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New Fiction BooksAugust 2026 |
Our Librarians have selected 10 of the newest fiction books in the collection. |
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Holloway by Elana K. Arnold Carrying her mother’s ashes on the Paris Metro in late summer 2021, Nora slips into a forest hollow and wakes to find herself in another time, a world as marked by fear, illness and uncertainty as the one she left; as she searches for a way back and a place to fulfill the promise she never made - to lay her mother to rest - she must also decide how to live with grief and brokenness in a changed landscape.
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Glyph by Ali Smith After Petra and her younger sister Patch invent a ghost in response to a disturbing story from the past, their lives diverge until, thirty years on, a phantom horse appears in Petra’s bedroom and drives her to call the sister to whom she no longer speaks; as they face this unsettling presence together, their shared history, imagination and estrangement push them to consider how stories, conflict and care shape family bonds and the wider, fractured world around them.
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An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge In 1950s Liverpool, a worn repertory theater prepares a Christmas production of Peter Pan while sixteen‑year‑old Stella Bradshaw, new to the company and eager for experience, falls for their enigmatic director, misreads his interests and turns instead to the charismatic leading man, and as rehearsals unfold, backstage flirtations, secrets and rivalries build toward a darker, unintended consequence behind the play’s glittering stage.
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Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth After the death of her dog and a medical diagnosis that rules out having children, a woman who teaches children’s literature leases a mare for two days a week, expecting a manageable commitment, but as lessons, bills and time in the stable deepen her attachment, she must reckon with what it means to pour care into an animal she does not fully own and how that consuming devotion reshapes her marriage, work and ideas of family.
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Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous In a Roman apartment block near Piazza Vittorio, a multilingual mix of residents is unsettled when a tenant is killed in the elevator, and as neighbors - from long‑time Italians to recent arrivals - offer their own versions of events in sharply different voices, the overlapping testimonies reveal everyday misunderstandings, prejudice and small acts of solidarity in a diverse city where questions of guilt, belonging and identity are never straightforward.
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Ghalen: A Romance in Black by Walter Mosley As the son of a driven scientist and a gentle, unconventional cook who fall in love across differences in class, education and temperament, Ghalen grows up in a Black family marked by high expectations, tenderness and complexity, and as he navigates friendships, incarceration, neurodivergence and the weight of inherited stories, his coming‑of‑age forces everyone around him to reconsider how love, loyalty and belonging look in a world that rarely sees all of them clearly.
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Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick With thirty looming and her anxiety sabotaging every romantic step, Phoebe Berman - a devoted teacher and romance‑novel fan who has never had sex - draws up a determined “lose my virginity” checklist and suddenly finds herself juggling three possibilities: a charming new colleague, a nostalgic online reconnection and the roommate who has quietly become her safest place, forcing her to face what she really wants from intimacy, love and growing up.
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Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin After emigrating from China to claim a remote Dakota homestead, Saul Keng Hsiu and Mei Lee slowly build a life growing chrysanthemums, raising livestock and then a daughter Mara - until the U.S. Army buys part of their land for a missile silo whose presence seems to awaken odd gifts - Mara’s bond with animals, Mei’s auguries and crops that refuse to fail - and over the following generations, as their family must navigate prosperity, danger and obligation, military power and the natural world remain uneasily entwined.
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The Last Human Bear by Greg Sarris Growing up as a Pomo woman in 1930s California, Mary Hatcher hears whispers that her stepmother has taught her to become a “Human Bear,” a shape‑shifter who can harm those who cross her, and as she moves between Native and white communities, tests love with men who may not fully see her and builds a fiercely independent life, she must decide whether the power and stories surrounding her mark her for violence or for a different kind of healing.
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Riverwork by Lisa Robertson Walking the streets of Paris above the buried Bièvre, Lucy Frost cleans apartments by day and, in stolen hours, pores over the notebooks left by a vanished great‑aunt, taking up her abandoned research into the lost river; as she traces its industrial past through writers and archives and sees her own domestic work reflected in laundresses and other unseen labor, she gradually shapes a quiet literary life that links forgotten waterways, women’s work and the city’s layered histories.
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