|
|
Book Bites and Brunch October 2026 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Peck & Peck
by Bonnie Garmus
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A BEST BOOK OF THE FALL FOR OPRAH DAILY TIME, AND THE NEW YORK POST A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR CBS, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE BOSTON GLOBE, COUNTRY LIVING, LIT HUB, BOOKPAGE, AND MORE The #1 New York Times bestselling author of global sensation Lessons in Chemistry returns with an irresistible, delightful, and tender literary novel set in the publishing world of 1980s New York City about a young man whose life turns upside down when he is hired by the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in the world: the renowned Peck & Peck. Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest. It's 1982, New York City. Crime is on the rise, muggings are in the streets, and Batter Gray, recent college graduate with a skill that no one wants--an ear for poetry--is worried about his future. While all of his friends have real jobs, he's folding T-shirts at the Gap. As for love? No. Not unless you count Sallie Mae, the student loan tyrant. He hears from Sallie all the time. But when Batter gets a dream job at Peck & Peck, the most prestigious poetry quarterly in the world, his life moves into the literary fast lane. Soon Batter is knee-deep in the secret war between the two Editors in Chief, the famous Peck brothers--twins and enemies--as well as being privy to the private affairs of their thirty-nine editors, whose professed mission is the same: Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest. And by burn, they mean incinerate. Because at Peck & Peck, good isn't good enough, interesting doesn't cut it, plagiarists aren't tolerated, and parolees run the mailroom. Still want to submit your poem? Go with God. Welcome to another dazzling and unforgettable novel from Bonnie Garmus. If you loved Lessons in Chemistry, you will love Peck & Peck.
|
|
|
|
American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty. Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end. --Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children--Bo, DH, and Mido--find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John's oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California--where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children's futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other's lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice--for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers--is a kind of prayer. An immersive, engrossing novel ... this is panorama told in brilliant detail.--Colm T ib n, bestselling author ofLong IslandandBrooklyn
|
|
|
|
The Three Graces of Pearl Street
by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins
Instant USA TODAY Bestseller A stunning debut. An intergenerational story full of the complexities of family life that will surprise and inspire you at every turn. --Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author In this wise and warm debut novel, an Italian American grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter all named after the Roman myth of the Three Graces find their lives--and their secrets--colliding when, after years apart, they come to live under the same roof. Graziella, a ninety-six-year-old former nun, spends her days running the parish's food kitchen, convinced it is her responsibility to keep everyone fed in their working-class New York neighborhood. Her daughter, Grace, a respected psychology professor, appears accomplished and composed, yet finds herself unmoored as her personal life falters. Ella--Graziella's granddaughter and Grace's daughter--is weary of defending her vegan diet and anti-capitalistic lifestyle; blind to her own brilliance, she longs, above all, for a place to belong. Living together again, the three Graces reckon with the distances that have shaped them, and with what it means, at last, to be fully known. Truly captivating (Annabel Monaghan, New York Times bestselling author) and populated by unforgettable characters, The Three Graces of Pearl Street explores the delicate balance between tradition and modernity, and the quiet courage it takes to move through the world with true grace.
|
|
|
|
Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository (and Yarn)
by Rebecca McKee
If you believe a bookstore (that also sells yarn) is the most magical place on earth, Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository (and Yarn) is the book for you --Meg Shaffer, USA Today bestselling author of The Wishing Game The Midnight Library meets The Ten Thousand Doors of January and The Book of Lost Hours in this mesmerizing debut about a magical bookstore's staff who must risk everything to stop the unraveling of the universe. Stick your nose in these books and they just might bite. Living at the center of the universe, Mr. Mendlebee's Pandimensional Literary Repository (and Yarn) is home to lost things, forgotten objects, and dark and dangerous items best left unseen. With help from the yeti-like Book Keeper, wizened Yarn Weaver, fish-out-of-water clerk, and Muriel the cat, the seaside store keeps the universe spinning as it should while opening its doors only to those who need it most, with one caveat: Once you've visited, you may never return. But when Violet, repository resident and personal friend to Mr. Mendlebee, starts seeing ghosts, the store allows its first repeat customer: Rachel, a young woman who may be the key to unlocking the secrets hiding within Mr. Mendlebee's. Haunted by an echoing knock that sounds from nowhere, the bookstore's staff enlists Rachel's help to discover what's rotten at the heart of the repository. As they do, these misfits and magical mavericks form a bond as solid as steel and as true as their hearts. But will their little community be enough to save the bookstore... and the world? Because Mr. Mendlebee's is coming undone, and won't stop until the truth is out.
