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Fiction A to Z February 2026 |
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| Departure(s) by Julian BarnesStarring a 70-something Booker Prize winner with a fatal illness, Departure(s) is the planned final novel by author Julian Barnes, who shares a name and many similarities with his main character. Exploring art, life, death, and memory while covering the fictional Julian's two matchmaking attempts for the same couple -- once in college and once decades later -- this short but powerful tale is candid and witty. Read-alikes: Paul Auster's Baumgartner; Joshua Ferris' A Calling for Charlie Barnes.
*If you are interested in requesting this book, please visit your library and ask for assistance! |
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Behind These Four Walls
by Yasmin Angoe
From the author of Not What She Seems, Yasmin Angoe's thriller explores revenge, morality, corruption, and wealth as a woman sets out to uncover the truth behind her friend's disappearance and expose the powerful family behind it.Isla Thorne had a rough start in life. Orphaned young, she spent her formative years in a group home where she met her best friend, Eden Galloway. At sixteen, they decide to run away to LA...but Eden never makes it.It's been ten years since Eden vanished. And Isla's determined to find her.She begins at the last place Eden visited: the Corrigan mansion in Virginia. Eden claimed to have unfinished business there. Posing as an aspiring journalist, Isla insinuates herself into the wealthy family's home and begins searching for the truth.The more she digs, the more Isla discovers Eden isn't who she thought she was. Was she even a victim, or did Eden plan this all along? Desperate for answers and to keep her identity hidden, Isla finds an ally in one of the Corrigan sons. But as she wades deeper into this power-hungry family's secrets and lies, she finds herself in the crosshairs of a bloodline that's more lethal than loyal.
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Summer Fridays
by Suzanne Rindell
Summer of 1999. Twenty-something Sawyer is balancing a new city, her suddenly-distant fiancâe, her assistant job in publishing, and making a mark with her own writing. When she meets Nick, boyfriend to her fiancââe's all-too-close female colleague--seriously, since when is karaoke part of staying late to work on a case?--Sawyer's lonely summer in New York takes an unexpected turn. At first she finds Nick salty and smug, and he finds Sawyer stuck in her own head. When Nick seeks out Sawyer online to apologize for said saltiness and smugness-- the early days of AOL and instant messenger banter ensue--a friendship develops. As their relationship evolves, and Sawyer finds herself increasingly alone in her hot apartment, she and Nick begin an unofficial ritual: exploring New York City every 'Summer Friday'--
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Wreck
by Catherine Newman
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK - INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Wreck is a delight. What an absolute joy to be reunited with Rocky and her family, the characters we all fell in love with in Sandwich. Newman's prose is laugh-out-loud funny. It's also profound. I couldn't stop reading, even though I didn't want it to end.--J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The CliffsWreck is the kind of book that pulls up a chair, pours the wine, and dives deep--equal parts hilarious, sharp, and achingly sincere. I didn't just read it--I felt known by it. A luminous, laugh-out-loud triumph.--Alison Espach, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding PeopleThe acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn't go as planned.If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry--and relate.)Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky's widowed father, has moved in.It all couldn't be more ridiculously normal . . . until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them--and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won't affect them at all.With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people--no matter how much you love them--are not always exactly who you want them to be.
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Flashlight
by Susan Choi
Flashlight follows American Louisa Kang and her family across locations and years, but focuses on the night young Louisa and her ethnically Korean father walk on a beach in Japan. Later, she washes ashore, amnesiac and clinging to life, but her dad can't be found. Covering family relationships and geopolitics, this slow burn novel is "never sentimental, never predictable" (Kirkus Reviews). Try this next: Kyung-Sook Shin's I Went to See My Father.
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Cape Fever
by Nadia Davids
It's a stunner. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner. I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read. The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes--a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both. Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.
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| The Award by Matthew PearlIn Cambridge, Massachusetts, aspiring author David Trent and his girlfriend rent the upper floor in a house belonging to well-known writer Silas Hale. But while David dreams of mentorship, he gets the cold shoulder. That is, until he wins an award and Silas invites him to a literary party, which leads to murder and more in this witty send-up of the writing life. Read-alikes: Daniel Aleman's I Might Be in Trouble; R.F. Kuang's Yellowface.
*If you are interested in requesting this book, please visit your library and ask for assistance! |
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The Rainfall Market
by You Yeong-Gwang
On the outskirts of Rainbow Town, there is an old, abandoned house. They say that if you send a letter detailing your misfortunes there, you could receive a ticket. If you bring this ticket to the house on the first day of the rainy season, you'll be granted entrance into the mysterious Rainfall Market--where you can choose to completely change your life. No one is more surprised than Serin when she receives a ticket. Lonely and with no real prospects for a future, Serin ventures to the market, determined to create a better life for herself. There she meets a magical cat companion named Issha and they search through bookstores, perfumeries, and magical realms while Serin tries to determine what her perfect life will look like--
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A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
by Mariana Enriquez
WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST - A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by Buenos Aires's sorceress of horror (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times) Entertaining, political and exquisitely gruesome, these stories summon terror against the backdrop of everyday horrors. . . . A queen of horror delivers more delightfully twisted stories.--Los Angeles Times As vivid and essential as Kafka's tales.--Minneapolis Star-Tribune NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - IGNYTE AWARD FINALIST - LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE TELEGRAPH, ELECTRIC LIT, PASTE, LATINA MEDIA On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed--all those birds were once women. Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women--these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists. Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez's stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez's unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her the most exciting discovery I've made in fiction for some time.
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Vigil
by George Saunders
An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next Not for the first time, Jill Doll Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man's room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone's postdeath future. With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we've come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time--the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress--and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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