August 19 Book Releases

The final book in the Lakefront Billionaires series by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Asher.

LORENZO
Five months. Two people “in love”. One fake relationship with an expiration date.
Sounds simple enough.
The problem is, Lily Muñoz and I have history.
So, when she volunteers to date me so I can improve my public image, I should say no.
Our past complicates everything, but since my future depends on her, I agree to her plan.
Faking it for the public is expected, but falling in love in private?
That isn’t part of our arrangement.

LILY
Using a dating app sounded like a great idea, up until I discovered Lorenzo Vittori was my match.
My sister’s boyfriend hates him. My mom is wary of him.
And me? I’ve spent the last year avoiding him.
But when my business is threatened, I’m forced into teaming up with Lorenzo to save it.
All I need to do is help him win the mayoral election, and he promises to protect my shop.
It doesn’t take me long to learn that I’m not cut out for fake relationships, but Lorenzo?
He isn’t capable of a real one.

DELUXE EDITION—a gorgeous hardcover edition featuring bright green sprayed edges, a foil stamp on the casing, and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind

Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.

Not to die, but to save—seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.

But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.

Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.

Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

The brokenhearted billionaire visits Cozy Creek to escape. I never expected to become his fake girlfriend or fall madly in love…but here we are.

My first impression of Zane Alexander isn’t great. The second is worse, but when he forces me to hang out with him, I can’t say no. We quickly go from familiar strangers to flirty friends.

When my ex returns, Zane flawlessly pretends to be my boyfriend to protect me. He’s so damn good at it, I almost believe it. Afterward, we devise a plan to fake date through the holidays. I become his plus one and he becomes mine.

I don’t know when our relationship moves from pretending to passionate, but I catch feelings. As our exes desperately crawl back into our lives like zombies, I realize there is only one man for me, and (f)all I want is him.

FALL I WANT is a spicy autumn-inspired small-town romantic comedy with a billionaire who falls first and harder. Grab a pumpkin spice latte, a warm fuzzy blanket, and make your way down to Cozy Creek. Each book in the series is a complete stand alone with a happily ever after.

When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust… from bestselling author Isabel Cañas.

In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something cold lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong.

Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family’s legacy of greed. Alba, as his cousin’s betrothed, is none of his business. Which is of course why he can’t help but notice her every time she enters a room or the growing tension between them… and why he notices her deteriorate when the demon’s thirst for blood grows stronger.

The perfect summer read, full of charm and heart, written in the vein of The Thursday Murder Club or Only Murders in the Building but with a southern California twist.

Mrs. B, the landlady of The Marigold Cottages is a stubborn idealist who only rents to people she cares about: Sophie, an anxious young playwright with a dark past; Hamilton, an agoraphobe who likes to overshare; Ocean, a queer sculptor raising two kids alone; the perfectionist Lily-Ann; and Nicholas, a finance bro who’s hiding secrets.

The tenants live contentedly in their doll-house bungalows in Santa Barbara, just minutes from the beach, until their peace is shattered when Anthony, a quiet, hulking, but potentially violent ex-con moves in. Three weeks later, a dead body is discovered on the streets of the peaceful neighborhood. Anthony is arrested, and the tenants heave sighs of relief. Until Mrs. B, convinced that he’s innocent, marches down to the police station and confesses to the crime herself. The tenants band together and form “The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective” to save their beloved landlady. As clues are unearthed and secrets are revealed, the community of misfits only grows more tight-knit…until a second body is found. Full of eccentricity, humor, community, The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective will keep you hooked until the last page.

When a body is found the day after Halloween, a small British community must reckon with its past and the dangers lurking in its present in this spine-tingling novel from “not to be missed” (Hayley Scrivener, author of Dirt Creek) author Hannah Richell.

On Halloween, a group of teenage students meet in the woods near Sally in the Wood, a road steeped in local lore and rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl. By the end of the night, one student will be dead.

Rachel, the school guidance counselor, is trying to keep a handle on her increasingly distant teenaged daughter, Ellie, while students and parents panic and mourn. Her ex-husband and detective Ben, dealing with a personal crisis of his own, has concerns about his daughter’s safety as he investigates the death of one of her classmates. Meanwhile, Ellie is keeping secrets from both her parents, including one about where she was that night.