|
|
|
|
Love, Like Apples
by Jeff Zentner
A lyrical, deeply felt story of an artist and the great love that defined his life, set against the electric, delirious backdrop of 1970s New York City and the tumultuous years prior--for readers of Taylor Jenkins Reid and Kristin Hannah. A wonder of a book. -Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here Growing up motherless and under the cruel eye of his alcoholic, emotionally distant father, Tiller Loomis seems destined for a hardscrabble life. In the 1960s, the small Appalachian town of Sawyer, Tennessee offers few opportunities outside of working arduous hours on his family's apple orchard. The one ray of light is his older brother Smith, a compassionate and gentle boy who salvages what might have otherwise been a brutal childhood. Kindness, he teaches Tiller, is a choice. But when Smith is drafted into the Vietnam War, Tiller's world collapses. Directionless and grief-stricken, he stumbles into a children's puppet show at his church and ultimately finds purpose and joy through the strange, tender art of puppetry. Chasing his dream of puppeteering full time, Tiller lands in the gritty, graffitied, bohemian hothouse of 1977 New York City, where experimental artists and misfit idealists are using puppets to try to reach teens with a message of hope on a PBS show called Imagine Nation. In Imagine Nation's cast, Tiller finds a chosen family of dreamers and creators who will change his life forever, chief among whom is the beautiful Julie DiFrancesca, a fiercely vivacious woman who offers Tiller a chance at a life he never thought possible. Narratively framed as a present-day documentary production about Imagine Nation, Love, Like Apples takes us from the 1970s into the modern era, tracing how the ripples from one controversial but forgotten TV show and a complicated love affair continue outward over decades, while also exploring the indelible power of radical empathy and the lives of the artists who carry its flame in their hearts. AN AUDIBLE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR FALL AND OCTOBER INDIE NEXT PICK
|
|
|
|
As You Wake, Break the Shell
by Becky Chambers
Explore a universe of stubborn survival and found family, of persistent danger and quiet wonder in the first installment of a heartfelt new duology from Hugo Award-winning author Becky Chambers.Life on the resource-poor planet of Fortune is challenging, but for its inhabitants, it's home. For two of them, Signy and Cora, this home might no longer be enough.Signy is a brilliant but reclusive botanist who bio-prints medicine from her small plant shop, often bending the rules to help those the system leaves behind. Her life is filled with the green of her store, the warmth of her one elderly friend, and the quiet determination to help others without putting herself in danger.Cora is a rorqual pilot, one of the few with the unique ability to navigate the massive, living ships that connect the scattered settlements of their solar system. Her bond with her rorqual, Colibri, is profound--a connection that is both her greatest gift and a threat to her career.It is that threat--the mindbleed, a dangerous side effect of her piloting--that brings her to Signy's shop, and her appearance puts Signy in the danger she so fears. But it's soon apparent it's not just about losing her license--this delicate balance between risk and trust has the potential to change everything for them.Told in an alternating timeline of their initial coming together and a not-so-distant future where they have found domestic bliss, this is a story harrowing and haunting, heartfelt and hopeful. Through a love story centered around survival, we are given a glimpse into the very best of what Becky Chambers does in her writing: explore what it means to be human, and what it means to come together.
|
|
|
|
This B Just Won't Die!
