What’s New – Fiction
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
“Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend as he navigates the road up ahead. A profoundly moving experience.” —Ann Patchett
“Deeply human…a beautifully quiet and devastating book.” —Sarah Jessica Parker
A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about marriage, middle-age, and a man at a crossroads in his life.
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.
So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.
“The Award begins as a wryly funny satire of thwarted literary ambition, but it quickly evolves into something darker and more disturbing. Matthew Pearl’s addictive and propulsive novel has the twisted nightmare logic of a Patricia Highsmith thriller.”—Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win and Mrs. Fletcher
“A propulsive and gripping novel about the literary world, ambition, deception and murder and the twisted corner where they all intersect. Matthew Pearl grabs you from the first sentence and doesn’t let go.”—Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Night We Lost Him
The author of Save Our Souls and The Dante Club makes his eagerly awaited return to fiction with this irreverent and propulsive novel about a young writer trying to make his way through a cutthroat literary scene that turns deadly.
David Trent is an aspiring novelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to navigate his ambitions in a place that has writers around every corner.
He lives in an apartment above a Very Famous Author named Silas Hale who, beneath his celebrated image, is a bombastic, vindictive monster who refuses to allow his new neighbor even to make eye contact with him.
Until young David wins a prestigious award for his new book.
Suddenly Silas is interested—if intensely spiteful.
But soon, the administrator of the award comes to David with alarming news, forcing the writer into a desperate set of choices.
Fate intervenes—with shocking consequences. . . .
With the wit and psychological wisdom of The Plot and The Winner, The Award is a timely, razor-sharp, and unputdownable novel about writing groups, publishing, ambition, human foibles, and the dangerous things we will do to get ahead.
New York Times Bestseller • Barnes & Noble 2025 Book of the Year • Boston Globe Best Book of the Year • National Indie Bestseller • Top Ten Indie Next Pick • Indigo Heather’s Pick
Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.
While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s.
Mona’s Eyes is a heartfelt, enlightening journey across five centuries of Western art history. With the emotional impact of The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the readability of The Little Paris Bookshop, Thomas Schlesser’s sensational debut novel is at once a moving book about the beauty of life and a deeply touching story about the special bond between a girl and her grandfather.
“Vibrant debut … Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona’s story… Readers of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World will love this.”—Publishers Weekly
Discover all 52 masterpieces inside the fold-out dustjacket.
Fleabag meets Big Swiss in this bold debut about a charismatic misfit who livestreams her life for seven days and nights to raise money to save her comatose sister—a poignant and darkly funny exploration of grief, forgiveness, and redemption.
Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.
USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
A most anticipated book from Harper’s Bazaar, Goodreads, Woman’s World, and more!
For fans of Daisy Jones & the Six and In Five Years—a powerful and transportive new novel about a music executive desperately trying to bring a rock band back from the brink, from bestselling author Ashley Winstead.
The best love stories are the ones you don’t expect.
When record executive Theo meets the Future Saints, they’re bombing at a dive bar in their hometown. Since the tragic death of their manager, the band has been in a downward spiral and Theo has been dispatched to coax a new—and successful—album out of them, or else let them go.
Immediately, Theo is struck by Hannah, the group’s impetuous lead singer, who’s gone off script by debuting a whole new sound, replacing their California pop with gut-wrenching rock. When this new music goes viral, striking an unexpected chord with fans, Theo puts his career on the line to give the Saints one last shot at success with a new tour, new record, and new start.
But Hannah’s grief has larger consequences for the group, and her increasingly destructive antics become a distraction as she and her sister Ginny—her lifelong partner in crime—undermine Theo at every turn. Hannah isn’t ready to move on or prepared for the fame she’s been chasing, and the weight of her problems jeopardize the band, her growing closeness with Theo, and, worst of all, her relationship with her sister—all while the world watches closely. The Future Saints’s big break is here—if only they can survive it.
A novel about sisterhood, friendship, and the ghosts that haunt us, The Future Saints is “a mesmerizing look at grief, love, and the music industry that’s so raw and emotional, you’ll want to play it on repeat” (Laura Hankin, author of One-Star Romance).
In this historical novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz, a girl liberated from a carnival sideshow discovers her mysterious purpose in a moving story about family, sacrifice, and transcendent love.
The human “oddities” in the Museum of the Strange are less wondrous than the gawking rubes had been promised. But Alida is something else. The real thing. Traveling Depression-era America from carnival midways to speakeasies, Alida is resigned to an exploited and lonely life on the road as the museum’s golden ticket. Until she’s rescued by two compassionate strangers.
