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Women's Fiction & Chick Lit May 2026 |
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The Burning Side
by Sarah Damoff
When April and Leo's house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children and the quiet knowledge that the fire is not the only thing threatening their family. They retreat to April's childhood home in Dallas, where her spirited parents and siblings provide both comfort and complication. As the family reckons with the aftermath--grief, guilt, logistics, and memories scorched and intact--the fire exposes the cracks already forming in April and Leo's marriage.
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Caller Unknown
by Gillian McAllister
There is nothing that Simone won't do for her daughter, Lucy. With Lucy about to leave home for university, they depart the UK for a vacation to Texas to spend some quality time together. But when Simone awakens on their first morning in the desert, Lucy is gone, missing from their rental cabin. In her place is a cell phone, and a voice on the other line issues a shocking ransom demand. Though Simone's husband urges her to bring in the authorities for help, she knows she can't take any chances. The kidnappers might kill Lucy if she tells anyone. No mother would take that risk. Instead, that night, she drives to the isolated meet-up. What she finds there changes everything.
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Enormous Wings
by Laurie Frankel
Pepper Mills, newly relocated to a Texas retirement community at her children’s insistence, is just beginning to form friendships and rediscover companionship when alarming health symptoms appear. Her family braces for grim news, but tests reveal an unexpected pregnancy. As outsiders swarm for access and opinions multiply, Pepper confronts limits on her autonomy and the difficult choices that follow.
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Five-Star Summer
by Sarah Morgan
Running a five-star Cornish hotel should have been Evie Hamilton's dream job. But restoring it to its former glory is going to take a miracle. All Evie has is grit, and a hoard of unruly staff who love to speculate about her love life. She needs back-up, and fast. Enter Abby Jones. Parachuted in by the hotel's umbrella company for the summer, Abby thinks Evie could be the best friend she never had. But Abby has her own agenda for being in Cornwall. If her real motives are uncovered, their friendship is going to melt away faster than an ice cream in the summer sun. Yet Abby's arrival starts a chain reaction. With the help of a charming chef and a gruff pub owner, they begin to embrace their true selves and the bonds that unite them. But it's not just the hotel's five-star reputation that needs rebuilding - Evie and Abby will also have to brave tearing down their lives in order to reshape their futures.
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Girls Our Age
by Phoebe Thompson
Three women navigate their late twenties together in a bittersweet novel about female friendship, identity, and growing up--from the hope and promise of college to the realities that lie beyond.Lily, Ana, and Margot have been best friends ever since Hawthorne Res Life assigned them as roommates during their first year of college.Ten years later and Lily is planning her wedding to the endlessly supportive and entirely symmetrical Jack. Ana is a fourth-grade teacher at the prestigious Horizon Academy, alma mater of her long-term boyfriend, who's finally asked her to move in. Margot is about to land a life-changing promotion at ad agency McQueen O'Doul.It all looks good from here.But when the three friends converge on Maine for the wedding, the real challenges they've been able to keep from each other begin to surface. It's finally time to open up about the very private struggles they've hidden for too long and the risks they've taken to protect themselves, and those they love, from the truth.
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The Gulf of Lions
by Caitlin Shetterly
Alice, a breast cancer survivor still reckoning with the aftermath of surgery, chemo, and a five-year prognosis, decides that a change of scenery is long overdue. Eager to create positive memories not formed in a hospital waiting room or in an infusion center, Alice maps out a summertime road trip through the south of France with her two daughters, teenager Sophie and eight-year-old Iris.
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The Hill
by Harriet Clark
Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna's mother, who will never be released. At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter's crime and refuses to visit the prison. Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. The Hill is the story of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment.
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June Baby
by Shannon Garvey
At seventeen, Ruth lost her mother to cancer, and her father, unable to handle his grieving daughter, shipped her off to Block Island with nothing but a name scribbled on the back of a receipt: Diana Beckett. Diana, a renowned photographer, took Ruth in for the summer, and Block Island became Ruth's refuge, a place of beauty and creativity, a place where she could nurture her dreams of being a writer, a place where she could fall in love for the first time--with Diana's nephew, Charlie. Now, at twenty-seven, Ruth has spent the last ten summers living and working among the lucky few who get to vacation in this wealthy beach town, and the rest of the year just scraping by, yearning to return to the place where she feels safe and unburdened. But then Ruth's world is upended by tragedy again. Desperate for an anchor, she reaches for the person she's been pining for since she met him--Charlie--who has his own startling revelation to share. And when another surprise comes in the form of a box left to Ruth by Diana, its contents raise questions about just how well she knew the two women who raised her. Torn between what to believe about her past, and what her future might hold, Ruth is faced with another choice: does she dare to rewrite her story entirely?
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A Little Bit Bad
by Cassandra Neyenesch
Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor's anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she's pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he's fifteen years younger, she's terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret. Now it's three years later and Nando has been murdered. As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day?
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The May House
by Jillian Cantor
Three adult sisters inherit a beach house from their grandmother on the condition they return every May to spend one week together, unearthing family secrets, unrequited love, and the deep bonds of sisterhood.
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Mercy Hill
by Hannah Thurman
A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.
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Returns and Exchanges
by Kayla Rae Whitaker
A sweeping novel of one Kentucky family's rise and fall throughout the 1980s--a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and children, and the perils of mixing family with business.
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Summer State of Mind
by Kristy Woodson Harvey
After the worst day in her professional life, burnt-out NICU nurse Daisy Stevens runs to Cape Carolina, North Carolina, looking for a new life. On her first day at her simpler job, high school baseball coach Mason Thaysden discovers an abandoned baby, sending ripples through the entire tight-knit town. Mason is struggling to reconcile the scars of the injury that kept him out of the big leagues, stuck in his hometown, and searching for a way out. This newcomer and the child they've saved together might be just the motivation he needs to stay put. But as Daisy becomes increasingly attached to this abandoned child, a startling discovery is made that threatens to rip the entire town apart.
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The Things We Never Say
by Elizabeth Strout
Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He goes about his days teaching American history to high schoolers, correcting their casual ignorance, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He spends his free time sailing the beautiful Massachusetts Bay, or with his adult son and his wife of more than three decades -- and as Artie does these things, he plans the event that will forever change the world he inhabits. But when a startling accident awakens a new perspective, and he realizes that life has its own secret it's been keeping from him, he charts another course full of grief, hilarity, and heart, to a place where the end marks the beginning.
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The Wish
by Heather Morris
A dying teenager asks a lonely VR game designer to create a video experience of her life, leading to an unexpected friendship and emotional journey.
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