by Tanya Pell
This humorous, heart-pounding, feminist slasher follows an aging scream queen as she is pursued by a serial killer mimicking the murders from her horror films. In this darkly humorous love letter to the slasher film and the iconic doll, aging scream queen Barbra Jacobs desperately wants to break out of the box Hollywood has neatly packaged her in. Cast as the star of the Mirror horror franchise films twenty years ago, the role that shaped her career has also destroyed her dreams of being taken seriously as an actress. Now forty, and still seeking the approval of everyone around her, Barb makes her living signing old photos of herself and doing meet and greets at horror conventions. When a producer calls her to ask about hosting The Monsters We Made, a hot new horror docuseries, she sees it as a step in the right direction. But when fans begin dying around her--and in ways that mimic the kills in her films--Barb is thrust back into a role she can't seem to walk away from: the final girl. Will she ever break out of the display-box life, or will Mirror Man end it all in Barbie's Scream House?
|
|
|
|
The Pirate Queen: A Novel from the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Frozen River
by Ariel Lawhon
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A sweeping historical adventure inspired by the life of Grace O'Malley, the legendary Irish folk heroine who risked everything to defend her people. Venture onto the high seas with the thrilling latest from the New York Times bestselling author of The Frozen River and I Was Anastasia. Grace O'Malley was born to be a sea captain. But despite her natural skill on the water, Grace learns early that her dreams of a life at the helm are not compatible with the expectations of her noble family. As the only daughter of a powerful chieftain, her role is to secure a strong alliance and bear children. But when she's sent to foster with a nearby clan, Grace falls for a clever and open-minded second son--a man she cannot have. Married off against her will to a brutal warrior, Grace performs her duty, all the while gathering followers loyal to her, and consolidating her husband's power, only to be ousted from his lands. But this betrayal offers Grace the opportunity to return to sea, finally leading clan O'Malley's mighty fleet. Just as she finds true independence, Queen Elizabeth's incursions into Ireland grow bolder and Grace must fight to defend her land, her ships, and the people she loves most against the cruel and power-hungry English deputies, who will stop at nothing to check her influence. Keenly observed and fiercely written, Ariel Lawhon's new action-packed novel channels the untamed beauty and harsh realities of sixteenth-century Ireland, as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine who rightly became the Pirate Queen of Ireland.
|
|
|
|
Exit Party
by Emily St John Mandel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman--a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State--searches for answers. The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. . . . Exit Party is the kind of novel you'll be desperate to talk about. --Ron Charles Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party's host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
|
|
|
|
Off the Reservation
by Stephen Graham Jones
A ragtag group of activists sets out to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy taken to the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in author Stephen Graham Jones's return to the Blackfeet reservation of his award-winning New York Times bestsellers The Only Good Indians and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Instant USA TODAY Bestseller Five years have passed since the massacre on the Blackfeet reservation in Stephen Graham Jones's breakout bestseller The Only Good Indians. Nathan Yellow Tail, one of the survivors of the revenge murders, finds himself in the hospital after a terrible accident that should've killed him and that nearly killed his best friend, Sebby, who is hanging on to life in a room a few doors down. Nate's life is out of balance, so when he is given the chance to reset his life, and maybe save Sebby in the process, Nate steps up, again. This time it's into a camper van that is almost as run down as his broken body, filled with three older Blackfeet, to find the bones of the lone Blackfeet boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School--where many Indigenous children were abused--and repatriate this boy home. The problem is, when they get the bones, something terrible has escaped with them. By turns terrifying and deeply moving, Off the Reservation is a haunting American Indian novel of survival, reckoning, and redemption, shining light on the dark corners of this country's history while also showing the desperate choices people make when they're put up against a wall.
|
|
|
|
Whale Harbor: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel
by Mary Beth Keane
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK - NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, a sweeping multigenerational saga inspired by the author's family history, following eleven brothers as they are set on different paths between Ireland, England, Montana, and New York. 1960s, Ireland. In the wake of tragedy, a father makes choices for his eleven grieving sons. The older brothers will emigrate to England for work, while the younger ones will stay behind. The second eldest, Macdara, is offered a job on a Montana cattle ranch and sets off. His spirited younger brother Rian begs to come along and Mac promises to bring Rian to America as soon as he's old enough. But then one day Mac gets a call that Rian has gone missing. His disappearance will haunt Mac and his family across decades. Spanning lifetimes and continents, Whale Harbor is tender, immersive, and exquisitely written (Florence Knapp, author of The Names) with award-winning author Mary Beth Keane's signature wit, eloquence, and attention to the emotional resonance of family, brotherhood, and the choices that echo across generations.
