Discover your next favorite indie gem
Looking for your next unforgettable read? We’ve rounded up the most compelling, buzzworthy books from standout indie authors this season. From fresh debuts to rising stars, this collection highlights bold voices and exciting stories you won’t want to miss. Whether you're into twisty thrillers, steamy romance, epic fantasy, or something totally unexpected, these indie must-reads are ready to take over your TBR.
Next Best Thing: A Memoir of What Remains When Family Fails
by Sarah Spector
Four words changed Sarah Spector's life. I will get him.
She typed them into her phone in September 2018, while her cousin Abby lay dying in a Los Angeles hospital and someone had to decide what happened to Abby's step-father. His name was Peter. Everyone called him Schatzi, German for treasure, the name his late wife gave him. He had Parkinson's, a heavy accent, a habit of mumbling, and no one left.
Sarah was not his daughter. She was not his next of kin. She was a CPA with a full life and a family she had spent more than a decade keeping at a distance. She was, as he put it, the next best thing.
What followed was four years inside a system that was not built for a man like Schatzi. Nursing homes that lost track of him. A conservatorship that moved at its own pace while he did not. Gambling, elder abuse reports, a pandemic that locked every door, and a man who kept calling the police on the people trying to help him.
Told with text messages, emails, and legal documents exactly as they were written, Next Best Thing is a record of what eldercare actually looks like from the inside. It is also a book about what family means when the people who are supposed to show up do not, and about the friends and strangers who did.
It is unsparing about the institutions, and pretty much everything else. It is far funnier than it has any right to be.
For anyone who has become the person who handles it.
Going to School: A Life in Education
by Jim Sebert
For thirty years, Dr. Jim Sebert has lived a life entirely in education, as a student who genuinely loved school, then as a teacher, principal, and superintendent across communities in Wisconsin. Going to School is the story of that journey: shaped by parents who taught him kindness and reliability, and a coach who walked up a driveway one summer afternoon; an act of attention that changed the course of a life.
It is a story that passes through classrooms and superintendent's chairs, through a global pandemic, a tragic boat accident, thirty-seven community meetings about facility consolidation, and a Halloween party where a young man met the woman who would become his wife. Along the way, it asks questions every educator and every leader will recognize: How do you make hard decisions when there are no good options? How do you hold the line when the community is divided? How do you stay the kind of person you set out to be when the work tries to change you?
Going to School is honest about the moments that tested him, and about how each one made him a better leader. It is open about failure, gentle about grace, and clear-eyed about what it actually takes to run a school district in the modern era.
It is a book for educators at every level, but it is also for anyone who has ever been shaped by a classroom, a gymnasium, or a hallway conversation that changed the way they saw themselves or the world. It is for the teacher who wonders whether the work is worth it. For the principal in a difficult year. For the superintendent at the end of a hard week. For the parent who wants to understand what is happening inside their child's school. For the new board member trying to make sense of an unfamiliar world. And for the reader who simply loves a good story about a life well lived in service of others.
Throughout, Dr. Sebert reflects on the people, decisions, and moments that have defined his career: the coach who came to the driveway, the woman behind everything, the difficult conversations he learned to have, the standing ovations and the late-night phone calls, and the superintendency as a lifestyle. He writes with the warmth of someone who has loved this work every day, and the candor of someone who knows that loving it is not the same as being good at it; that those two things have to be earned each and every year.
This is Dr. Sebert's first book. It reads like a long conversation with a trusted colleague nearing the end of a long career, full of stories worth carrying forward.
"I have been going to school my entire life. It has been an incredible gift."
Love on the Perimeter
by Lloyd Devereux Richards
Events at a teen summer canoe program in the Canadian northwoods turn deadly in this new thriller by the author of Stone Maidens.
At 17, Llewelyn Davies is a sensitive and intelligent adolescent under the care of a wealthy grandmother who took him in after his mother died and his alcoholic father abandoned him. Plagued by anxiety and depression, Llewelyn builds a wall to protect his fragile heart.
When his grandmother signs him up for a month-long wilderness experience to help boost his leadership skills, they both get more than they bargained for. A murder at the camp, tied to a Toronto-based crime family, puts Llewelyn in mortal danger. Fleeing from armed hitmen, Llewelyn and Eloise, a red-headed teen with her own past traumas, battle extreme and dangerous conditions. Tapping into strengths he didn't know he had, Llewelyn finds his true identity and falls in love, despite the treachery of lies, deceit, and demise around them.
Love on the Perimeter, a romantic crime thriller about coming to terms with the past in order to face your future, makes clear that while a perimeter-a defense against outside forces or unexpected intrusions-is necessary in life, it can be breached by love.
