Literary Fiction New Release Books
For those who read to get lost in deep, immersive narratives, our summer lineup of literary fiction new releases offers the ultimate escape with an intellectual edge. This summer reading list for the Bookworm Reader Type focuses on realistic characters, intricate prose and thought-provoking themes brought to life by master storytellers like Ann Patchett, Joyce Carol Oates, Jenny Jackson and more. Because we know you value depth, not just gripping storylines, our in-house editorial team carefully vets early reviews, industry presales data and librarian-led research to select only the most beautifully written new releases worthy of your summer TBR.
August 2026 Literary Fiction New Releases
Etna
by Paul Yoon
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME and LITHUB
A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE BOSTON GLOBE, LITHUB and SCARY MOMMY
Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?
This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.
Sunrise
by Téa Obreht
Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife
"I've loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know." -- Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today, Good Housekeeping, The Boston Globe
In 2024, Nina's small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise, a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
In 2003, Sand Daw's golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town's annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise's most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy's disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise's many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht's novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.
A Tender Age
by Chang-Rae Lee
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE BOSTON GLOBE, GOODREADS, LITERARY HUB AND THE MILLIONS
"Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?"-- The Los Angeles Times
"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." – Jhumpa Lahiri
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence and a boy on the cusp of adolescence
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away and then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
Dèy
by Edwidge Danticat
From the bestselling author of Everything Inside comes a vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.
"Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?" These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami. When she hears gunfire while at a shopping mall, she takes shelter in a nearby restaurant, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners.
Once she's safely home, Magnolia keeps this traumatic event from everyone. But given her life back, she begins to see everything clearly: her extraordinary bond with her daughter, Zoë; her nearly broken relationship with Zoë's father; the challenges of her mentally troubled mother, whose unraveling patterns
Magnolia worries she's spiraling toward herself; and her father's affair with a woman who has borne him a child. While struggling through the labyrinth of her past, Magnolia must also come to terms with the losses sustained that life-altering day, and nearly every day by her parents and sibling in Haiti.
Can love or family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one's heart? Which side will prevail for Magnolia? Pulled between these questions, each of which involves a high-stakes choice -- Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after -- Magnolia is a narrator who is "yon pati koukouy, part firefly" flitting and shimmering between different worlds.
Taking as its title a Haitian Kreyòl word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance not only of sharing grief but also of inseverable family ties. Brave and striking, Dèy is one of Danticat's most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with her signature "unfaltering voice and evocative beauty" (The Boston Globe).
Life of M
by Rachel Cusk
From the critically acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty and truth -- and a blazing renovation of the form.
The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away.
Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M's life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths -- about the very experience of living -- might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?
In this astonishing novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for these truths without ever swerving away into self-deception. Her pursuit leads us across olive groves and beaches, behind the smoked windows of limousines, and through beautiful cities considered the great masterpieces of civilization. And at every turn, Cusk contemplates the cost of this beauty--and what we might lose when we are hypnotized by it.
Life of M is a thrilling investigation of who we are, and who we pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are mesmerized more than ever by the images we see everywhere. It cuts through a world of noise and spectacle to bring us an eerie music of immense power and beauty.
The Seekers of Deer Creek
by Thao Thai
From the national bestselling author of Banyan Moon, a captivating, evocative story of two estranged sisters on a quest to find a painting by a forgotten Vietnamese artist that holds the truth of their family's fractured past.
Aside from the fact they are sisters, Vivi and Calla Nguyễn have little in common.
Vivi, the eldest, lives an orderly and predictable life. She works as an art conservator at a museum in Chicago, carefully preserving pieces of the past, all the while refusing to examine her own dark history.
Calla leads a much bolder, if occasionally reckless, existence. She's an accomplished artist with a flair for the dramatic, charming and intriguing everyone she meets. She's also a recovering addict, constantly causing Vivi to worry.
Months after the two fall out in the wake of their father's death, Calla appears on the steps of the museum with a sketch and a letter she found in their father's belongings. The sketch is an exact copy of Blue Mirror, a striking painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. Lý. In the letter, Lý writes about a mysterious lost work of art. Calla is convinced it is meant for their family, and that it was their father's deathbed wish for her and Vivi to find it together. Intrigued yet reluctant to follow her capricious sister, Vivi must decide whether she's willing to face or shut the door to the past.
From the ghostly Wisconsin woods to a glittering estate in the French countryside to a sprawling ancestral home teetering on the edge of a ravine in Việt Nam, The Seekers of Deer Creek is a story of sisters, art, and the irresistible gravity of the past -- how it endures across time and generations, always present even when buried.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary
by Anjet Daanje - David McKay
A thrilling literary puzzle that explores the haunted life and mysterious afterlifes of a writer and her work.
