Fiction A to Z - August 2025
Recent Releases
What Kind of Paradise
by Janelle Brown

Teenage 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.
Spectacular Things : A novel
by Beck Dorey-Stein

Mia and Cricket have always been close and are well-known in the small Maine town they call home. As they grow up, they must grapple with the legacy of their mother’s secret past while navigating their own precarious future. Can Mia allow herself to fall in love at the risk of repeating a terrible history? Will Cricket's relentless chase of a lifelong goal drive her sister away? When does loyalty become self-sabotage?
The Catch
by Yrsa Daley-Ward

After 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.
The Winds From Further West
by Alexander McCall Smith

"A dazzling and uplifting novel of new beginnings and endless possibilities, in which a slew of personal and professional disasters cause a young researcher to upend his seemingly stable life in Edinburgh and move to a remote island off the Scottish coast"
Kakigori Summer
by Emily Itami

Three sisters -- ambitious London finance expert Rei; single mom Kiki, who works at a care home; and young pop star Ai -- reunite at their Japanese childhood home after Ai is caught up in a scandal. Over the summer, they support each other and navigate memories of their troubled mother and their early years, where being half-British and half-Japanese made them outsiders.

For fans of: Emily Giffin's The Summer Pact. 
Culpability
by Bruce W. Holsinger

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, 17-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of AI, is absorbed in her work. As the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Lorelei’s odd behaviour tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident.
 
The Homemade God
by Rachel Joyce

Not 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.
The View from Lake Como : A novel
by Adriana Trigiani

After a painful divorce and family upheaval in working-class Lake Como, New Jersey, draftswoman Jess Capodimonte Baratta flees to Carrara, Italy, where artistic ambition, and new relationships reshape her understanding of love, loyalty, and personal fulfillment
These Summer Storms
by Sarah MacLean

After their billionaire patriarch's death, the Storms come together at their New England island. There, they are introduced to Jack, their father's right-hand man and daughter Alice's recent one-night-stand, who says they must all complete individual tasks or no one inherits anything. Bestselling historical romance author Sarah MacLean delivers a fun contemporary family novel that will please fans of HBO's Succession.
The Glass House
by Graeme Simsion

Written by author Graeme Simison and his wife, psychiatrist Anne Buist, 'The Glass House' follows psychiatry registrar Doctor Hannah Wright who takes a job at in the psychiatric ward at Menzies Hospital. Hannah must learn on the job as she and her fellow trainees deal with the common and the bizarre, the hilarious and the tragic, the treatable and the confronting.
Menzies Mental Health (1)

From the author of 'The Rosie Project'
 
Endling
by Maria Reva

In 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.
Finding Grace : A novel
by Loretta Rothschild

Grace has made her London wine shop a second home for people like her—those running from their own past—and she soon finds herself curious about Tom, who becomes a fixture at the shop.
Ordinary Love
by Marie Rutkoski

Shortly after leaving her abusive husband, affluent Emily reconnects with her high school best friend (and first love), Gennifer, now a famous Olympian with a questionable reputation. Will their respective baggage keep them from a second chance at happiness?

Try this next: Perris, California by Rachel Stark.
The Girl I Was : A novel
by Jeneva Rose

'The Girl I Was' follows a woman who wakes up in the year 2002 believing she’s been given a second chance to do her life over - until she comes face-to-face with her unruly 18-year-old self, who couldn't be more different than the person she is today. It is only by working together that they'll be able to change their lives for the better.
Vera, or Faith
by Gary Shteyngart

Highly intelligent ten-year-old Vera loves words and lists. She also worries a lot, including about money, her Jewish dad and WASP stepmother divorcing, that they love her brother more, and how to find her Korean mom. This highly anticipated satirical latest from an acclaimed author explores a modern New York family in a politically troubled world. Read-alike: Alice Franklin's Life Hacks for a Little Alien; Eiren Caffall's All the Water in the World.
Beautiful Nights : A novel
by Nina George

"A respected professor begins a secret affair with her son's girlfriend one summer on the Brittany coast in this intense, poetic novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop"-- Provided by publisher
That last Carolina summer : a novel
by Karen White

'The Last Carolina Summer' is a new southern-set standalone novel about a woman with the gift of premonition, who is plagued by mysterious visions of a tragic accident, the truth of which comes to light when she returns home to care for her estranged mother.
 
Cheesecake : A Block-long Novel
by Mark Kurlansky

'Cheese Cake' is a delectable fiction debut novel about one Greek family's diner, its colourful ensemble of regulars, and the Upper West Side-wide race to interpret a perplexing historical recipe for Cato's Roman cheesecake amid a rapidly gentrifying community.
The Namaste Club : a novel
by Asha Elias

'The Namaste Club' is a hilarious send-up of the wellness industrial complex, rich ladies doing yoga, and all things fabulous and Florida.
Just inland from Florida’s Treasure Coast is the Namaste Club yoga centre, a place of reflection, release, and redemption - or at least, that's the sales pitch. This weekend, a new bunch of South Florida burnouts have arrived. Who will be living their best life? Who will get their comeuppance?
 
Darling Beasts
by Michelle Gable

HBO's 'Succession' meets Kevin Wilson's 'Nothing to See Here' in this new novel from Michelle Gable. In 'Darling Beasts', the heirs to a publishing fortune are knit back into each other's lives when they are forced into the spotlight for their father’s political campaign - and exotic animals begin to appear as an omen before each new debacle they face.
 
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