Told from multiple perspectives and with Hannah Richell’s distinct “atmospheric and ever-twisting” (Emylia Hall, author of the Shell House Detective Mysteries) prose, One Dark Night is a white-knuckled and suspenseful thriller about urban legends, privilege, and how the past continues to haunt us.

The final book in the lauded Only a Monster trilogy is here—where the unstoppable love and high stakes of Divine Rivals meets the propulsive thrills of This Savage Song in a last-ditch, breathless race against time.

Joan has failed to stop Eleanor.

Now Eleanor rules over a cruel new timeline where monsters live openly among humans, preying on them and subjugating them.

Nick—once a hero to humans, and Joan’s first love—is tormented by the choice he made to save her over the timeline itself. And Aaron—the ruthless heir to a powerful monster family—now finds himself in a world where monsters have power beyond imagining while his feelings for Joan grow.

Wrenched between love and rivalry, the three of them must negotiate their fractured pasts to survive the new world and restore what was lost. Because only they remember that there was once a better timeline.

But how will they defeat a whole world of monsters with control over time itself?

The sins of a favorite son rock a small Mississippi town in this taut Southern family drama.

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, shepherd of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. Besides the barbershop and radio station he owns, he has an iron hand on every aspect of Dominion, Mississippi, society. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. After a surprising encounter with a stranger, Wonderboy finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined, and his response will send shock waves through the entire community. Told from the point of view of the women who love these two men, Dominion illustrates how we enable the everyday violence and casual sins of the patriarchy.

Dark Matter meets Girl, Interrupted in this spellbinding psychological thriller about a young woman teetering on the edge of reality.

Virginia 1954. A young woman wakes, agitated and confused, on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital. She remembers nothing of her life before that moment, none of the dark things she must’ve seen—and done—that have forged her into such a skilled and cunning fighter. Once she’s been subdued, doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed to Hanover for treatments they hope will quell her increasingly violent delusions.

She’s certain they’re wrong—until disturbing visions begin to invade her reality: of a dystopian future where frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission” and save humankind. Convinced it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one, focuses only on escape… Until there’s a visitor, a man whose loving face—and touch—she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier.

Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her doctors and Paul, and she might save herself. She’s desperate for answers, but she’ll have to harness the darkness inside her to get them, risking her freedom, her mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.

A young woman who wields the unimaginable power of the dragon spirit must decide who to support—and who to love—in this enthralling fantasy that reimagines the legend of Mulan.

The explosive sequel to The Night Ends with Fire!

The war may be over, but Hai Meilin is still paying a heavy toll. In spite of securing victory for the kingdom of Anlai, she is imprisoned upon her return. Her crime? Wielding a sword as a woman.

In the palace, Meilin is an outcast and a social pariah. But beyond the imperial walls, the legend of the woman warrior has taken on a life of its own. To the east, a new rebel leader needs Meilin to helm his people’s revolution. In the south, a former enemy prince, now a prisoner of war, seeks Meilin’s aid in restoring balance to the Three Kingdoms. And back home in Anlai, Liu Sky, Meilin’s commander and first love, requires Meilin by his side in his bid for the throne.

Pulled in all directions by those who seek to use her for their own ends, Meilin vows that this time, she will not be so quick to trust. Yet there is one she cannot help but listen to—for he dwells within her.

Beyond any human machinations, the sea dragon Qinglong has his own plans for the spirit realm. During the last war, Meilin wielded his power to cheat death and attain victory for Anlai; now the dragon has come to collect his dues. Meilin’s mother warned her long The spirits demand blood. And Qinglong is ravenous.

An enchantingly warm and funny novel about family, love lost and found, discovering who you are, and how difficult it is to slay a vampire from the beloved national bestselling author of the TikTok sensation In the Company of Witches.

Cassie Beckett’s life is anything but magical. With a wild younger sister, three unruly kids, and an absent husband, she’s really not looking forward to the witching month of October. At least the gorgeous, foggy Prince Edward Island is always quiet.

That is, until the vampires arrive.

As the creatures sink their teeth into Cassie’s tenuous grip on normalcy, she’s forced to come face-to-face with long–disregarded family secrets. The legacy gifts her with power, but also a lofty rid the island of vampires, or let them win. (Both options suck, in more ways than one.)