Who was Eliza May Drayden? Is she just the quiet, intensely private person she seems to all the world in her little village of Bridge Fowling in the shadow of the West Yorkshire hills, or is there more to her than meets the eye? It is only after her death that Haeger Mass, her one book, a dark and cryptic novel, assumes a life of its own. In each new chapter of this literary treasure hunt that spans almost 300 years, we see the conundrum through the eyes of a new generation of characters, each providing competing and interlocking versions of the life -- and cursed vision -- of this Emily Brontë-like figure.
Scholars immerse themselves in the mystery of her life and are led to ruin; the curse that hangs over her comes to visit a young couple; a mysterious diary emerges with her strange and indecipherable poetry and sketches. Elements and symbols repeat in relentless and varying combinations from one story to the next as the years pass: as if the truth at the center of her work is fighting to break free.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary is a philosophical puzzle that unfolds with the exuberance of a historical romp, ingeniously pivoting from Gothic horror to quantum mechanics to memento mori. In this thrilling, recursive tale, Anjet Daanje gets to the frantically beating heart of why we tell stories and how we try to create meaning with them in a world filled with brutality and death. Daanje has crafted a conundrum that is as diabolical as it is heartbreaking. When we finally open the box that contains the secret behind the life of Eliza May Drayden, what will we see there--a vision of heaven or a vision of hell?
The Wild Beneath (Original)
by Kelly Anderson
"Ethereal...a story that reminds us sometimes the impossible is possible." -- JODI PICOULT
"A haunting, heart-stopping debut."-- CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE
"Part love story, part ode to nature, with a mystical, musical, mysterious quality."-- NIKKI ERLICK
For readers of Wild Dark Shore and The Time Traveler's Wife, a fierce, haunting story of one woman caught between her first love and a mysterious stranger who upends everything--and the two worlds that won't let her go.
Annie MacLeod always knew she was different, growing up on a sailboat in the Pacific Northwest, navigating by stars and swimming with sea creatures alongside her parents and best friend Evan. But when a tsunami shatters her world, Annie is stranded on land and forced to confront how eccentric she is. In the wreckage, she rescues a wordless man named Walker, who emits a hum only she can hear.
Their connection is instant, electric. Walker's touch gives Annie visions of the ocean's hidden world, a life she's never known but feels inexplicably drawn to. Yet even as she is pulled toward him, Evan, the steadfast love who has always been there, remains on dry land, offering the stability she may have to leave behind. Annie is torn between Evan's grounding presence and Walker's magnetic secrets. But then, Walker vanishes, along with the answers she needs about who she really is.
Six years later, Annie has left the sea and buried the past--until Walker's otherworldly sound returns, pulling her back toward the ocean and the life she abandoned. The truth under the water is more ancient than she ever could have known, and Annie must confront a choice that will test her heart and determine her future.
"Absolutely dazzling."-- SARAH PENNER
"Incandescent ... I did not want to come up for air." -- EMMA KNIGHT
"Spellbinding!"-- NITA PROSE
Take What You Can
by Naima Coster
Most Anticipated Book of Summer: The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country, Time Magazine, Electric Literature – Most Anticipated Book of 2026: People, LitHub
"Take What You Can is so brilliantly, unbelievably good I have a burning in my heart. ... Love is utterly bewildering, and nobody writes about it better than Naima Coster."-- Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich
From the New York Times bestselling author of What's Mine and Yours, a rich, panoramic exploration of friendship, class, new motherhood and independence
Val and Milly fell in love with France at the same time they fell in love with each other and became immediate best friends. Then, they bonded as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip. Now they are in their thirties, each married and with a baby girl on the way. When Milly suggests Val move to New York so they can raise their daughters together after a decade apart, it's a resounding yes.
Despite their excitement, the pair secretly wonders if their friendship has always worked best as a trio. On that first trip to France, these two motherless daughters were taken under the wing of an older woman named Helene. She showered them with money, love and attention and showed them the possibilities of an independent and abundant future. But now, without Helene and her guidance, who are Milly and Val?
Milly, a successful influencer married to restaurant royalty, is occupied with her desire for freedom. Val, a brilliant journalist, is unsure whether she fits into Milly's new world. The realities of class and social capital, of strained marriages and the demands of motherhood, serve as constant reminders of how far apart they've grown. And no matter how much they try to avoid it, everything comes back to the rift that began all those years ago in France. What they've long tried to bury may finally destroy their sisterhood.
Weaving between Brooklyn brownstones and the glittering beaches of southern France, Take What You Can is a dazzling novel exploring what it means to be a mother when you have none, a sister without blood ties and a woman in pursuit of the life she wants. With her signature sharply observed prose, Naima Coster illustrates how to be--and to stay--someone's person through all phases of life.
