GMAbook club.

Take What You Can

Naima Coster

Childhood friends Val and Milly reunite in New York as they prepare to become mothers. Their different marriages, careers, and financial circumstances strain a bond once shaped by an older benefactor in France. Moving between their past and present, the novel explores friendship, ambition, motherhood, and the secrets intimacy cannot always survive.

Country People

Daniel Mason

A stalled doctoral student accompanies his wife and children to Vermont, hoping a change of scenery will help him finish his work. Instead, he becomes absorbed in eccentric neighbors, woodland histories, and a strange local legend. A year of distractions turns into an exploration of marriage, storytelling, and the need to belong.

Dolly All the Time

Annabel Monaghan

Single mother Dolly returns to her Rhode Island hometown to help save her family's house. An encounter with wealthy Stewart Whitfield leads to a fake dating arrangement that soon feels unexpectedly real. As their summer together deepens, Dolly must decide whether her fierce independence leaves room for accepting love and support.

Homebound

Portia Elan

An unfinished computer game left to a grieving teenager in the 1980s sets off connections that reach centuries into the future. A researcher confronting artificial intelligence and a seafaring scavenger become part of its continuing story. Their linked lives explore creativity, technological inheritance, queer identity, and the search for a place to belong.

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke

Natalie has built an online empire selling an idealized version of traditional motherhood. Then she awakens in an apparently nineteenth-century version of her own household, where domestic labor is dangerous and relentless. As she searches for an explanation and escape, the novel examines the gap between a profitable fantasy and the lives it romanticizes.

The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives

Elizabeth Arnott

In 1966 California, three women whose husbands were exposed as killers form an unlikely friendship while rebuilding their lives. When another series of murders begins, they use their hard-earned knowledge of deception to investigate. The story combines a hunt for a killer with questions about blame, survival, and the power of female solidarity.

The Exes

Leodora Darlington

Natalie hopes her marriage to James will finally give her the loving family she wants. But her former boyfriends have a habit of turning up dead, and unsettling messages threaten her new happiness. To protect her husband, she must untangle her past and discover whether the danger comes from someone else or from herself.

Skylark

Paula McLain

Two stories unfold beneath the streets of Paris: a seventeenth-century dyer's daughter struggles for freedom after her father's imprisonment, while a young doctor faces the Nazi occupation. Their parallel journeys reveal hidden communities, acts of rescue, and resistance to cruelty. Art, medicine, and courage connect lives separated by centuries.

Best Offer Wins

Marisa Kashino

After repeatedly losing bidding wars, Margo becomes fixated on a house she believes will rescue her marriage and future. She begins inserting herself into its owners' lives before it reaches the market. Her increasingly extreme tactics turn a familiar housing frustration into a darkly comic examination of status, obsession, and the price of ambition.

Wreck

Catherine Newman

Rocky is back at home with her husband, adult daughter, and widowed father, adjusting to another stage of family life. A nearby accident and a troubling medical possibility unsettle her sense of ordinary safety. Through anxiety and affectionate humor, the novel examines uncertainty, aging, and loving people whose lives cannot be controlled.

Twice

Mitch Albom

Alfie discovers that he can repeat any moment of his life, replacing a first attempt with a second. The gift lets him avoid mistakes and pursue romance, but it has a devastating limit when love is undone. His remarkable history raises questions about desire, regret, and whether endless second chances can produce a satisfying life.

The Book of Lost Hours

Hayley Gelfuso

Lisavet grows up inside a mysterious library that preserves the memories of the dead, where agents are destroying records to reshape history. Decades later, another young woman is drawn into a search for a missing book. Their intertwined stories examine who controls the past and what it costs to preserve forbidden truths.

Not Quite Dead Yet

Holly Jackson

After a violent attack, Jet learns that her injuries will probably kill her within a week. She chooses to spend that time discovering who tried to murder her, with help from a childhood friend. As her health deteriorates, familiar relationships become suspect and the investigation forces her to confront a life she kept postponing.

