“War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.” – R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War
Doll Parts by Penny Zang
fiction / mystery / suspense.
For best friends Nikki and Sadie, college was supposed to be a fresh start, a way to blast Courtney Love from car speakers and leave their youth behind. But along with sadness-obsessed girls and intrusive professors, a dark story plagues their small all-women’s school: the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the deaths of multiple Sylvia Plath-adoring students, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the tragic tales, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. As she digs deeper, Nikki soon suspects there’s much more to the story – a suspicion that will lead to a tragedy of its own, one that will tear her and Sadie apart.
It’s been nearly twenty years since Sadie last saw her estranged friend. Now, Nikki is dead, and when Sadie ends up pregnant by Nikki’s grieving husband not long after the funeral, she finds herself stepping into her ex-best friend’s seemingly perfect life. But the longer Sadie lives in Nikki’s eerily preserved home, the more she sees her appear and soon, she’s convinced that Nikki is sending her clues from beyond the grave. Because it seems Nikki never stopped looking for answers about what happened to the girls of the Sylvia Club, and she may have been its latest victim.
“[A] compelling debut… Book group clubbers will come for the thoughtful exploration of serious themes, while fans in search of character-rich, academia-set suspense tales will enjoy the twisty plot.” – John Charles, Library Journal
“Zang’s debut uses two perspectives—one of a dead woman, the other of her grieving best friend—to paint a comprehensive picture of a complex mystery… uses music to transport readers back in time; elder millennials and Gen Xers will appreciate the nostalgia from bands like Garbage and Hole.” – Cari Dubiel, Booklist
Forget Me Not by Stacy Willingham ★
fiction / suspense / mystery.
Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist… until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.
With the entire summer now looming ahead―a summer spent with nothing to do in her childhood home, with her estranged mother―Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. At first glance, Galloway is an idyllic escape for Claire. A scenic retreat full of slow-paced nostalgia, as well as a place where her sister seemed truly happy in that last summer before she vanished, it feels like the perfect plan to pass the time. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard’s owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary’s contents… as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister’s disappearance may be somehow tied to it all.
Galloway was supposed to be a place to help her move forward, but instead, Claire quickly finds herself immersed in her own dark and dangerous past.
“[A] compelling suspense ride, full of twists and turns avid followers of her couldn’t even imagine. Much like the diary in Willingham’s current book, Forget Me Not is hard to put down after you’ve read the first few chapters. Totally consume yourself in this southern suspense novel.” – Jeff Walker, Charleston.com
“[A] gripping thriller packed with twists that will keep readers on edge until the final page… Fans of Sally Hepworth and Kate Alice Marshall will enjoy the novel’s Southern heat, slow-burning tension, and suspense.” – Kerri Copus, Library Journal
“Claire and Marcia’s narratives are cleverly alternated to leverage paranoia and twists; this is prime binge-reading.” – Christine Tran, Booklist
“…you can hear secrets creaking in every chapter… a Southern gothic whirlpool of memory, grief, and almost unbearable suspense… Willingham knows how to place ‘bombs under the table’ — building suspense Hitchcock-style, so you squirm without knowing exactly when the shoe will drop.” – Jeff Murdock, Medium
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang ★
fiction / fantasy / romance.
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams…
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies… or lead to their doom.