|
|
|
|
Savage Lake
by Nick Medina
A mother and son travel to a dilapidated cabin in the woods that haunts more than just her memories in this new unnerving horror from the author of The Whistler and Sisters of the Lost Nation. Nell Marin swore she would never return to the place where part of her died. The passing of her estranged father, however, leaves her with no choice but to take her teenage son, Oscar, back to the run-down family cabin on Torchlight Lake, where horrific memories linger. The two will fix the place up, sell it, and ensure Nell never has to return to that dreaded lake again. But when the roads--which pass through Native land--are barricaded by the local Tribe, the quick trip turns into weeks. Oscar, a horror movie buff, knows this is exactly how it starts. As the long summer days drag on, unsettling things begin to occur: screams ring out over the water and a mysterious figure watches the cabin from the trees at night. Most disturbing of all, his mother is becoming less and less herself. As the strange events lead Oscar to uncover the secrets Nell has shielded him from, he is forced to confront a reality that is far more frightening than movie monsters. He must uncover answers to the questions that stole so much from his mother...before the horror that traumatized Nell drags him under as well.
|
|
|
|
There Used to Be People Here
by Kennedy Cole
In 1970s Mississippi, a Black detective and his temporary partner are assigned to a case that shifts from murder to paranormal conspiracy with life-altering repercussions. Wenton, Mississippi: A man enters the bathroom of a local gay bar and doesn't come back out. Instead he's found cold, on the floor, and facing the wall. And no one seems to know how this happened. Samuel Barkley is Wenton's only Black detective. Assigned to the case, Samuel's one goal is to keep his head down with eyes on moving up in the police ranks. But it's not easy with Harvey, a new, temporary partner who Samuel can't seem to like...or hate. Nor with the cold, questioning eyes and fake smiles from those in town. Persistent. Judging. Wrong. Samuel is reaching his breaking point. As his investigation leads him to a curious plane crash cover-up, Samuel's placid existence is turned on its head. Because what crashed in Wenton isn't a plane. There are others here. They like it here. And if Samuel can't stop them, they will find a way to stay. With shades of The X-Files and S. A. Cosby, There Used to Be People Here deftly explores race, queerness, and existing as other in a society that demonizes everything different.
|
|
|
|
Winter Song
by Rebeca Lee Morales
For fans of Elizabeth Strout and Kent Haruf: a novel that follows the intertwined lives of a small-town Midwestern police chief and a young man recently released from prison, each in search of justiceIt's 1986, deep winter in Minnesota's hinterland: remote Middle America of demolition derbies and downtown diners, a place so frozen and secluded that the world beyond its borders barely registers.Here, Gordon Trent, a police chief facing mandatory retirement, squares off with Byron Lugo, just released from Stillwater prison for vehicular homicide. Byron has never admitted guilt and still proclaims his innocence to anyone who will listen: the police chief, townspeople suspicious of the felon now in their midst, the motley group of friends who will stand by him no matter what did or didn't happen that fateful night.Byron's headlong quest to clear his name and resume the life he lost when he was convicted will force the chief into a painful reassessment of his own judgment, loyalty, and legacy as a police officer.Winter Song is a moving and pitch-perfect examination of love, community, identity, and the redress of past wrongs in working-class America--and marks the introduction of a brilliant new literary voice.
|
|
|
Attendees titles recommended:
|
|
|
|
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
by Robert Kolker
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where [they had twelve chidlren] ... In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins, ... and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: ... by the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after the other, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institutes of Mental Health?--
|
|
|
|
The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia
by Robert Kolker
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia. Robert Kolker's new book is at once a tragedy, a mystery and a testament to a family's love. --NPR With his breathtaking chronicle of a family with a rare form of dementia, Robert Kolker claims his title as the Ann Patchett of nonfiction family dramas. --BookPage (starred review) In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn't recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker's heartbreaking follow-up to his beloved Hidden Valley Road. This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking--shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility--and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish--and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too. The Vanishing Family unfolds with dramatic intensity as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this family's rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia--including the scourge of Alzheimer's disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family's fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.