The Micro-Odysseys: Tiny Stories from a Tiny World
by Grandpa Ron Grandpa Ron
Six Inches from the Ground: Where everyday life becomes an epic odyssey.
The world is much, much bigger than you think. You're just standing too far away from the grass.
In The Micro-Odysseys, young explorers leave the human world behind and enter the Backyard Wilderness, where a sneaker becomes a falling moon, a garden hose resembles a scaled serpent, and a lawnmower is the terrifying, forest-decapitating "World-Eater."
Along the way, adventure becomes stealth science. Real biology, from pheromone trails and pleopods to the tardigrade's remarkable tun state, is woven into every story.
Specimen Files, scientific facts, a glossary, and a Backyard Quest invite readers to keep exploring after the stories end.
Perfect for curious readers ages 7-10, The Micro-Odysseys turns an ordinary backyard into a world waiting to be discovered.
Are you brave enough to look closer? I'll see YOU, outside!
Arriving Nowhere: A Complete Guide to Staying Exactly Where You Are
by Lebsack Lebsack
A life insurance salesman has been detailing the current state of the economy ever since a podcast explained it to him. He didn't think to ask the woman across the table what she does for a living. She works at the Kansas City Fed.
An executive assistant can read her boss's silence from the far end of the office. His coffee order is open on her phone before he asks. Her crisis is waiting for an opening on the calendar.
Nobody in this book is going anywhere. Any one of them can tell you exactly how to get there.
Arriving Nowhere is a complete guide to staying exactly where you are. Twenty chapters. Twenty American cities. A narrator so warm and so reasonable you will not notice what he is doing until it is done. There are five territories to hold, and he will teach you all of them.
A Mind Worth Wasting. A mind is the finest instrument you will ever own. Dottie plays hers constantly. Every grievance filed, dated, and still appreciating. A virtuoso at the art of grudge collecting.
A Body Worth Overruling. The body has opinions about everything and never stops sharing them. Frankie's knee has been filing the same complaint for months. She reads it, uh-huhs it, and moves on.
Relationships Worth Ruining. Anyone can walk away from a friendship. Gael has perfected the slow withdrawal, so carefully conducted that no single moment can ever be pointed to.
A Future Worth Sabotaging. The past and present won't budge an inch. The future is open, adjustable, and never makes a peep when you sabotage it. Sam knows the better option is coming. That's why the shortlist never gets shorter.
A Soul Worth Starving. Mei-Lin works air traffic control, where silence on the frequency means something has gone wrong. Nine years in, she has not let a room go quiet either. The quiet is where you would have to notice what you want and what you owe yourself.
Not one of these people is a disaster. They are accomplished, well-liked, and better at this than anyone has ever given them credit for.
Nothing in this book asks you to change. Whether you do is entirely up to you.
You Are Capable of More: A No-Excuses Guide to Becoming Your Best Self
by Chris Sund
Most people don't fall short because they lack talent. They fall short because somewhere along the way, they stopped believing what was actually possible for them.
You know the feeling. You are doing fine on paper, but something in you keeps saying there is another level you have not reached. You have been telling yourself you will get to it. Later. When things settle down. When you feel ready.
In You Are Capable of More, keynote speaker and executive Chris Sund makes the case that later never comes, and that the thing standing between you and your potential is almost never talent. It is the excuses you stopped noticing you make.
Sund writes from the field, not from theory. He is a sitting President and COO who helped grow a company 12x in revenue in two years, and he built this book out of two decades of leading teams and sitting across from people operating well below what they were capable of.
Ten principles. One version of you.
- Own It. Every Day. Take responsibility before anyone asks you to.
- Time Is Your Edge. Stop trading your best hours for everyone else's priorities.
- Growth Starts Where Comfort Stops. Find the ceiling you built yourself.
- Train Your Inner Voice. Change how you talk to yourself under pressure.
- Relentless Improvement. Get better on the days you don't feel like it.
- Seek Truth. Not Praise. Go looking for the feedback you have been avoiding.
- Unlock Your Hidden Gear. Reach the capacity you have never had to use.
- Lead Before You Are Asked. Step up without the title.
- Finish What You Start. Close the loop on what you already began.
- Leave People Better. Make your impact outlast you.
Every principle comes with the story behind it, the honest challenge inside it, and something to actually do. The book closes with the Playbook, a practical framework for turning ten ideas into a way of living.
