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Literary Fiction August 2025 |
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| What Kind of Paradise by Janelle BrownTeenage Jane lives isolated from the outside world in a remote cabin with her beloved father, an enigmatic genius. After discovering disturbing information about him, she flees, finding herself in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. This twisty coming-of-age novel offers intriguing looks at extremism, technology, and humanity. Read-alikes: What Mother Won't Tell Me by Ivar Leon Menger; Godshot by Chelsea Jean Bieker. |
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Maggie ; : or, A man and a woman walk into a bar
by Katie Yee
A Chinese American woman discovers her husband is cheating with someone named Maggie; she then finds out she has cancer and names the tumor Maggie, talking to her body's new inhabitant as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.
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| The Catch by Yrsa Daley-WardAfter their mother's belongings were found near the Thames River in 1995, young twins Clara and Dempsey were adopted by different families. Now 30, successful author Clara meets a woman who looks exactly as their mom did in the 1990s. While Clara thinks somehow this woman is their mom, administrative clerk Dempsey doesn't, leading to tension between the estranged sisters in this thought-provoking debut novel by a poet and memoirist. Read-alike: August Blue by Deborah Levy. |
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| The Homemade God by Rachel JoyceNot long after their larger-than-life 76-year-old artist father suddenly marries a 27-year-old they've never met, the four Kemp siblings learn he has drowned in an Italian lake he'd swam in for decades. Descending on the vacation villa during a sweltering heatwave, they meet their enigmatic stepmother, question their dad's mysterious death, hunt for his unfinished masterpiece, and confront long-hidden familial wounds. Read-alike: Lynn Steger Strong's Flight. |
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| The Accidental Favorite by Fran LittlewoodGathering to celebrate their mother's 70th birthday at a posh rented house in the English countryside, three middle-aged sisters, each with their own families and issues, are shocked when an unexpected event indicates who their father's favorite child is. Told from multiple points of view over various time periods, this is the moving latest by the author of Amazing Grace Adams. Read-alike: Catherine Newman's Sandwich. |
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| The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila MottleyIn the Florida Panhandle, young mothers support each other amid upheavals while others judge and put obstacles in their paths. Three of them narrate: de facto leader Simone, a 20-year-old mother of twins who's pregnant again; newcomer Adela, a champion teen swimmer from Indiana who's been sent to live with her grandmother; and determined Emory, who brings her infant to high school with her. Read-alikes: Sarai Johnson's Grown Women; Brit Bennett's The Mothers. |
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| Endling by Maria RevaIn 2022 Ukraine, two sisters talk a scientist intent on saving an endangered snail species into helping them kidnap Western men on so-called "romance" tours looking for docile brides. But Russia invades, changing everything in this "page-turning, genre-bending meta-novel as entertaining as it is gut-wrenching" (Library Journal). For fans of: inventive, stylistically complex literary debuts, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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