The Women by KRISTIN HANNAH
When her brother ships off to Vietnam, nursing student Frankie McGrath impulsively decides to leave her sheltered life on Coronado Island and join the Army Nurse Corps. In Vietnam, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos of war. Yet, even more unsettling is the shock of coming home to a country that has been divided by war and disillusioned by politics.
End of Story by A. J. FINN
Nicky Hunter has corresponded with reclusive mystery writer Sebastian Trapp for years but is shocked when he invites her to his mansion to help him write his life story. Twenty years earlier on New Year’s Eve, Sebastian’s first wife and son disappeared from different locations. Did Sebastian commit the perfect crime? Why is he willing to start talking about it now?
The Teacher by FREIDA MCFADDEN
Last year, Caseman High School was rocked by a scandal. Everyone says that Addie, a troubled student, is a liar determined to ruin lives and hurt others. A math teacher with a great life, Eve is dismayed to learn that Addie will be in her class this year. For Addie has secrets that she will do anything in her power to keep from coming out.
Brooklyn by TRACY BROWN
During her dying moments, Brooklyn Melody James contemplates what led her to become the cold calculating manipulator that everyone wanted dead. Learning the art of the hustle from her parents, Brooklyn burns her bridges with her family before fleeing to New York City. In the city, she falls in love with a player in the drug game and becomes ruthless in her ambition, creating a reign of terror that one person decides must end.
Normal Women by PHILIPPA GREGORY
For centuries, history has been written for men and about men. In a new nonfiction book, Philippa Gregory rewrites British history with ordinary women at the forefront. Extensively researched, Normal Women showcases the contributions of women during periods of social transition and reminds us that the persistence of normal women can change history.
The Phoenix Crown by KATE QUINN AND JANIE CHANG
In 1906 San Francisco, Gemma desperately needs a refresh of her singing career, and Suling, a Chinese embroideress, needs to escape an arranged marriage. Soon, they are both caught up with charming railroad magnate Henry Thornton, owner of the fabled Phoenix Crown, an ancient Chinese relic. After an earthquake tears the town apart, Henry disappears. When the crown reappears at a Paris ball five years later, Gemma and Suling are determined to solve the mystery.
Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti
With Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti takes apart a decade’s worth of her personal journals and puts their sentences together from A to Z. The Canadian author known for experimentation started this reconstruction project in earnest in 2014 in hopes of identifying patterns and preoccupations in her personal writing. She believed that by loading 500,000 words from her old journals into an Excel spreadsheet and putting them in alphabetical order, she might be able to see herself in a new way. After making edits and cuts, Heti told the New York Times in 2022 that her latest release blurs the line between fact and fiction. Whether it should be considered a memoir or something else entirely, Alphabetical Diaries looks at how we see ourselves and how we’d like to be seen.
Get the Picture, Bianca Bosker
Seven years after award-winning journalist Bianca Bosker released Cork Dork, her expertly reported deep dive into the wine business, she’s back with Get the Picture, a gripping and often hilarious investigation into the art world. To understand the inner workings of the fine art scene, Bosker goes full Tom Wofe and embeds herself within the community. She stretches canvas until her fingers are raw while interning at a downtown New York City gallery, schmoozes with billionaire collectors at Art Basel Miami, guards master works at the Guggenheim, and lets performance artist and “ass influencer” Mandy allFIRE sit on her face. It’s through these outrageous experiences that Bosker learns to cultivate her artistic “eye” and appreciate the beauty that surrounds her.
How to Live Free in a Dangerous World, Shayla Lawson
Shayla Lawson’s How To Live Free in a Dangerous World is Eat, Pray, Love for a new generation. In 2021, Lawson was diagnosed with Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that causes chronic pain. With hope and humor, they explore how their race, gender identity, and disability affect how they see the world and how the world sees them. It is by traveling to Indiana and Italy, and countless locales in between, that they begin to rethink their sexuality, identity, and mortality. How to Live Free in a Dangerous World is a poignant look at how Lawson learned to liberate themselves from the things that held them back.
Redwood Court, DéLana R. A. Dameron
Poet DéLana R. A. Dameron’s tender debut novel, Redwood Court, follows a teenage girl in the 1990s. As the baby of her family, Mika Tabor has spent much of her life in the house on the titular cul-de-sac in an all-Black middle class neighbourhood in Columbia, S.C. There, she grew up listening to her grandparents and parents’ stories of making it in the United States. Her family’s triumphs and struggles become her guide to navigating racism, sexism, and poverty as she comes of age at the start of a new millennium. Dameron is a native of Columbia—and her knowledge of the community shines through this portrait of a Southern Black family doing all they can to hold on to the American dream.
The Book of Love, Kelly Link
Pulitzer Prize finalist and short story master Kelly Link’s long awaited debut novel, The Book of Love, begins with best friends Laura, Daniel, and Mo realizing that they’ve been dead for nearly a year. The teens have been resurrected by their high school music teacher, an unlikely spiritual guide who offers them an opportunity to return for good if they can complete a series of magical tasks. With each new challenge, the three get closer to solving the mystery of their deaths and reclaiming the lives they left behind.
The Fox Wife, Yangsze Choo
Inspired by Chinese and Japanese folklore, Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife follows a hard-boiled private detective named Bao who is tasked with uncovering the identity of a woman found dead in an alleyway in 1900s Manchuria. His investigation soon leads him to Snow, a mum seeking vengeance for her daughter, who also happens to be a shape-shifting fox. Bao follows Snow on a trek from northern China to Japan in hopes of catching a predator, not knowing he may just become her prey in this enchanting tale of murder, revenge, and the power of a mother’s love.
Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein
In her debut Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein writes candidly of her own struggles with disordered eating, knowing that she is not alone. With compassion and rage, she wrestles with the root causes of the ongoing eating disorder epidemic in the U.S., which has seen an uptick in anorexia, bulimia, and disordered eating among young women in recent decades. Across 12 deeply researched essays, she calls out Kim Kardashian for “impl[ying] the customer’s natural form is a problem to be solved” with her influential company SKIMS, and analyses the role pro-eating disorder content on social media plays in the current crisis. Dead Weight is by no means an easy read, but a sobering and necessary look at a pervasive problem in American culture.
Grief Is For People, Sloane Crosley
In 2019, novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley suffered two losses within the span of a month that would become inextricably linked: her New York City apartment was robbed and her closest friend and mentor died by suicide. (To top it all off, six months later, the COVID-19 pandemic would leave the whole world in mourning.) Crosley’s debut memoir, Grief Is For People, is a sardonic and lyrical meditation on grief and a mournful eulogy for a complicated friend that offers a powerful lesson in how to navigate life’s most painful moments with humour and grace.