Franklin and Loretta Fairchild see in Alida a gifted and uncannily well-read girl in need of a loving touch and a family. With the openhearted couple and their three precociously imaginative children, Alida finds it. Yet despite everyone’s overwhelming generosity and acceptance, Alida knows she is still a very different kind of girl. Her dreams bear that out. They’re vivid, unsettling, and threatening. Alida fears that they’re also warnings. And that it’s the Fairchilds who may need rescue from a bad, bad world.
Alida will do anything to help those she now holds nearest and dearest. Empowered with a purpose to vanquish evil, she will not fail her family.
A vibrant debut and powerful meditation on family, motherhood, and the cost of holding on to your dreams, reminiscent of Ann Napolitano.
In New England, Susan Bliss is a young mother married to a professor.
In LA, Susan Byrne stars in a soap opera beloved coast to coast.
Decades after she’s gone, her twins have no idea of their mother’s fame. But the past can’t stay hidden forever.
It’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star: Susan Bliss.
Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life: an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her life in New England as a wife and mother to young twins to the bright lights of Los Angeles, where she becomes the beloved star of a daytime soap.
In the present, Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past. Viola, resentful of her mother’s torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of her. But when Viola runs into her mother’s old costar Orson Grey—now a renowned Hollywood star—she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never really knew.
Sharp, assured, and beautifully written, Family Drama is a story told in double-helix, with intertwined timelines that explore the different versions of ourselves we share with the world and with each other.
In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant—who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.
Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.”
As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general—and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.
Based loosely on a program a New York City mayor floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her best: smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times.
A Native American first contact story and gripping thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse
“Thrilling and personal… an important addition to the landscape of science fiction.”—Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising
“Hole in the Sky is mind-bending… indigenous knowledge collides with science fiction in a thrilling page-turner.”—Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker and writer of Reservation Dogs
On the Great Plains of Oklahoma, in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, a strange atmospheric disturbance is noticed by Jim Hardgray, a down-on-his-luck single father trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter, Tawny. At NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, astrophysicist Dr. Mikayla Johnson observes an interaction with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on the far side of the solar system, and she concludes that something enormous and unidentified is heading directly for Earth. And in an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the United States, an American threat forecaster known only as the Man Downstairs intercepts a cryptic communication and sends a message directly to the president and highest-ranking military brass: “First contact imminent.”
Daniel H. Wilson’s Hole in the Sky is a riveting thriller in the most creative tradition of extraterrestrial fiction. Drawing on Wilson’s unique background as both a threat forecaster for the United States Air Force and a Cherokee Nation citizen, this propulsive novel asks probing questions about nonhuman intelligence, the Western mindset, and humans’ understanding of reality.
An instant New York Times bestseller!
“A thrilling adventure, full of twists and turns, gripping from the first page to the last. Hugely enjoyable. The perfect book to meet Zig & Nola.” — Alex Michaelides, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient
New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer is back with his thrilling Zig and Nola series, unraveling a shocking cold case with a personal—and deadly—twist.
Andrew Fechmeier is a master at hiding. He’d better be—he’s spent decades concealing a secret that could get him killed. So when he’s diagnosed with a terminal disease, he heads for the local funeral home carrying the blue suit he eventually wants to be buried in. But what no one knows is that Fechmeier secretly tucked something inside, turning the suit into a final, untraceable hiding spot.
It’s a perfect plan. Until Fetch is brutally murdered by a mysterious killer who will stop at nothing to find the priceless object hidden in the suit.
Wasting no time, the cunning but unconventional Roddy LaPointe opens an investigation into Fetch’s murder, recruiting help from his friend, the brilliant “Zig” Zigarowski. But it doesn’t take long for Zig to discover the real reason Roddy cares so much about this case: Fetch’s death is tied to Roddy’s mother, who was murdered decades earlier.
As the relentless killer closes in, Roddy’s twin sister—the enigmatic and volatile Nola Brown—starts investigating for herself, uncovering a sinister plot that reveals their mother’s dark history, the true identity of her killer, and the shocking secret behind her death.
Don’t turn your back on The Viper.
“The Viper is a pulse pounding adventure that takes you on a journey into the darkest recesses of the human heart.” — S.A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed and King of Ashes
“Expertly crafted and charged with tension, Meltzer delivers exactly what readers crave: a killer story from a true master of the craft. Smart, sharp, and undeniably gripping—this is Meltzer doing what he does best.” — Jack Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Sky Mourning