Armed with her family, newfound friends, and a baby in a spectacularly garlicky onesie, Cassie must learn what it is to be a witch and how to fight for what she loves before time runs out. Because on Halloween night, the stakes will be higher than ever before…and it’s up to Cassie to finish what the witches that came generations before her started.

On a train, there are only so many places to hide…

Crime fiction author Joe Penvale has won the most brutal battle of his life. Now that he has finished his intense medical treatment, he and his twin sister, Meredith, are boarding the glorious Orient Express in Paris, hoping for some much-needed rest and rejuvenation. Meredith also hopes that the literary ghosts on the train will nudge Joe’s muse awake, and he’ll be inspired to write again. And he is; after their first evening spent getting to know some of their fellow travelers, Joe pulls out his laptop and opens a new document. Seems like this trip is just what the doctor ordered…

And then some. The next morning, Joe and Meredith are shocked to witness that the cabin next door has become a crime scene, bathed in blood but with no body in sight. The pair soon find themselves caught up in an Agatha Christie-esque murder investigation. Without any help from the authorities, and with the victim still not found, Joe and Meredith are asked to join a group of fellow passengers with law enforcement backgrounds to look into the mysterious disappearance of the man in Cabin16G. But when the steward guarding the crime scene is murdered, it marks the beginning of a killing spree which leaves five found dead—and one still missing. Now Joe and Meredith must fight once again to preserve their newfound future and to catch a cunning killer before they reach the end of the line.

USA Today bestselling author Sulari Gentill brings readers on a heart-pounding ride filled with intrigue, suspense, and literary charm in Five Found Dead, perfect for fans of twisty mysteries and books about books. 

An original short story anthology based on master storyteller Stephen King’s #1 New York Times bestselling classic The Stand!

Since its initial publication in 1978, The Stand has been considered Stephen King’s seminal masterpiece of apocalyptic fiction, with millions of copies sold and adapted twice for television. Although there are other extraordinary works exploring the unraveling of human society, none have been as influential as this iconic novel—generations of writers have been impacted by its dark yet ultimately hopeful vision of the end and new beginning of civilization, and its stunning array of characters.

Now for the first time, Stephen King has fully authorized a return to the harrowing world of The Stand through this original short story anthology as presented by award-winning authors and editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene. Bringing together some of today’s greatest and most visionary writers, The End of the World As We Know It features unforgettable, all-new stories set during and after (and some perhaps long after) the events of The Stand—brilliant, terrifying, and painfully human tales that will resonate with readers everywhere as an essential companion to the classic, bestselling novel.

Featuring an introduction by Stephen King, a foreword by Christopher Golden, and an afterword by Brian Keene. Contributors include Wayne Brady and Maurice Broaddus, Poppy Z. Brite, Somer Canon, C. Robert Cargill, Nat Cassidy, V. Castro, Richard Chizmar, S. A. Cosby, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, Meg Gardiner, Gabino Iglesias, Jonathan Janz, Alma Katsu, Caroline Kepnes, Michael Koryta, Sarah Langan, Joe R. Lansdale, Tim Lebbon, Josh Malerman, Ronald Malfi, Usman T. Malik, Premee Mohamed, Cynthia Pelayo, Hailey Piper, David J. Schow, Alex Segura, Bryan Smith, Paul Tremblay, Catherynne M. Valente, Bev Vincent, Catriona Ward, Chuck Wendig, Wrath James White, and Rio Youers.

Sparks will fly, even without firewood…When city-girl Harper arrives in the Caledonian Forest in Scotland, her hopes for her holiday are quickly dashed. She’d planned a whimsical, autumnal writing retreat, to finish her novel. But ghosted by her scammer rental host, she discovers that the cosy log cabin she’d booked for her solo getaway does not actually exist. Miles away from any hotel, she wanders through the woods until she finds the hot local woodcutter Fraser.

The last thing Fraser needs right now is a pretty girl distracting him, but he can’t leave Harper stranded. So he reluctantly allows Harper to stay in his tiny lumberjack’s cabin for the night. He will sleep at his house outside the forest, then return tomorrow to turf Harper out so he can get back to his strenuous task of splitting logs for the locals’ firewood.

But once Harper sees Fraser’s axe swing, she is determined to cut through his gruff exterior. She has a feeling this man might be the perfect cure for her writer’s block.

