Romance & other Ficiton February 2026 |
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The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness--
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Mona's Eyes
by Thomas Schlesser
New York Times BestsellerBarnes & Noble 2025 Book of the YearPublishers Weekly BestsellerNational Indie BestsellerIndie Next PickIndigo Heather's PickTen-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory all that is beautiful in the world before Mona loses her sight forever.While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona's brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl's grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris's renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist's work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl's world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same--nor will the reader's.Mona's Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser's sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.Vibrant debut ... Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona's story... Readers of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World will love this.--Publishers WeeklyDiscover all 52 masterpieces inside the fold-out dustjacket.
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Heart the Lover
by Lily King
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky. -Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time TomorrowFrom the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first loveYou knew I'd write a book about you someday.Our narrator understands good love stories--their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
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Remember That Day
by Mary Balogh
A soldier and a pacifist make the unlikeliest of pairs, but when attraction sparks, there's nothing that can prevent their love from igniting. Winifred Cunningham, the adopted daughter of a portrait painter, hopes that her new close friend, Owen Ware, will soon ask for her hand in marriage. But when Owen introduces Winifred to his elder brother Nicholas, the late Earl of Stratton's second son, the slow burn of attraction between them begins ...--Provided by publisher.
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Bad Bad Girl
by Gish Jen
Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: 'Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!' She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally-minded education. Still, her father would say, 'Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.' Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D in America. ... Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood--
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The Old Fire
by Elisa Shua Dusapin
From National Book Award-winning Elisa Shua Dusapin, a subtle yet powerful portrayal of family, secrets, and silence set against the backdrop of a crumbling house in the French countryside--perfect for readers of Katie Kitamura and Elena Ferrante. A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place, immersing you in its temperatures and rainfalls, its grief and grace and sound and silence. You won't be the same when you leave it. --Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch Through the window, I can see a light inside. Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it. As the pair clean and sift through a lifetime's worth of belongings, old memories, and resentments surface. Tender and tense, haunting and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin's most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, it is also a graceful and profound look at the unsaid and the unanswered, the secrets that remain, and whether you can ever really go home again. A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale. --Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: Her talent is a thrill to behold. --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
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When the Fireflies Dance
by Aisha Hassan
On the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, a large yellow moon hung low in the sky when the men came with dogs and guns and cricket bats. In front of his family's small hut on the edge of a looming brick kiln, Lalloo's brother was murdered. Unable to escape the memory of that horrible night, Lalloo's parents and sisters remain trapped, the kiln chimney churning black smoke into the sky as the family slave, brick by brick, to pay off their debts. To rescue them, Lalloo must free himself from his past and carve out his own destiny--Provided by publisher.
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All the Little Houses
by May Cobb
May Cobb's most explosive book yet. And trust me, that's saying a lot. -- Jeneva RoseNobody does explosive and twisted like May Cobb does it. --Lisa JewellAdults can behave badly too...It's the mid-1980s in the tiny town of Longview, Texas. Nellie Anderson, the beautiful daughter of the Anderson family dynasty, has burst onto the scene. She always gets what she wants. What she can't get for herself... well, that's what her mother is for. Because Charleigh Andersen, blond, beautiful, and ruthlessly cunning, remembers all too well having to claw her way to the top. When she was coming of age on the poor side of East Texas, she was a loser, an outcast, humiliated, and shunned by the in-crowd, whose approval she'd so desperately thirsted for. When a prairie-kissed family moves to town, all trad wife, woodworking dad, wholesome daughter vibes, Charleigh's entire self-made social empire threatens to crumble.Who will be left standing when the dust settles?From the author of The Hunting Wives comes a deliciously wicked new thriller about mean girls, mean moms, and the delicious secrets inside all the little houses.
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Before I Forget
by Tory Henwood Hoen
A funny, heartfelt, late coming-of-age story that examines the role of memory in holding us back--and in moving us forward--for fans of The Collected Regrets of Clover and Maame.
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Just Watch Me
by Lior Torenberg
Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister--a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption. Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She's behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she's being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle
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Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating
by Christina Lauren
A 'rom-com' standalone romance by writing duo Christina Lauren. Foul-mouthed, quirky, sharp-as-a-whip Hazel never thought she would win the heart of her gorgeous college TA, Josh. And, in fact, she didn't. But what a difference ten years can make. Well...ten years, and a lot of legwork--
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Not Part of the Plan
by Lucy Score
Originally published in 2017 by That's What She Said Publishing, Inc.--Title page verso.
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One Week Later
by Kj Micciche
From Cosmopolitan's Cosmo Reads imprint comes a story of sun-drenched missed connection, a storm of public scandal, and a second chance you'll root for until the last page--perfect for fans of Emily Henry, Carley Fortune and Christina Lauren.They had one perfect week. Then they vanished from each other's lives--until his book inadvertently made her the villain.Two years ago, romance novelist Melody Adams and aspiring author Beckett Nash met on a sun-soaked vacation in Aruba. Seven days of stolen moments, midnight swims, and intimate conversations left them both certain they'd found the real thing. Then a tangle of missed flights, mixed signals, and bad timing tore them apart before they could say goodbye. Neither could reach the other--so both assumed they'd been dumped.And both did what writers do: they turned heartbreak into a novel.Now Beckett's debut has made him a literary sensation. Melody's book? Critics call it a shameless rip-off. The only way to salvage her career--and her sanity--is to reconnect with Beckett and set the record straight. There's just one problem: Beckett is engaged to someone else. And seeing each other again reminds them of exactly what they lost...and how much they both still want. A] romantic gem. --Publishers Weekly STARRED Review for The Book ProposalFans of Emily Henry will adore this author. --New York Times bestselling author Kristan HigginsA love letter to writing. --Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka for A Storybook Wedding
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Call Me Ishmaelle
by Xiaolu Guo
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Nearly twenty years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca's leg. Built on the bones of Melville's classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew--from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk-and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, and the nature of home-- Provided by publisher.
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I Wanted to Be Wonderful
by Lihi Lapid
Instant National Bestseller This book begins where most love stories leave off: at the beginning of real life. I WANTED TO BE WONDERFUL follows the lives of two women in their first years of marriage and motherhood. One is a fictional character trying to live the happily-ever-after many imagine for themselves, and the second woman is inspired by the author herself, relating the most intimate moments of her life. Both couples start their marriages full of idyllic happiness, but as the stressors of everyday life seep into their daily lives, that spark of young love begins to dim. In trenchant, thoughtful prose, Lihi Lapid tells a braided story of women struggling to live up to modern pressures; about shattered dreams; and about finding the strength to gather up the pieces and to learn to smile again.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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