The Compound

Aisling Rawle

Lily wakes in a remote compound with nineteen other reality-show contestants, competing for luxuries and basic necessities. Staying longer promises greater rewards, but the producers push the players into increasingly dangerous situations. As desire, rivalry, and desperation blur together, the novel questions the attractions of spectacle in a world already coming apart.

Atmosphere

Taylor Jenkins Reid

In the early 1980s, physics professor Joan Goodwin joins NASA's astronaut training program. The demanding work brings intense friendships and an unexpected love that changes her understanding of herself. Against the ambitions and dangers of spaceflight, the novel follows a woman learning how far she is willing to go for both discovery and connection.

The Original Daughter

Jemimah Wei

Genevieve's life in working-class Singapore changes when Arin enters her household as an unexpected sister. The girls grow close while pursuing success in a fiercely competitive society, until betrayal drives them apart. Their story explores the emotional costs of ambition and the difficult balance between loyalty to family and loyalty to oneself.

The Sirens

Emilia Hart

After a disturbing episode, Lucy flees to her sister's Australian coastal home and finds her missing. A diary, local disappearances, and strange stories about the sea draw her toward an older history involving two sisters transported from Ireland. The novel links generations through inherited trauma, female resilience, and an unsettling oceanic power.

Count My Lies

Sophie Stava

Sloane's compulsive lies help her gain entry to a wealthy couple's seemingly perfect household as their nanny. She believes she has found the life she has always wanted, but the family has secrets of its own. Competing deceptions turn intimacy and aspiration into a dangerous contest over who is manipulating whom.

Junie

Erin Crosby Eckstine

Enslaved on an Alabama plantation before the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Junie mourns her sister and dreams of a wider world. A desperate action summons her sister's ghost, while visiting outsiders threaten the household's fragile routines. Junie must confront concealed truths and decide what love and liberation demand of her.

Homeseeking

Karissa Chen

Childhood sweethearts Haiwen and Suchi are separated by war in China and follow different paths across Asia and America. When they encounter one another in Los Angeles sixty years later, memory offers both possibility and pain. Their alternating histories explore migration, sacrifice, family obligations, and a love that survives profound political upheaval.

The Last One

Rachel Howzell Hall

"Romantasy readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough." —Publishers Weekly "Masterful storytelling with a female protagonist worth rooting for." —#1 NYT bestselling author Rebecca Yarros Explosive and enthralling romantasy debut from New York Times bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall... Thrown into a desolate land of sickness and unnatural beasts, Kai wakes in the woods with no idea who she is or how she got there. All she knows is that if she cannot reach the Sea of Devour, even this hellscape will get worse. But when she sees the village blacksmith fight invaders with unspeakable skill, she decides to accept his offer of help. Too bad he’s as skilled at annoying her as he is at fighting. As she searches for answers, Kai only finds more questions, especially regarding the blacksmith who can ignite her body like a flame, then douse it with ice in the next breath. And no one is what—or who—they appear to be in the kingdom of Vinevridth, including the man whose secrets might be as deadly as the land itself. The Vallendor series is best enjoyed in order. Reading Order: Book #1 The Last One Book #2 The Cruel Dawn

The Blue Hour

Paula Hawkins

An apparent human bone in a celebrated artist's sculpture sends a curator to her isolated island home. There he encounters the woman who guarded the artist's final years and a legacy marked by jealousies and disappearances. The investigation exposes how possession, artistic reputation, and hidden violence can become inseparable.

A Song to Drown Rivers

Ann Liang

Inspired by the legend of Xishi, the novel follows a young woman recruited to infiltrate a rival kingdom through her extraordinary beauty. Her training creates an intense bond with the adviser who sends her into danger. Inside the enemy court, political duty and personal feeling collide, making victory inseparable from sacrifice.

Colored Television

Danzy Senna

Jane hopes a year in a borrowed luxury home will allow her to finish an ambitious novel and secure her family's future. When her literary plans falter, she turns to television and collaborates with a powerful producer. The resulting entanglement satirizes cultural ambition, unstable creative work, and the commercial packaging of racial identity.