Fraser can’t help inviting Harper to extend her one-night stay to two, then three, then four. And with every tree he fells, he’s starting to wonder if he’s falling harder.

This spicy autumnal romance features a HEA ending with BookTok’s hottest lumberjack love interest.

18+ content.



– opposites attract

– forced proximity

– rural setting

Most visitors to Skerry Island see only its lush greenery, picturesque cemetery, and quaint downtown. Yet generations of local women know that on Skerry, their benevolent witchcraft is at its most powerful.
  
Beatrice Barnard doesn’t believe in magic. She definitely doesn’t believe the predictions of the celebrity psychic who claims that she will experience seven miracles and soon after she will die. When she discovers her husband is cheating on her, Bea flees to Skerry Island, off the Pacific Northwest coast, in desperate need of solitude—taking her husband’s birthday vacation by herself. Immediately upon arrival, she finds her life on the line as a rogue woodchopper blade almost kills her. Her survival feels like a miracle.

And then things get more miraculous when she discovers her twin sister, Cordelia, whom she never knew about, and her mother Astrid, who supposedly died when Beatrice was two years old. Astrid and Cordelia reveal that Beatrice (given name Beatrix) is an immensely powerful witch who can commune with the dead, like all the local Holland family witches. When their twin magic is joined, it shines like a beacon to the Velamen family, whose malevolent spirits are locked in an age-old struggle for magical dominance over the Hollands.

Beatrice doesn’t know what to believe, but she begins to fear that the seven predicted miracles may occur, and that her imminent death will rip her away from her rediscovered family. Beatrice resolves to learn everything she can about her own power, in the hope of saving herself. But when her niece, Minna, goes missing, Bea’s own life suddenly seems much less important. Beatrice must join her mother and her sister to save Minna even if she dies in the process.

An historical novel inspired by the experiences of the author’s own family after the Holocaust, a sweeping saga about survival, loss, love, and the reverberating effects of war

Vienna,1946: Chana Rosensweig has endured the horrors of war to find herself, her mother, and younger brother finally free in Vienna. But freedom doesn’t look like they imagined it would, as they struggle to make a living and stay safe.

Despite the danger, Chana sneaks out most nights to return to the hotel kitchen where she works as a dishwasher, using the quiet nighttime hours to bake her late father’s recipes. As she tries to balance her love of baking against her family’s need for security, Chana finds herself caught in a dangerous love triangle, torn between the black-market dealer who has offered marriage and protection, and the apprentice baker who shares her passions.

The Lost Baker of Vienna affirms the unbreakable bonds of family, while shining a light on the courageous spirit of WWII refugees as they battle to survive the overwhelming hardships of a world torn apart.

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders’s own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic–with very unexpected results–in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training–she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she’s also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie’s mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn’t know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it’s up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

A terrifying new novel from bestselling #HorrorBookTok sensation Ania Ahlborn—the acclaimed author of the modern classic Brother.

Hailed as a writer of “some of the most promising horror I’ve encountered in years” (Seanan McGuire, author of the Ghost Roads series), Ania Ahlborn delivers a novel that pushes the boundaries of horror into a new realm.

Isla Hansen, a mother reeling from a devastating loss, is beside herself when a mysteriously orphaned child appears on the outskirts of the Hansens’ secluded Colorado property. Although strange and unexplainable, the child’s presence breathes new life into Isla. But as the child settles in, Isla’s husband, Luke, and their five children notice peculiarities that hint at something far beyond the ordinary—anomalies that challenge the very fabric of reality itself. The tension within the Hansen household grows, and with it, the sense that there is something very wrong with the new kid in the house.

The Unseen is a haunting tale that walks the line between the familiar and the unknown, drawing us into a chilling narrative where reality itself feels just out of reach.

From bestselling author Erika Robuck comes the perilous and awe-inspiring true story of award-winning photojournalist Dickey Chapelle as she risks everything to show the American people the price of war through the lens of her camera.

Manhattan, 1954.

Since her arrest for disobeying orders and going ashore at Iwo Jima almost a decade earlier, combat correspondent Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle has been unmoored. Her military accreditation revoked, her marriage failing, and her savings dwindling, Dickey jumps at the next opportunity. In the aftermath of a an assignment gone wrong, a flame is lit deep inside Dickey—to survive in order to be the world’s witness to war from the front lines.