|
|
|
|
In Wonderland
by Joyce Maynard
In one golden summer, Frances trades her working-class world for an elite Maine lakeside estate--where privilege and betrayal turn into a deadly game. Frances believes she's found a ticket to paradise when a wealthy couple hires her for the summer as their mother's helper at their lakefront summer home in Maine. The vintage wooden boats, the days at the country club, a shiny new bicycle, and a tennis racquet--suddenly Frances has everything her modest childhood lacked. Best of all, she gets to spend the summer with Forrest Emerson, her father's charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood when he married into money. But below the glittering surface of Lake Catherine, nothing is what it seems. When Forrest's wife, Regina, pulls Frances into her private obsession, the girl finds herself witness to the intimate secrets of adult lives. As the summer heat builds, so do the tensions within Wonderland's walls. By Labor Day, a death will shatter the seemingly perfect family, leaving Frances to question everything she thought she knew about privilege, power, and the price of belonging.(c) 2026 by Joyce Maynard, all rights reserved.
|
|
|
|
Land
by Maggie O'Farrell
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds, and skies. --Daniel Mason, author of North Woods On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tom s and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tom s, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tom s is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tom s, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home? Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.
|
|
|
|
Mad Mabel
by Sally Hepworth
From New York Times bestselling author Sally Hepworth comes a twisty tale of justice, redemption, and one irrepressible woman who's not done breaking the rules just yet. Meet Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick: eighty-one years old, gloriously grumpy, fiercely independent, and never without a hot cup of tea--or a cutting remark. She minds her own business in her quiet Melbourne suburb, until a neighbor turns up dead and the whispers start flying. Because Elsie hasn't always been Elsie. Once upon a headline, she was Mad Mabel Waller--Australia's youngest convicted murderer. But was she really mad, or just misunderstood? Either way, she's kept her secret buried for decades. Enter seven-year-old Persephone, a relentless little chatterbox who has just moved in across the road (armed with stickers, questions, and no sense of personal boundaries); Joan, who appears to have it in for Elsie; and a healthy dose of public interest--the cops are sniffing around, and the media is circling like seagulls at a picnic. So Mabel does what she's always done best--she takes matters into her own hands. Is she a cantankerous old lady with a shady past? A cold-blooded killer with arthritis? Or just someone who's finally ready to tell her side of the story? Sharp, surprising, and wickedly funny, this is the unforgettable story of a woman who's spent a lifetime being underestimated--and is about to prove everyone wrong. Again.
|
|
|
|
Dolly All the Time: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Annabel Monaghan
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A hardworking single mom returns to her seaside hometown and stumbles into a fake dating situationship with a wealthy, workaholic scion, from the New York Times bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script. A luminous story of love, duty, and the tension between the two, Dolly All the Time is less like a novel and more like a place I never wanted to leave. This might be my new favorite --Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author If they start by pretending, can they end with something real? Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn't solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she comes across Stewart Whitfield--annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family--with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it's in her nature to help. But Stewart's proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as public dinners and high-society benefits turn into sunset boat rides and kisses that hit her bloodstream like a ghost pepper, Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful. She's never relied on anyone besides herself--can she really start now? This book is like a spicy margarita...sweet and a little salty, tart and hot...I have fallen in love with Dolly and with funny, fizzing Annabel Monaghan --Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich
|
|
|
|
The Ladies Hall: A Novel of Three Women Who Refused to Be Silenced
by Vanessa Miller
Based on the real lives of Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida Gibbs Hunt, The Ladies Hall is a mirror into times of great change--where progress and new possibilities are met with violence and resistance . . . but hope always rises. And it rises still.