July 2026 Literary Fiction New Releases
Some People
by Parini Shroff
A man on the brink of divorce is forced to care for his injured future-ex-mother-in-law in this wise, witty and heartfelt novel from the bestselling author of The Bandit Queens.
Malti Patel is absolutely fine. Concussed and bruised, maybe, but fine. Certainly fine enough to not need her daughter's soon-to-be-ex-husband, Nathan Whitlock, playing nurse in her home while she recuperates. And yet, that's exactly the quandary in which she finds herself. Her doctor insists on in-home supervision for seven days, and with her daughter, Kavya, abroad at grad school in India, Nathan proves too much of a do-gooder to let Malti rehabilitate alone. Seven days of Nathan, the man divorcing her daughter for all manner of reasons: cultural misunderstanding, emotional walls, simmering hostility ... most of them having to do with Kavya's baggage from her childhood.
They want nothing to do with one another. But over the course of the week, as Malti grapples with the shadows of her past and Nathan ponders the wreckage of his marriage, they learn that they are the two people who know Kavya best--and the ones who have hurt her so deeply that she's left them both.
Rich with emotional depth, Some People paints a nuanced portrait of love, forgiveness, and our timeless quest for understanding and acceptance.
Matcha on Monday
by Michiko Aoyama
Discover the beloved early classic from the million-copy bestselling author of WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY
Across a bridge in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, a charming little matcha café - open only on Mondays - offers a beacon of light and healing to all who pass through its doors.
All throughout the week, customers flock to the Marble Café that's tucked away behind the trees - except when it's closed on Mondays, when the Matcha Café opens in its place, offering its clientele a warm cup of matcha and restoration to start the busy week ahead.
On this one day of the week, people from all walks of life frequent this cozy haven and experience the joys of human connection. Among them include:
- A singer who has just broken up with his lover
- An unsociable young owner of a tea wholesaler
- A husband who has made his wife angry
- A designer and owner of a lingerie shop
- A Kamishibai artist who doesn't get along with his grandmother
This heart-warming story spans Tokyo and Kyoto over 12 months, bringing together a community of untold unfolding lives - all starting with a cup of matcha.
Country People
by Daniel Mason
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (a.k.a Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind--a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America's greatest living writers
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate's words, a great capacity "to fall in with anyone, anywhere." And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world's delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre--perhaps ridiculous--local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
We Were Forbidden
by Jacqueline Harpman - Ros Schwartz
From the bestselling author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling trio of novellas--translated into English for the first time--each plumbing the depths of that vital human instinct: defiance.
In the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman wanders the forest. She and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their eternal march through its strange depths.
Attending a rigid French school in 1940s Casablanca, a teenage girl is barred from ever questioning the dogma she is taught to believe--her punishment for doing so will be as swift as it is shocking.
Locked in a loveless marriage in the Belgian bourgeoisie, a young woman satisfies her husband's desires, twice weekly, as required. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.
These novellas -- the first works by Jacqueline Harpman to arrive in English in decades -- reveal her incredible stylistic range and demonstrate once more her penetrating psychological insight. Here we find the origins of a singular, relentless voice.
The Half Life
by Rachel Beanland
From the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire, a novel set on a remote Italian island about a navy wife's reckoning with power, love, and the price of staying silent in the Atomic Age.
"A captivating, whip-smart novel about love, loyalty, and a woman torn between two lives. I utterly adored it." – Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country
When 23-year-old Eileen O'Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn't expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen's got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender.
In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island--taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones -- she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from.
Still, it doesn't take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the U.S. government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island--not to mention all of Italy--doesn't go communist in the next election.
When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the U.S. Navy. Soon, Eileen's marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets--and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she's been handed.
Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakening--of one woman forced to choose between loyalty to her husband and country and to the Italian locals who show her the high cost of American exceptionalism.
In Wonderland
by Joyce Maynard
In one golden summer, Frances trades her working-class world for an elite Maine lakeside estate -- where privilege and betrayal turn into a deadly game.
Frances believes she's found a ticket to paradise when a wealthy couple hires her for the summer as their mother's helper at their lakefront summer home in Maine. The vintage wooden boats, the days at the country club, a shiny new bicycle and a tennis racquet. Suddenly, Frances has everything her modest childhood lacked. Best of all, she gets to spend the summer with Forrest Emerson, her father's charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood when he married into money.
But below the glittering surface of Lake Catherine, nothing is what it seems. When Forrest's wife, Regina, pulls Frances into her private obsession, the girl finds herself witness to the intimate secrets of adult lives. As the summer heat builds, so do the tensions within Wonderland's walls. By Labor Day, a death will shatter the seemingly perfect family, leaving Frances to question everything she thought she knew about privilege, power, and the price of belonging.