Never content to report on battles unless her own boots are on the ground, Dickey and her camera journey with American and international soldiers from frozen wastelands to raging seas to luscious jungles, revealing one woman’s extraordinary courage and tenacity in the face of discrimination and danger. And it’s along the way, in Dickey’s desire to save the world, she realizes she might also be saving herself.

At a time when a woman’s heroic spirit often gave way to homeland reality, Dickey blazed a trail for the revolutionary hearts inside us all.

Emmy Award-winning reporter Christina Estes uses her twenty-year career for inspiration for her mysteries. In The Story That Wouldn’t Die, Jolene Garcia refuses to stop investigating, but someone is determined to kill the story—and maybe her—for good.

Phoenix, Arizona TV reporter Jolene Garcia is fresh off winning her first Emmy and committed to covering stories that matter to her community. But Jolene’s managers want stories that grab immediate attention and generate clicks, not ones that take time to develop.

When a beloved small business owner dies in a car crash, Jolene isn’t convinced it was an accident. He’d been raising questions about who keeps getting lucrative deals at city hall—questions that powerful people don’t want answered. The deeper Jolene digs, the more suspicious things she uncovers.

Exposing greed, ambition, and deception could become the biggest story of Jolene’s career. Her bosses tell her to drop it. But there’s a story here, and Jolene’s going to find it.

Sometimes, looking at him was like looking in a fun-house mirror.

Zoe’s life has gone off the rails.

When she left Seattle to go to college in New York, she was determined to start fresh, to figure out what being a lesbian meant to her, experiment with clothes and presentation away from home for the first time.

Instead, she lost touch with her freshman orientation friend group, skipped classes, and failed completely at being the studious premed student her parents wanted her to be.

But the biggest derailment of all? Her newly minted ex-boyfriend—and the fact that she had a boyfriend to begin with. When she met Alden, he made her feel wanted, he made her feel free. He made her feel . . . like she could be like him, which was exciting and confusing all at once.

So, Zoe decides a second fresh start is in order: she’s going to take a cross-country train from New York to Seattle for fall break. There, no one will know who she is, and she can outrun her mistakes.

Or so she thinks, until she meets Oakley, who’s the opposite of Zoe in so many ways: effortlessly cool and hot, smart, self-assured. But as Zoe and Oakley make their way across the county, Zoe realizes that Oakley’s life has also gone off the rails—and that they might just be able to help each other along before that train finally leaves the station.

Joyful and surprising interconnected stories that celebrate the ways people from all across America are learning to cope and to connect in a changing world—from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg once said that what the world needs now is a good laugh. And that is what she gives us in these thirty warmhearted, often hilarious, always surprising stories about Americans finding clever ways of dealing with the curveballs life throws at us.

We meet Velma from Kansas, a loving great-grandmother who struggles to bridge the generational divide with her great-grandchild in California. Why, for instance, does her great-grandchild sign letters to Velma with “(they/them)”? We cheer for Helen, in Ithaca, New York, who takes an audacious course of action when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. Four men in Bent Fork, Wyoming, make a bold decision after learning that the café where they eat breakfast every day is about to be sold to a stranger from out of town. And observing them all is Special Agent Frawley, an odd visitor from another planet, sent to Earth to figure out what makes human beings tick, only to fall in love with one of them—and with her cat.

With her infectious humor, wild imagination, and her great understanding of Americans—and of the human heart—Fannie Flagg holds up a mirror to all of us and lets us laugh at the sometimes eccentric, sometimes brilliant ways people learn to deal with and, ultimately, prevail over life’s challenges.

On an unexpected road trip, three estranged siblings uncover a startling family secret and larger truths about being Asian American in a post-COVID world—from the author of the “dazzling and devastating” (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author) thriller Complicit.

The Chu siblings haven’t seen each other in years but when they’re told that their ailing mother is scheduled for an operation next month, they agree to visit her together. Then their mother makes an odd before seeing her, they must go on a road trip together to the Grand Canyon.

Thirty years ago, a strange incident had aborted a previous family road trip there. No one’s ever really spoken about it, but during this journey, the middle-aged Chu siblings have no choice but to confront their childhood experience.