|
|
|
|
How to Read a Book
by Monica Wood
The perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours....A reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world. --New York Times Book ReviewA beautiful, big-hearted treasure of a novel. --Lily KingNational Bestseller * From the award-winning author of The One-in-a-Million Boy comes a heartfelt, uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories. Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle...Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn't yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland--Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman--their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living. A deeply humane and touching novel; highly recommended for book clubs and fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures. -- Booklist
|
|
|
|
Pictures of You
by Emma Grey
A National Bestseller A PEOPLE Magazine's Best Book of November 2024 A November 2024 Book of the Month Selection What would you do if you could start over? Imagine having a second chance with the one you never forgot. From the author of the global breakout bestseller The Last Love Note comes the story of a young woman struggling to piece her life back together in the wake of a tragic accident, and the man who gives up everything to help her. Evie Hudson should be grieving her dead husband, but since the car crash that claimed his life and landed her in the hospital, she can't remember him at all. The only person who can help her piece her past together is her high-school best friend Drew Kennedy. When snippets of her memory start falling into place, Evie wonders exactly how she ended up in a life that couldn't be further from the one she dreamed of. This time around, she's seeing all the things she missed--and the life she gets to choose . . . again.
|
|
|
|
Hollow Bones
by Jodi Picoult
#1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER - From the acclaimed author of By Any Other Name comes a riveting novel about the risks we take to protect the ones we love in a world where crisis is always just around the corner. On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn't have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters. Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse--a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis--have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew. Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
|
|
|
|
Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Caro Claire Burke
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A GMA BOOK CLUB PICK - A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) - A traditional American woman, a tradwife influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855--where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel. A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear...will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page.--Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie's followers--all 8 million of them--don't know won't hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They're sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn't simply living the good life, she's living the ideal--and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn't hers. Her home, her husband, her children--they're all familiar, but something's off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she's expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.
|
|
|
|
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1
by Beth Brower
I've arrived in London without incident. There are few triumphs in my recent life, but I count this as one. My existence of the last three years has been nothing but incident. The Year is 1883 and Emma M. Lion has returned to her London neighborhood of St. Crispian's. But Emma's plans for a charmed and studious life are sabotaged by her eccentric Cousin Archibald, her formidable Aunt Eugenia, and the slightly odd denizens of St. Crispian's. Emma M. Lion offers up her Unselected Journals, however self-incriminating they may be. Armed with wit and a sideways amusement, Emma documents the curious realities of her life at Lapis Lazuli House. Readers have compared Beth Brower's writing to Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, and L. M. Montgomery.
|
|
|
|
Mestra: A Short Story
by Madeline Miller
A brilliant new short story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Madeline Miller--her first new work of fiction since the publication of Circe--that vibrantly reimagines the powerful and forgotten myth of Mestra.A cursed father, a gifted daughter Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.Her father, on the other hand, is cursed. As punishment for disrespecting the goddess Demeter, he is in possession of an unnatural, insatiable hunger. Devoted Mestra suggests using her new gift to help her father. But if his hunger is bottomless, how much will he take from her? Soon she must decide: Will she keep helping her father survive or finally break free?A jewel-like tale of human fallibility, and her first new work of fiction since the publication of Circe, Mestra confirms Madeline Miller as our high priestess of mythology.
|
|
|
|
The Witches of Cambridge (a Read with Jenna Pick)
by Alice Hoffman
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK The brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe known as the Lilith Society. Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees. The Puritans blamed Eve for the sins of the world. That was when we began to meet in the name of Lilith, Adam's first wife--banished for refusing to do as she was told. We Fly Together... By the 1950s, Cambridge, Massachusetts feels far removed from the legendary witch trials that marked its early days as a colony. Ava, a bright young woman from a small town in Maine, arrives for her first year at Radcliffe College. There, she meets Lauren, her opposite in every way--the wild and brazen daughter of a wealthy and well-established Cambridge family. But the two have more in common than they think. Both are recruited by the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times. As they learn more about their legacy, Ava and Lauren form a close bond that is put to the test as they learn to navigate their new power, friendship, and love. While Radcliffe seems like a safe haven, the shadow of McCarthyism looms large, an ever-present threat to the flourishing creative and intellectual life in Cambridge. And as girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realize the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|