The Seventh Veil of Salome

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

An unknown Mexican actress wins a coveted role as Salome in a major 1950s Hollywood production, provoking a rival's resentment. Their competing ambitions unfold alongside the ancient princess's own story of desire and power. The novel examines fame, prejudice, and the ways women are turned into images others want to possess.

The Love of My Afterlife

Kirsty Greenwood

After an embarrassing death, Delphie meets an irresistible stranger in the afterlife, only for him to be sent back to Earth. She is offered a brief return to life if she can find him. Her frantic search gradually opens her isolated world to friendship, new possibilities, and a different understanding of love.

Malas

Marcela Fuentes

A curse spoken in a Texas border town in 1951 echoes through a family's later generations. Decades afterward, teenager Lulu befriends an outsider whose history may explain her family's wounds. Moving between two women's voices, the novel explores rebellion, inherited stories, and the difficult work of making peace with the past.

The Ministry of Time

Kaliane Bradley

A civil servant joins a government project that brings people from different historical periods into the present. Assigned to help a Victorian naval officer adapt, she develops feelings that complicate her professional role. Their relationship becomes entangled with political intrigue, colonial history, and unsettling questions about the real purpose of the experiment.

Just for the Summer

Abby Jimenez

Emma and Justin share a peculiar dating pattern: their exes find lasting love immediately after leaving them. They agree to date briefly in hopes of breaking the pattern, but family crises complicate their plan. What begins as a temporary summer arrangement becomes a test of emotional honesty, responsibility, and accepting a lasting connection.

Listen for the Lie

Amy Tintera

Years after being found covered in her best friend's blood, Lucy returns to her Texas hometown when a popular podcast reopens the unsolved murder. She cannot remember the night that made everyone suspect her. A renewed investigation forces her to confront local secrets and consider whether she might be guilty herself.

Come and Get It

Kiley Reid

Resident assistant Millie wants financial security and accepts an unusual opportunity from a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas. Dormitory tensions, personal desires, and ethically questionable research soon complicate their arrangement. The novel explores how money shapes relationships and how easily ambition turns other people's private lives into opportunities.

The Storm We Made

Vanessa Chan

In British-ruled Malaya, Cecily becomes involved with a Japanese intelligence officer and hopes to help end colonial domination. The resulting occupation brings devastating consequences for her family. Moving between espionage and wartime survival, the novel examines compromised choices, parental responsibility, and the gap between political promises and the suffering they produce.

The Frozen River

Ariel Lawhon

When a body is found in a frozen Maine river in 1789, midwife Martha Ballard suspects murder. The dead man was implicated in an assault she recorded in her diary, linking the discovery to a wider struggle for justice. Inspired by a real historical figure, the novel follows her resistance to powerful men and institutional prejudice.

Class

Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land recounts her efforts to complete a university education while supporting a child and living with persistent financial insecurity. Her pursuit of a writing career is repeatedly complicated by hunger, childcare, and judgments about who deserves assistance. The memoir examines motherhood, class barriers, and the unequal conditions under which people pursue the American dream.

The List

Yomi Adegoke

Journalist Ola is preparing to marry Michael when an anonymous online list names him among men accused of abuse. Her public commitments and private loyalties suddenly conflict. Told through the couple's perspectives, the novel follows the consequences of an allegation spreading through their workplaces and relationships, probing trust, accountability, and judgment in digital culture.

Happiness Falls

Angie Kim

A father disappears during an outing with his teenage son, who cannot communicate through speech. His daughter's effort to understand what happened reveals unexpected aspects of both her father and brother. The novel combines an urgent missing-person investigation with questions about language, assumptions about intelligence, and the limits of knowing those closest to us.

Family Lore

Elizabeth Acevedo

Flor can foresee deaths and startles her Dominican American relatives by deciding to hold a living wake for herself. As the gathering approaches, the family's women revisit their own histories, desires, and guarded truths. Several generations' voices create a portrait of sisterhood, inherited gifts, and the complicated ways families remember and protect one another.