Together, Bonnie, Kevin, and Alex travel along Route 66—but as the trip continues, they realize the Great American Road Trip may not be what they expected. Facing their own prejudices and those of others, they somehow learn to bridge the distances between them, the present-day, and their past.

With “powerful and beautiful writing” (Sarah Pearse, New York Times bestselling author), Winnie M Li weaves an emotive and eye-opening exploration of family, race, growing up, and what it means to be American.

Drawing on extensive new archival material, this spellbinding biography reveals how James Baldwin’s relationships shaped his work.

A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of James Baldwin’s most sustaining with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.

This biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the Civil Rights Movement and on Black and queer literary history.

Nicholas Boggs’s rich and subtle narration of Baldwin’s public story and his lucid discussion of his work are underpinned by what he calls “a search for the truth about Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate relationships and how they had shaped his life and art, which in turn has had such an indelible impact on the literary and political landscape of the twentieth century and continues to influence and even offer some measure of hope for the world today. It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that Irealized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.”

Princess Yulana has a few problems. Her late grandfather has died without naming an heir, civil war threatens to tear the Morning Realms apart, a strange waking dreamer sickness is sweeping through the land, and a plague of hungry ghosts roam the steppes. On top of all of that, Kho, her former best friend turned rival, is getting under her skin. A struggle for power divides the north, and the outcome rests on the winner of the Grand Game―a competition that will determine not just the future of her people, but the course of the entire empire.

When the world is out of balance, the Guardians of Dawn are reborn.

As the Guardian of Wind, it is Yuli’s responsibility to bring order to chaos, along with the Guardian of Fire and the Guardian of Wood. But can she restore balance to the Morning Realms when she can’t even win the political games being played at home? The fate of the Morning Realms depends on the Guardians of Dawn, and whether Yuli can manage both the demonic and political chaos at once.

Sometimes the pomegranate doesn’t fall far from the tree…

Asher Anderson is angry―at the world, at himself, at the way his best friend Lucy Wolfe seems determined to tune out this buzzing connection between them. He doesn’t mean to solve all his problems with violence, but maybe he has too much of his father in him. That’s why the faculty at Avernia College hates him, right? Because of the “evil” blood in his veins?

He should know better than to darken the old, ivy-covered university’s door, but it’s practically a law of the universe: wherever Lucy goes, Asher follows. Even if that means entering a twisting labyrinth of secret societies, human sacrifices, and a very personal history soaked in blood.

Lucy is used to being an outcast. She’s even used to Asher being her dark, brooding shadow. What she isn’t used to is him shattering her resolve by taking her up against library bookshelves as she desperately pretends her heart hasn’t always been his. She should know better than to play with fire, but with unexplained deaths and pointed threats ripping apart the university’s fabric, Asher and Lucy soon find themselves at the center of the turmoil…where they’ll have to confront their feelings or die trying.

From USA Today bestselling author Sav R. Miller comes the first in a dazzling spin-off trilogy focusing on the children of the original Monsters & Muses: a dark and twisted contemporary romance inspired by the Greek Furies, set at an exclusive (and dangerous) university.

For readers of Percival Everett and viewers of INDUSTRY, a hotshot hedge fund employee must risk everything to save his job—and his life—in this timely and darkly funny thriller about race, power, and the corrupting influence of the almighty dollar.

Ali “Al” Jafar is a rising star at notorious hedge fund Prism Capital, but fortunes change fast on Wall Street. When his biggest investment goes up in smoke, Al loses $300 million—and his fragile sense of self-worth—in a single afternoon. He’s certain he’ll be fired, but Prism’s obscenely rich and politically connected founder isn’t that merciful. Instead, he gives Al an impossible ultimatum: recover the lost money in three months or become the fall guy for the government’s insider-trading investigation into the firm.

Depressed and desperate, Al turns to high finance’s dark side, where he battles back-stabbing coworkers and cutthroat competitors and digs himself into an even deeper hole. As the clock winds down, and the pressure mounts, Al’s mental health deteriorates. To survive, he’ll have to outfox one of the world’s most powerful men and decide if he values the dearest asset of all: himself.