The Intrigue
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a sizzling noir about desire, danger, and greed, in which seduction is the ultimate con.
"Lush and passionate with magnetic prose … The Intrigue will grab you by the throat and not let go until its earth-shaking finale!" – S. A. Cosby, author of King of Ashes
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, People, Book Riot, Southern Living
Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters in order to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won't last forever, and he's desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.
He thinks he's found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn't expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt's household.
When Inés discovers Ulises's true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They'll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast, and clean. But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained for. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.
Venture into the streets of a small town where a patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.
Cool Machine
by Colson Whitehead
From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he's feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he's plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you're uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence--Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie's death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie's son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he's spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead's vivid characters, it's what's below the surface that reveals the truth.
June Literary Fiction Releases
Little Wonder
by Sophie Chen Keller
A musical prodigy and his mother spend years searching for each other in this beautiful novel of hope, perseverance, and love.
A SWEEPING NOVEL FROM JENNA BUSH HAGER'S NEW VENTURE, THOUSAND VOICES.
Song is a nobody -- just a food delivery worker from a village in Northeastern China -- but her son, River, is a little wonder.
At the age of 4, he toddled to a piano and tapped out his favorite song. At 8, he mastered Liszt's three Liebestraume; at 10, he blazed through the complete set of Chopin's études. And at every step, through the valleys of loss, illness and poverty, Song is there to light his way -- until finally, at the age of 11, River is invited to study with a preeminent teacher in Beijing.
But in the chaos of Beijing Railway Station on the busiest day of the year, Song faces every mother's nightmare: She loses her grip on River's little hand and is unable to find him after a desperate, harrowing search.
Over the next days, weeks, and eventually, years, Song and River fight to forge a path back to each other as they carve out new lives that carry them farther apart. An evocative exploration of a mother's love and a son's yearning, Little Wonder takes us on an extraordinary journey through a modern Beijing that pulses with the music of humanity and its impossible--and impossibly brave -- hopes.
As every musician knows: You start in one key. You wander to other keys, strange and distant places. But in the end, you always come back home.
The Children
by Melissa Albert
"An extraordinary book. It's a page-turner, full of mystery, but that's the least of it. The language is dusted with magic. The Children reminded me of Ray Bradbury at his best." -- Stephen King
The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother's beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory and magic.
Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother's world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names.
In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother's readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they've made their playland. As Edith Sharpe's books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame -- until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith's series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.
Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere's childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last 20 years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother's fantasy world?
The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.
The Frenzy: Stories
by Joyce Carol Oates
A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates "who is surely on any shortlist of America's greatest living writers" -- The New York Times Magazine
"A genius in the truest sense of the word." -- Rebecca Makkai
"One of the greatest writers among us today." -- Gillian Flynn
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Lit Hub
Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity
Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.
A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband's return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument -- should he intervene?
Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates's short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character's deepest fears -- revealing our own in turn. "Literature is a texture of words," says Oates of her short fiction, "evoking life in the most vivid ways -- psychologically, physically." These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.
The Shampoo Effect
by Jenny Jackson
"Funny, drama-fueled and full of Jackson's breezy wit … Brilliant." -- Coco Mellors, New York Times bestselling author of Blue Sisters
An ambitious young woman insinuates herself into a tight-knit social set, shaking up friendships and marriages in a small seaside town. A frothy novel of love, money, sex, and friendship, from the New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street ("Laugh-out-loud-good." -- Harper's Bazaar)
When Caroline Lash arrives in Greenhead, Massachusetts, she falls head-over-heels for Van Whittaker, a fleece-wearing, litter-collecting, kayak enthusiast with long, floppy hair and the personality of a Border collie. Born and raised in this picturesque coastal village, Van runs with the same crowd he did as a kid: His ex-girlfriend, Bailey, a beautiful girl who attracts men like moths to a flame; Augusta, old money, horsey and snobbish; and Fran, surrounded by brothers and sons, too fed up with boys to ever consider marrying one.
Together, the group runs wild through the marshes, beaches and bars of Greenhead, drinking on houseboats, spending long afternoons sunbathing with their children and playing games the way they always have. But when Bailey discovers that she is pregnant with Van's baby, the delicate balance of the group's friendship is thrown off.
Soon Caroline is cast out of the circle and what she does next -- in a potent mix of fury and heartbreak -- exposes long-held secrets and works the entire town of Greenhead into a lather. Dazzlingly funny, sexy and as juicy as it is astute, The Shampoo Effect is a story of late-night parties, early mornings with small children, the dawn of midlife and a group of old friends finally growing up despite all their best efforts to the contrary.
Related: If you liked these recommendations, step back in time with our top picks for the Time Traveler, or view our Spring 2026 Bookworm New Releases in case you missed them.