Save What's Left

Elizabeth Castellano

After her husband leaves to rethink his life, Kathleen moves to an apparently idyllic seaside town. A huge construction project next door soon turns her fresh start into a campaign against neighbors and local officials. Through escalating complaints and unlikely friendships, the novel finds comedy in reinvention and the uneasy politics behind a beautiful coastal view.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Emma Törzs

Two estranged sisters have inherited duties involving magical books, but a threat to their family forces their separate lives together again. Their search intersects with a young man raised to write powerful spells under restrictive protection. Secrets about the books' origins draw them into a dangerous struggle over who may wield their magic.

The Nigerwife

Vanessa Walters

Nicole, a British woman married into a wealthy Nigerian family, disappears after a boat trip in Lagos. When her aunt arrives to investigate, the family's polished lifestyle begins to reveal troubling contradictions. Alternating perspectives uncover isolation, social pressure, and old secrets beneath an apparently privileged marriage. Later editions were published as The Lagos Wife.

Dirty Laundry

Disha Bose

An influential mother in a small Irish village appears to have a perfect family and enviable online life. Her relationships with an isolated newcomer and a scorned local mother expose a less flattering reality. When she is found dead, jealousies, private compromises, and carefully curated appearances become clues to a murder.

Pineapple Street

Jenny Jackson

Three women connected to an old-money Brooklyn family confront different versions of privilege. One has sacrificed a career for motherhood, one has married into a world that treats her as an outsider, and one is rethinking her inherited advantages. Their intersecting lives examine class, love, and the assumptions that wealth makes possible.

River Sing Me Home

Eleanor Shearer

In 1834 Barbados, Rachel discovers that slavery's official end still leaves her bound to compulsory labor. She escapes and searches across the Caribbean for the children who were sold away from her. Her dangerous journey becomes an exploration of what freedom means when a family has been scattered by violence and exploitation.

Age of Vice

Deepti Kapoor

A deadly collision in Delhi draws together a poor servant, a wealthy heir, and a journalist. Their intertwined histories expose the influence of a powerful family whose fortune rests on corruption and violence. Moving between luxury and deprivation, the novel explores how desire, loyalty, and unequal power trap people inside a criminal system.

The Light Pirate

Lily Brooks-Dalton

Born during a destructive Florida hurricane, Wanda grows up as rising seas and worsening storms make her home increasingly uninhabitable. Loss and adaptation lead her toward unexpected companionship in a landscape reclaimed by nature. The novel follows a life shaped by environmental collapse while asking what forms of beauty and belonging might remain.

Someday, Maybe

Onyi Nwabineli

After her husband's suicide, Eve struggles to understand a death that has shattered her apparently happy marriage. Her Nigerian family and friends try to support her, while grief resists any orderly timetable. The novel follows her difficult movement toward a changed life, exploring unanswered questions, familial love, and the uneven process of healing.

Mad Honey

Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan

A teenage girl's death leads to the arrest of her boyfriend and a trial that divides families. As his mother fights to understand what happened, another mother's history reveals the vulnerabilities hidden beneath their children's relationship. The novel combines a courtroom mystery with reflections on identity, prejudice, parenthood, and the limits of protection.

The Fortunes of Jaded Women

Carolyn Huynh

The women of a Vietnamese American family believe an ancestral curse has condemned them to unhappy love lives. A psychic's prediction of major changes brings estranged relatives back into one another's orbit. Set in Southern California's Little Saigon, the story follows meddling mothers, ambitious daughters, and the comic conflicts that accompany reconciliation.