*A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY LITHUB, THE OC REGISTER, THE MILLIONS AND MORE * NAMED A MUST-READ BOOK BY THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS * THE STRAND’S AUGUST 2025 PICK-OF-THE-MONTH * SELECTED AS AN AUGUST 2025 READ BY VULTURE *

“Delicious, confessional, shocking, and poignant—it’s impossible to put this masterful book down.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa

“Chou is the rare writer who can serve up dark truths with equal helpings of humor and heart.” —Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

From the critically-acclaimed author of Disorientation, a multi-genre story collection that explores the limits and possibilities of storytelling

A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film. A writer’s affair with a married artist tests the line between fact and fiction, self-victimization and the victimization of others.

In these six singular stories and a novella that pivot from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the slipperiness of truth in storytelling. With razor-sharp precision and psychological acuity, she peels back the tales we tell ourselves to peer beneath them: at our treacherous desires, our self-deceptions and our capacity for cruelty, both to ourselves and each other. Expansive and provocative, Where Are You Really From is a visionary achievement.

Betty meets Queenie in a courageous debut novel about a mixed-race Black girl fighting for recognition in a Cherokee Indian community that refuses to accept her ancestry as legitimate.

Ophelia Blue Rivers is the specificity of her circumstance. She’s not just mixed in the American binary sense of being a racial amalgamation of two races; she’s a mix of two of the distinct racial identities that make up the politics of this continent. She’s Black and she is Native American, raised by her grandmother who is a Black descendent of Cherokee freedmen.

A history as rich as it is complicated, Cherokee freedmen were formerly enslaved Africans once owned by Cherokee elites. After Emancipation as well as the Trail of Tears, these former slaves were freed but their belonging to the Cherokee nation remained a point of controversy. Can people who once belonged to another people who were displaced claim birthright to that heritage?

An ageless story of self-discovery set in contemporary 1990s South Carolina, Antonio Michael Downing uses Ophelia’s search for home and family to dramatize what it means to belong to a people when the terms of that belonging come at such a high price.

As she finds her way ghosts return, patterns repeat, myths become reality, and the lush southern landscape flows on like time itself.

In this mesmerizing and profound novel, the arc of a woman’s life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning.
 
Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness? Ruth immerses us in an experience that challenges our most fervent beliefs.

As the reigning Miss Teen Indiana, seventeen-year-old Corie Nielson has looks, charm, and her family’s formalwear boutique’s sponsorship. But her real dream is to use that success to become a horror movie scream queen. Except for one small Corie is struggling with ADHD without even realizing it. After missing yet another pageant commitment puts her on shaky ground with her coach, Corie wonders how she can possibly live up to everyone’s expectations, including her own.

When a regional horror host announces a monster costume contest where first place gets a guest appearance on the show featuring the winner’s choice movie and cash prize, Corie knows she’s found a way to prove what she’s capable of. All she has to do is convince a grumpy special effects makeup artist, Everett Robbins, to partner up and turn her into a pageant-worthy monster. But when the contest distracts her from her pageant obligations, Corie must decide which matters pageants—and her promises to her family—or achieving her horror movie dreams?

A compelling, propulsive YA graphic novel mystery from acclaimed Eisner Award–winning author of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki, and Eisner-nominated illustrator Nicole Goux

At Wilberton Academy, few students are more revered than the members of the elite Wilberton Theatrical Society—a.k.a. the WTS—and no one represents that exclusive club better than Elizabeth Woodward. Breathtakingly beautiful, beloved by all, and a talented thespian, it’s no surprise she’s starring as Juliet in the WTS’s performance of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. But when she’s found dead the morning after opening night, the whole school is thrown into chaos.

Transfer student Abby Kita was one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive, and when local authorities deem the it-girl’s death a suicide, Abby’s not convinced. She’s sure there’s more to Wilburton and the WTS than meets the eye. As she gets tangled in prep school intrigues, Abby quickly realizes that Elizabeth was keeping secrets. Was one of those secrets worth killing for?

Told in comics, letters, diary entries, and news articles, This Place Kills Me is a page-turning whodunnit from award-winning writer Mariko Tamaki and acclaimed illustrator Nicole Goux that will have readers on the edge of their seats and begging for an encore.

My class… His rules.

Hade Harbor was supposed to be my clean slate—a quiet, hockey-obsessed Maine town where I could disappear.

Then I walked into my first lecture and saw him.
The bartender from last night.
The one I should’ve never touched.