Read this if
- You look successful by most measures and still know you are holding back
- You lead people and want to raise your own standard before you raise theirs
- You are tired of books that feel good for a day and change nothing
- You would rather be challenged than comforted
With a foreword by Ben Newman, USA Today Top 5 Performance Coach and two-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
There is more in you than life has asked for so far. This is the book that asks.
Mimi and Maurice: A Novel, Based on a True Story
by Jo Taylor
Between San Francisco and Belgian Congo, between war and silence . . .
It is 1936. Mimi lives in San Francisco, in a house she shares with her father and sister, writing letters to Maurice-a distant cousin she has never met. Maurice is in Belgian Congo, settling the estates of Europeans who die far from home. They have no shared memories, only paper, ink, and the weeks it takes a letter to arrive.
They write. For years. Three hundred and eighty-two letters survive.
Between us, an ocean, two continents, and the stubborn mathematics of distance. Marry me, Mimi. It's all I want.
They become engaged and are set to meet in Belgium in May of 1940. Then the war comes. Maurice vanishes into the Resistance-imprisoned, interrogated, forced into an irrevocable choice. At home, Mimi endures years of silence and uncertainty, learning photography-Maurice's great passion-to see the world through his eyes while waiting for letters that never arrive.
Drawn from their real correspondence, Mimi and Maurice is the story of a love written in full-and of what survives the silence.
The Demon Doll: A Novel in Stories
by Joe Castoro - Clara Hillis - Eric Rieger
Antonio Russo has always had a talent for making the wrong choice.
He lies. He gets jealous. He follows his friends into trouble. And when a grotesque wooden doll enters his life, the consequences begin to spread beyond anything he can understand.
People disappear from memory. The past rearranges itself. A black cat appears where it should not. As Antonio's grandfather is dying, his friendships begin to fracture under the weight of secrets, guilt, desire, and things none of them are prepared to understand.
But Antonio's story is only the trunk.
The Demon Doll: A Novel in Stories unfolds through a collection of interconnected tales-branches extending outward across different characters, places, and moments in time before curving unexpectedly back toward the central narrative. Stories that at first appear independent gradually reveal their connections, transforming earlier events and raising new questions about memory, consequence, faith, family, and the choices that bind one life to another.
Blending literary fiction, horror, mystery, and the supernatural, The Demon Doll is a novel about the strange ways our actions continue beyond us-and about what happens when the past refuses to remain buried.
Bright Flickering Lights
by D J Blackmore
Four friends. One wilderness. And the unsettling realisation that the stories we inherit can shape us-or break us.
Whispers of a yowie haunt the forest, and Darcy is determined to prove the legend real. But while he chases myth, he's quietly longing for something closer-Margot. She barely notices him, consumed by rescuing injured wildlife and fighting to protect the forest from the looming threat of coal seam gas.
For twins Sarah and Sam, the fight isn't environmental-it's deeply personal.
When a detour leads them to a decaying farmhouse on the fringe of the wilderness, their search for a creature of anecdote unearths something far more confronting. Long-buried secrets rise to the surface. Family truths fracture. Darcy is shaken by revelations about his own past, while Sarah faces tensions at home that can no longer be ignored.
As the community divides and emotions ignite, Margot is forced to question not just what she's fighting for-but who she is.
Winner of the 2024 Australian Society of Authors Mentorship. Shortlisted for the 2025 inaugural Spiers Prize. Bright Flickering Lights is a powerful coming-of-age story about identity, belonging, and the courage to confront what lies beneath. Like the rare and fragile species holding fast to the wilderness, each of us is unique-and worthy of being seen.
What Harmony Forgot
by Aurelia Tessar
Cassia Alarian has spent thirty years mastering the harmonies that hold her world together. Then a new invention does in hours what took her a lifetime to learn.
At forty-two, Cassia is a Sixfold Master Tuner, one of the rare people able to perceive and shape the resonant forces running through people, objects, and places.
The device should not be possible.
If the reports are true, it could transform access to harmony forever and challenge generations of Conservatory teaching. Cassia is sent to determine whether it is revolutionary or a fraud.
Instead, she finds questions she was never taught to ask.
Alongside Tristan Naveran, the pragmatic builder assigned as her guide, Cassia follows those questions through communities already touched by the device. Somewhere between unfamiliar cities, increasingly uncomfortable questions, and a partnership neither anticipated, something else begins to resonate between them.
Cassia has spent her life learning how harmony works, but the investigation begins challenging more than either of them anticipated.
She may be about to discover how much her world has forgotten.
For readers who love unusual magic systems, mature and competent protagonists, hidden histories, immersive journeys, philosophical mystery, and slow-burn romance, What Harmony Forgot begins The First Voices, an epic fantasy series about what happens when mastery is only the beginning.