Mika in Real Life

Emiko Jean

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA and READ WITH MARIE CLAIRE BOOK CLUB PICK! Named a best book by Glamour, Marie Claire, TIME, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and more! From New York Times bestselling Emiko Jean, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and utterly heartwarming novel about motherhood, daughterhood, and love—how we find it, keep it, and how it always returns. One phone call changes everything. At thirty-five, Mika Suzuki’s life is a mess. Her last relationship ended in flames. Her roommate-slash-best friend might be a hoarder. She’s a perpetual disappointment to her traditional Japanese parents. And, most recently, she’s been fired from her latest dead-end job. Mika is at her lowest point when she receives a phone call from Penny—the daughter she placed for adoption sixteen years ago. Penny is determined to forge a relationship with her birth mother, and in turn, Mika longs to be someone Penny is proud of. Faced with her own inadequacies, Mika embellishes a fact about her life. What starts as a tiny white lie slowly snowballs into a fully-fledged fake life, one where Mika is mature, put-together, and successful in love and her career. The details of Mika’s life might be an illusion, but everything she shares with curious, headstrong Penny is real: her hopes, dreams, flaws, and Japanese heritage. The harder-won heart belongs to Thomas Calvin, Penny’s adoptive widower father. What starts as a rocky, contentious relationship slowly blossoms into a friendship and, over time, something more. But can Mika really have it all—love, her daughter, the life she’s always wanted? Or will Mika’s deceptions ultimately catch up to her? In the end, Mika must face the truth—about herself, her family, and her past—and answer the question, just who is Mika in real life? Perfect for fans of Rebecca Serle and Jojo Moyes, Mika in Real Life is at once a heart-wrenching and uplifting novel that explores the weight of silence, the secrets we keep, and what it means to be a mother.

The Dead Romantics

Ashley Poston

A romance ghostwriter who has lost faith in love returns home after her father's death. There she encounters the ghost of her editor, a man with whom she has unfinished business. Their improbable relationship gives both of them a reason to reconsider connection, while confronting grief and the question of what it means to move on.

More Than You'll Ever Know

Katie Gutierrez

A true-crime writer becomes absorbed in the story of Lore, a woman who secretly maintained two marriages across the U.S.–Mexico border. One husband's murder appears to offer a sensational explanation, but interviews reveal a more complicated life. Past and present narratives examine divided loyalties and the costs of turning another woman's secrets into a story.

The Change

Kirsten Miller

Three middle-aged women discover unusual powers and join forces after the body of a young girl is found near their coastal community. Their investigation uncovers other victims and powerful people protected by wealth. The novel blends supernatural revenge with a murder mystery and a celebration of women refusing to remain overlooked.

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus

Chemist Elizabeth Zott faces a scientific establishment that refuses to treat her as an equal in the 1960s. Unexpectedly becoming the host of a cooking program, she uses the kitchen to teach principles that extend far beyond recipes. Her unconventional household and public success challenge assumptions about women's work, authority, and independence.

The Love of My Life

Rosie Walsh

Obituary writer Leo begins researching his wife's life after a serious illness threatens her future. The marine biologist he loves has concealed major parts of her identity, leaving him uncertain about their shared history. As the truth emerges, the novel explores whether love can survive revelations about a partner's past and deepest loyalties.

The Violin Conspiracy

Brendan Slocumb

Ray, a gifted Black violinist, overcomes financial obstacles and prejudice to pursue a classical music career. When his inherited instrument is identified as a priceless Stradivarius, success seems possible—until it is stolen before a major competition. His search for the violin also becomes a struggle over ownership, family history, and recognition of his talent.

The Maid

Nita Prose

Hotel maid Molly prizes order and struggles to interpret other people's intentions. Discovering a wealthy guest dead in his suite draws her into a murder investigation in which her unusual behavior makes her a suspect. With unexpected allies, she must unravel deception and learn which people deserve her trust.

Dava Shastri's Last Day

Kirthana Ramisetti

Terminally ill billionaire Dava summons her adult children and arranges for her death to be reported early so she can read her own obituaries. The coverage exposes secrets instead of simply celebrating her philanthropy. As her family reacts, she must confront the distance between a carefully managed public legacy and the private consequences of her choices.

Still Life

Sarah Winman

An English soldier meets an art historian in wartime Tuscany, beginning a connection that shapes decades of his life. After returning to London, an inheritance draws him back to Italy and toward an unconventional family. The novel follows friendship, art, and love across historical upheavals, celebrating the communities people create beyond blood relationships.