Marcus Bailey isn’t just another college jock—he’s an Ice God.
Goalie for the Hellions. Arrogant. Vicious. Addicted to winning.
And now? He’s set his sights on me.

He’s not interested in boundaries. Not when he could break them.
Not when he could break me.
He could have me fired. Exposed. Ruined.
And he knows it.

Every rule I make, he shatters.
Every line I draw, he crosses.
Because Marcus doesn’t want obedience. He wants obsession.
And I’m exactly what he craves.

But my past isn’t finished with me.
It’s dangerous, it’s catching up, and when it hits—I won’t be the only one destroyed.

Meet the Ice Gods, the Hockey players who never play by the rules and own Hade Harbor and everyone in it. Wicked Ends is a standalone reverse age gap, forbidden professor/student dark hockey romance with a wickedly obsessed anti-hero and a black cat heroine with a harrowing past. This contains dark themes that are suitable for adults only.

A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

In this groundbreaking memoir, an acclaimed young poet explores what it means to live in the “in-betweenness” of the deaf and hearing worlds.

I live with the aid of deafness. Like poetry, it has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through. This book charts that art in the hopes of offering a map, a mirror, a small part of a larger story.

At the hospital where Raymond Antrobus was born, a midwife snapped her fingers by his ears and gauged his response. It was his first hearing test, and he passed. For years, Antrobus lived as a deaf person in the hearing world, before he was diagnosed at the age of six.
This “in-betweenness” was a space he would occupy in other areas of his life too. The son of a Jamaican father and white British mother, growing up in East London, it was easy for him to fall through the cracks. Growing up, he was told that he wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t black enough, wasn’t deaf enough.

It was only when he was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven, that he began to discover his missing sounds: the high pitches of whistles, birds, alarms, the “sh, ch, ba, th” sounds in speech—all of it missing.

The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds in Antrobus’ own life, and how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It’s a story of a journey of finding your path when there are no signs to show the way, and a testament to the people—his parents and teachers, artists, writers, and musicians—who helped form his language: spoken, written, and signed. It’s also about becoming a father to a hearing son, and trying to know the ways in which they might understand and misunderstand one another.

Weaving together memoir, criticism, and cultural history, and touching on both the spectrum of the deaf experience and how society fails deaf people, Antrobus finds his own way to reclaim his deafness as a power and a joy, and to reconcile his relationship to words and the world around him.

Near a small college campus, a student is found strangled in an abandoned barn on the outskirts of town. She’s been posed to look like a painting of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the scene taunting the police with messages that they don’t understand. Detective Ian Carter is known as a straitlaced cop, but seeing the girl’s body leaves him shaken and uncertain of where to turn—until a chance meeting with a charmingly awkward literature professor ends with her accidentally seeing, and solving, a clue left by the killer.

Professor Emma Reilly knows that the books she loves might hold the key to unraveling the killer’s crimes now that a second murder has been discovered, with the victim posed as the Lady of Shalott this time. However, when the murderer strikes too close to home and kills a third student, one from Emma’s classes, she realizes that the safety of her insular life might be nothing more than an illusion. She must find the strength to confront a killer who is turning the stories she loves into lurid scenes of death.

Amie Schaumberg has crafted a smart, thrilling and utterly compelling mystery that will have you trying to figure out whodunit right up until the end. 

Kat Simon’s life revolves around stories: the ones she gets paid to chronicle on the radio every weekday morning, those embedded within the treasures she finds at her favorite antique shop, Whimsy and Wu, and the ones in her head that tell her she’s not good enough. But when she thrifts a gorgeous vase that turns out to be an urn occupied by the spirit of former southern socialite, Marjorie Lockwood, Kat gets a bigger story than she bargained for.

Marjorie is bold, confident, and self-assured—everything Kat isn’t. Unable to keep her judgments to herself, Marjorie decides to help Kat understand why her dating life is a disaster. Meanwhile, Kat is determined to help Marjorie figure out what unfinished business is keeping her from going into the light, so they can both finally rest in peace. What ensues is a journey of hilarious hijinks (how does one excuse bringing an urn everywhere they go without raising suspicion?) and profound self discovery. Marjorie & Me is a delightfully funny and heartwarming story about the magical bonds that exist between women and the transcendent power of unconditional love.