“I’d follow R. F. Kuang anywhere — and that includes hell! Deep, dark, and atmospheric, Katabasis balances academia and danger perfectly, solidifying Kuang as an expert in the genre.” – Kassie King, The Indie Next List, AUGUST 2025 #1 PICK
“[A] simultaneous satire of and love letter to academia. At turns hilarious and sobering, Katabasis explores the hells we create for ourselves, as Peter and Alice consider the delusions they wrap themselves in and the sacrifices they’ve made to get this far. Witty, propulsive, feral, and clever.” – Leah von Essen, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“…brilliant… Katabasis is bitingly funny dark academia, bursting at its binding with philosophical Easter eggs, social commentary, cultural analysis, and the perfect amount of absurdity… It is rare to encounter a story that can be described as both ‘light imaginative escapism’ and ‘dense philosophical exploration’, but Kuang’s linguistic magic strikes a paradoxical balance between these contradictions and more. This book will resonate with academics, overthinkers, and those whose belief defies just enough reality to reveal both sides of a mobius strip.” – Nanci Nott, Arts Hub
“Despite the otherworldly premise, the novel dives deep into painful and all-too-real experiences… compelling and gratifying… The way Kuang captures Alice’s desire for oblivion is one of the more impressive threads of the book… Katabasis shines with devastatingly real characters and absorbing world building. Kuang’s sentences are delicious, her insights well-earned and deeply affecting… Katabasis isn’t always easy, but it is always enjoyable, and that’s a near impossible feat. Only a writer as thoughtful and skilled as Kuang could make a literal journey through hell so fun and so poignant.” – Kiersten White, New York Times
The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by David Baron
nonfiction / history / science / space.
“There Is Life on the Planet Mars” – New York Times, December 9, 1906
This New York Times headline was no joke.
In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania.
At the center of Baron’s historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed “canals” etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books.
While at first people treated the Martians whimsically―Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled―the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was “no escape from the conviction” that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile’s Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals’ existence.
Triumph quickly yielded to tragedy. Those wild claims and highly speculative photographs emboldened Lowell’s critics, whose withering attacks gathered steam and eventually wrecked the man and his theory―but not the fervor he had started. Although Lowell would die discredited and delusional in 1916, the Mars frenzy spurred a nascent literary genre called science fiction, and the world’s sense of its place in the universe would never be the same.
Today, the red planet maintains its grip on the public’s imagination. Many see Mars as civilization’s destiny―the first step toward our becoming an interplanetary species―but, as David Baron demonstrates, this tendency to project our hopes onto the world next door is hardly new. The Martians is a scintillating and necessary reminder that while we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.
“[A] captivating and vivid history… an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“David Baron delves into the astonishing historical evidence of the Mars mania that swept the nation at the turn of the 20th century. Whether you believe in UFOs or not… the truth can be stranger than fiction.” – B&N Reads
“This Boulder-based author has a knack for dredging rich characters from the annals of science. In this book, he shadows the astronomers who, at the dawn of 20th century, fell for and promoted a conspiracy theory so outlandish that it would be hard to believe by even today’s standards. But the book offers more than just an engrossing and often comical read; it trains a telescope on our own world, revealing a darker side of scientific ambition that can be both troubling and deeply inspiring.” – Kevin Simpson, The Colorado Sun
Sleepaway Camp: The Novelization by B.R. Flynn; based on the original screenplay by Robert Hiltzik
fiction / horror.
It’s the summer of ’83. The sun is blazing, the shorts are cut high, and at Camp Arawak the bodies are starting to pile up.
In this fearless reimagining, author B.R. Flynn resurrects the cult classic Sleepaway Camp with empathy, insight, and a gloriously twisted love for the golden age of slashers. Whether you’re a diehard fan or a first-time camper, this is the blood-soaked, scream-filled summer you won’t forget.
For Angela Baker, Camp Arawak is supposed to be a fresh start-a place to meet new friends, enjoy summer days, and leave behind the shadows of her past. But the ghosts of her trauma are never far behind. Quiet, withdrawn, and painfully misunderstood, Angela doesn’t fit in among the loud, often vicious campers.
But something else lurks beneath the surface of Camp Arawak-a darkness that stretches beyond Angela’s fragile world. And as tensions rise and bodies fall, Angela begins to change. Something inside her is stirring…
Sleepaway Camp: The Novelization is a profoundly unsettling coming-of-age tale where the true horror lies in how the world treats those it refuses to understand-digging deeper with every page into the genre, into the past, and into the wounds we try to hide.