We Are Not Like Them

Christine Pride, Jo Piazza

Lifelong friends Riley and Jen find themselves on opposing sides of a police shooting: Riley is a Black journalist covering the case, and Jen's white husband is one of the officers involved. Their bond is tested by professional obligations, grief, and public scrutiny. Alternating voices explore racial injustice and the difficulty of honest intimacy across different experiences.

Several People Are Typing

Calvin Kasulke

Gerald's consciousness becomes trapped inside his employer's Slack system, where colleagues initially assume his predicament is a joke. While he seeks a way back to his body, the office continues its chaotic business through chat messages. Told entirely in workplace exchanges, the novel turns remote-work culture, productivity demands, and digital connection into an absurd comedy.

The Husbands

Chandler Baker

Attorney Nora is exhausted by the unequal burden of managing a career and household. A prospective neighborhood seems full of successful women whose husbands provide unusually perfect support. While handling a resident's wrongful-death case, she discovers unsettling clues about how this harmony is maintained. The mystery examines domestic labor and the fantasies surrounding having it all.

The Personal Librarian

Heather Terrell , Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray

Belle da Costa Greene becomes J. P. Morgan's librarian and builds a remarkable collection of rare books and art. To succeed within elite society, she conceals her African American heritage and passes as white. This fictionalized account explores the achievement, personal compromises, and constant vulnerability behind her influential cultural career.

The Other Black Girl

Zakiya Dalila Harris

Nella is the only Black editorial assistant at her publishing house until Hazel arrives, apparently offering welcome companionship. Instead, Hazel gains favor as Nella receives threatening notes and finds herself increasingly isolated. The workplace rivalry develops into an unsettling mystery about racial conformity, ambition, and the price of succeeding within a supposedly progressive institution.

Olympus, Texas

Stacey Swann

March returns to his East Texas hometown after an affair with his brother's wife tore through their family. His arrival reignites jealousies and unresolved resentments, and a death soon destabilizes the entire community. Drawing on classical mythology, the novel turns tangled marriages and sibling rivalries into a modern examination of destructive love.

Of Women and Salt

Gabriela Garcia

A Cuban American woman in Miami seeks to understand her family's past while struggling with addiction and a difficult relationship with her mother. Her encounter with a neighbor's daughter opens another history shaped by migration and detention. Interwoven generations reveal how survival, silence, and political upheaval leave their mark on women's lives.

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara, an artificial companion designed for young people, carefully studies the humans she hopes to serve. When she joins a household, her observations of love, illness, and social difference reveal both her insight and her limitations. The novel explores what makes a person irreplaceable and how technology changes the meaning of care. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love? In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro's books as "novels of great emotional force" and said he has "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.""

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

Cherie Jones

In a Barbadian resort town, a failed burglary brings together people divided by race, class, and access to safety. A young mother trapped in a violent marriage and a wealthy visitor enduring loss become part of the ensuing tragedy. Their connected stories expose the brutality concealed beneath a tourist image of paradise.

The Push

Ashley Audrain

Blythe is determined to give her daughter the nurturing childhood she never had, but she becomes increasingly worried by the child's behavior. Her husband dismisses her fears, deepening her uncertainty about her own perceptions. A later tragedy forces a reckoning with motherhood, inherited trauma, and what happens when a woman's account is not believed.

This Time Next Year

Sophie Cousens

Minnie and Quinn were born minutes apart on New Year's Day, a coincidence Minnie believes stole her good fortune. Meeting again on their thirtieth birthday brings together two adults whose circumstances appear very different. Repeated encounters challenge her assumptions about luck and reveal how childhood stories can obscure the possibility of love.

Memorial

Bryan Washington

Benson and Mike's relationship in Houston has reached an uncertain point when Mike travels to Japan to see his dying father. Mike's visiting mother stays behind with Benson, creating an unexpected domestic partnership. Their separate experiences reveal family wounds and new forms of care, forcing both men to reconsider what they want from their shared life.

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig

Nora enters a library between life and death where books offer access to the lives she might have led. Trying alternate careers, relationships, and choices, she searches for an existence free from regret. The journey challenges her assumptions about success and happiness while asking how a person decides that their own life is worth living.

