward McCabe, whose attempts to establish Black-run communities in the post-Reconstruction Oklahoma Territory spurred the displacement of the Cherokee already living there. Try this next: The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance by Rebecca Clarren.

Youth Fiction

Aggie and the ghost
by Matthew Forsythe

"Aggie is very excited to live on her own-until she finds out her new house is haunted. But no fear, the situation is nothing that can't be fixed with a carefully considered list of rules: No haunting after dark. No stealing socks. No eating all the food. But the ghost doesn't like playing by the rules and challenges Aggie to an epic game of tic-tac-toe-winner gets the house."

The last resort
by Erin Entrada Kelly

Twelve-year-old Lila has two goals for the summer:
1. Win back the friends who ditched her for being "too dramatic"
2. Stop being so dramatic
But then Lila's estranged Grandpa Clem dies, throwing a wrench in her plans. Now she'll have to spend the summer in Ohio while her parents decide what to do with Grandpa Clem's creepy Victorian Inn. It's supremely unfair. How can she show off the "new and improved" Lila from so far away?
Even worse, strange things keep happening. En route to Ohio, the family gets into a scary car accident. No one's hurt, but the remainder of the trip is... odd. At every rest stop, Lila sees people in weird old-fashioned clothes. People no one else can see or hear...
Lila convinces herself it's just her overactive imagination until the day of the funeral when she spots an old man sitting in her grandfather's favorite chair. She does a double take -- it's him, Grandpa Clem. He tells Lila that he didn't die of a heart attack: he was murdered. Possibly by someone who wants to control the inn. Because it's not a normal bed & breakfast: it's a portal between the land of the living and the realm of the dead. A hotel for ghosts passing onto the afterlife.
With the help of her skeptical brother, Caleb, and their new ghost-obsessed neighbor, Teddy, Lila -- the girl who's vowed to be less dramatic -- must uncover her grandfather's killer AND stop the evil spirits desperate to make their way back into the human world.

A glimmer of change
by Elle McNicoll

Keedie, a thirteen-year-old neurodivergent girl who sees the world differently, is used to bullies, but when her friends become targets, she starts an anti-bullying agency and soon finds herself toeing the line between advocacy and becoming a bully herself.

Zodiac legacy
by Katie Zhao

The Descendants of the Chinese zodiac must navigate the aftermath of a chaotic heist and rescue a fallen comrade--all while battling dark forces determined to tear them apart.

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