“This one digs deep into the mind of Angela Baker, reimagined for a modern horror audience in a way that’s equal parts brutal, emotional, and unapologetically honest… This one swings for the jugular.” – TBM Horror
“It does everything a novelization should do.” – The Geek’s Attic
“Flynn masterfully took a silly slasher from the 80s and turned it into a powerful statement for the transgender community. For fans of the franchise, slashers, or horror in general, this is a must-read.” – James Gass IV, Rotten Reads
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews ★
nonfiction / memoir.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
“[A] haunting meditation on writing and death… Toews’s prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks… At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller.” – Kirkus Reviews
“The psychological acuity, imagination, vividness, and wise humor that shape her novels, including Women Talking and Fight Night, energize Toews’ creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing memoir… the reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Toews’ new genre-bending memoir — an astute reflection on both the significance and the inadequacy of language, a bittersweet and often wry retelling of impactful moments from her life, and a profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss — is nothing short of a masterpiece.” – Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
fiction.
Two Serious Ladies is the only novel ever written by the legendary and underappreciated Jane Bowles. Long held as a visionary cult classic, this subversive, anarchic, and riotous novel follows two upper-class women as they strip themselves of propriety and descend into debauchery—and it now appears with a new introduction by Sheila Heti.
Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield each embark on their own voyage of discovery and emancipation. Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, but finds herself descending into a shadowy and seedy demimonde of brothels and bars, while Miss Goering engages in increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. At the end, the two women meet again, each transformed by her experience—and the reader transformed by the devastating wit and strange clarity with which Bowles writes of society and women’s place in it.
“[A] conspicuously strange novel… required reading… [Bowles is] on a stylistic planet all her own.” – Negar Azimi, The New Yorker
“The book is amazing, a confounding, energetic picaresque suffused with sinister humor and dark delight… Nearly three-quarters of a century after its publication, Two Serious Ladies is still strange, still strong, still ahead of its time.” – Edwin Turner, Biblioklept
“The best book of 1943… The dialogue is uncanny – it sounds both modern and antiquated, American and European, banal and hilarious – and it is the source of the book’s genius… Characters and surroundings are rendered artfully, minimally, bestowing the gift of mystery to the reader… the entire book might call into question what a novel should look like. This is not a small accomplishment.” – Kathryn Scanlan, Granta
Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power by Vonda Wright, MD
nonfiction / health / self help.
Strong skeletal muscle drives healthy longevity yet too often women in particular neglect this important measure of fitness. Indeed, more than 70% of women experience musculoskeletal symptoms like joint pain, muscle loss, and reduced bone density as they enter perimenopause and menopause. These symptoms—what Dr. Vonda Wright refers to as the “musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause”—can often set us up for osteoporosis, osteopenia, broken bones, increasingly limited mobility, and reduced independence later in life. That trend stops now. Unbreakable outlines a new and direct path to protecting ourselves against this too-common fate.
Drawing on her decades of experience as a pioneering orthopedic surgeon helping women at all fitness levels to repair their bones and regain strength, Dr. Wright gives clear action steps to shield us from the timebombs of aging in four critical categories:
Exercise: Pinpointing the right combination of cardio and resistance training for you to aid in tissue regeneration and improve metabolic function.
Nutrition: What to eat to extinguish inflammation, repopulate your gut biome, and support strong bones and muscle growth.
Lifestyle: How to manage chronic stress, get more restorative sleep, and turn down systemic inflammation in your daily life.
Supplements: What to take to target the elimination of “zombie cells” and improve your cell function.
Including a six-week, master exercise protocol to jumpstart skeletal and muscular strength, critical information about baseline blood and mobility tests that will help you understand your current health state, and twenty easy, anti-inflammatory recipes, Unbreakable is an invaluable guide to adding more vibrantly healthy life to your years.
“Sexist beliefs that women should be thin and weak are being knocked out by messages from doctors and celebrities saying building muscle mass is key to longevity wellness… How people age is determined not by ‘bad genes,’ Wright said, but the time and energy invested in building healthy lifestyle habits.” – Ashley May, Axios
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