Fifty Words for Rain

Asha Lemmie

Set in Kyoto in 1948, the novel follows eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza, the daughter of a Japanese aristocrat and an African American soldier. After her mother leaves her with her powerful grandparents, Nori is hidden away because of her mixed-race heritage and subjected to harsh treatment intended to conceal what the family views as a threat to its reputation. Her isolated life begins to change when she meets her older half-brother, Akira, and forms a deep bond with him. As Nori grows older, she begins to challenge the expectations placed upon her and search for acceptance, independence, and a life of her own. The novel explores family, prejudice, identity, love, loss, and freedom across postwar Japan and beyond.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue

Fiona Davis

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller! “A page-turner for booklovers everywhere! . . . A story of family ties, their lost dreams, and the redemption that comes from discovering truth.”—Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Shoemaker's Wife In New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis's latest historical novel, a series of book thefts roils the iconic New York Public Library, leaving two generations of strong-willed women to pick up the pieces. It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. And when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may just lose everything in the process. Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she's wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie's running begin disappearing from the library's famous Berg Collection. Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the typically risk-averse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own family heritage—truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the library's history.

Sex and Vanity

Kevin Kwan

Lucie, born into a privileged mixed-race family, meets George during a glamorous wedding on Capri and resists her attraction to him. Their paths cross again years later, disrupting her engagement and carefully ordered social world. Inspired by A Room with a View, the novel satirizes status while examining cultural identity and romantic self-deception.

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

Twin sisters leave their small Louisiana community and eventually choose different racial identities: one returns to raise a Black daughter, while the other passes as white. Their separation shapes the next generation, whose lives later intersect. The novel explores colorism, identity, family ties, and the lasting emotional consequences of trying to escape one's origins.

The Book of V.

Anna Solomon

The stories of biblical Esther, a senator's wife in the 1970s, and a contemporary Brooklyn mother unfold in parallel. Each woman confronts expectations about marriage, sexuality, and acceptable female behavior. Their connections create a meditation on women's power and the ways social rules change across time while continuing to constrain individual lives.

Oona Out of Order

Margarita Montimore

On her nineteenth birthday, Oona begins living the years of her adult life in an unpredictable order. Each new birthday places her in another age, relationship, and set of circumstances she cannot fully understand. Her disordered chronology turns familiar choices about music, money, and love into an exploration of identity, uncertainty, and acceptance.

In Five Years

Rebecca Serle

After becoming engaged, meticulous lawyer Dannie briefly awakens five years in the future beside a different man. She returns to the present determined to follow her original plans, but later encounters the stranger through her closest friend. The unexplained glimpse complicates her assumptions about love, friendship, and the future she believes she can control.

Long Bright River

Liz Moore

Philadelphia police officer Mickey patrols the same neighborhood where her estranged sister Kacey struggles with addiction. When Kacey disappears during a series of murders, Mickey's investigation becomes intensely personal. Alternating the search with their shared childhood, the novel explores family loyalty, the opioid crisis, and the vulnerabilities hidden behind an officer's uniform.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance

Tomi Adeyemi

After restoring magic to Orïsha, Zélie and Amari discover that their victory has also empowered members of the nobility. Rival factions and a threatened civil war make unity increasingly difficult. This second installment in the Legacy of Orïsha series explores the responsibilities of leadership and the danger of reproducing the oppression a rebellion sought to end.

The Family Upstairs

Lisa Jewell

Libby inherits a London mansion and begins investigating the circumstances of her birth and the deaths once discovered there. Other people connected to the house are also drawn toward its buried history. Interwoven timelines reveal how an apparently welcoming household became a place of manipulation, coercion, and devastating family secrets.

Dominicana

Angie Cruz

Fifteen-year-old Ana marries an older man and moves from the Dominican Republic to New York in hopes of helping her family immigrate. Isolated in her apartment, she gradually discovers opportunities for language, friendship, and freedom. Set in the 1960s, the novel follows her struggle to balance family obligation with a life of her own.