In the vein of Lisa Jewell's None of This Is True, Daphne Woolsoncroft, host of the popular true crime podcast Going West, pens her chilling debut thriller which follows late‑night call-in radio host Nola Strate who is fearful that The Hiding Man, a serial killer she escaped from years ago, has resurfaced. Nola Strate is being watched, again. After an encounter with a notorious serial killer in the Pacific Northwest as a child, Nola has grown up and tried her best to forget her traumatizing night with The Hiding Man. She installed security cameras outside her Oregon home, never spoke of her experience, and now hosts Night Watch, a popular radio call-in show her semi‑famous father used to run. When coincidences lead Nola to believe that she is being stalked, and a caller on Night Watch has a live incident with an intruder in the caller's home, the description of whom is chillingly familiar, Nola is convinced that The Hiding Man has resurfaced and is coming for her. With a mysterious next‑door neighbor lurking in the shadows, more people getting hurt, the police not taking her concerns seriously, and evidence pointing towards her own father, Nola decides to become, like her listeners, a Night Watcher herself, and uncover the monster behind The Hiding Man's mask.

A gorgeous memoir about the sudden end to a seemingly happy marriage—an aching, love-filled, and transcendent account of surviving betrayal and discovering joyOn a chilly day in early spring, Belle Burden’s husband of twenty years announced, with no prior warning, that he was leaving her. Belle was shocked; he had always been a committed partner and a devoted father to their three children. She thought they were in love. She thought he—they—were living the life they'd always professional success, summers at their beloved beachside home, a vibrant social life. But overnight, her caring, steady husband became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.In Strangers, Belle revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone whose nickname was “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love and rediscovers trust in herself. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

Two sisters examine what they owe each other and what they are willing to sacrifice to make their family dreams come true. Mia and Cricket have always been close. The gifted daughters of a young single mother, the “Lowe girls” are well-known in their small Maine hometown. Each sister has a role to fill: The responsible and academically minded Mia assumes the position of caregiver far too young, while Cricket, a bouncing ball of energy and talent, seems born for soccer stardom. But the cost of achieving athletic greatness comes at a steep price. As Mia and Cricket grow up, they must grapple with the legacy of their mother’s secret past while navigating their own precarious future. Can Mia allow herself to fall in love at the risk of repeating a terrible history? Will Cricket’s relentless chase of a lifelong goal drive away her sister? When does loyalty become self-sabotage?

Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us? And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence. Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.

A swoony second-chance romance where facing the one who broke your heart could be the thing that makes your dream come true.Twenty-five-year-old Paige Lancaster is one contract away from earning a living doing her favorite thing in the world: writing songs. But when a music industry professional suggests she might be holding back with her lyrics to lessen the heartbreak of an old flame, Paige doubts if her music is ready to be heard.In a rare, impulsive move, Paige contacts Liam Bishop after four years of no contact to ask him for a small favor: date her, and then re-break her heart, all so she can remember what those big, songworthy emotions felt like. And since Liam is the one who first set Paige on this career path, he hesitantly agrees.Across three months of Liam’s summer work travel, the exes are forced to share hotel beds, rehash the past, and date in the present, all while navigating the building attraction between them they both swore was the one line of their agreement they wouldn’t cross.But when it becomes near impossible not to act on their rippling chemistry, and as ever intensifying feelings blur the lines of what’s actually real and what’s driven by the music, Paige and Liam will both have to decide what’s more important: art for the sake of it, or love over everything.

Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel).

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER! From a global star and International Booker Prize finalist, a razor-sharp, unforgettable novel about a maid who’s seen too much and a family at a breaking point A young girl has died and the family’s maid is being interrogated. She must tell the whole story before arriving at the girl’s death. Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: “smart appearance, full time,” their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion as she grew up, the mother’s coldness, the father’s distance. She saw it all. After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.

On the day Chareeya is born, her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From then on, Chareey's life is fated to carry the weight of her parents' disappointments. She and her sister grow up in a lush riverside town near the Thai capital, Bangkok, captivated by trashy romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. When the laconic orphan, Pran, enters their world, he unwittingly lures the sisters into a labyrinth of their own making as they each try to escape their intertwined fates. The original Thai langaue edition of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the prestigious South East Asian Writers ("S.E.A. Write") Award for fiction and was best-seller in Thailand. It is translated into English by Thai film critic and recipient of France's Chevalier dans I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kong Rithdee. Attuned to the addictive rhythms of a Thai soap opera and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window onto the Thai heart.

Excellent Book

Remy Pendergast is many things: the only son of the Duke of Valenbonne (though his father might wish otherwise), an elite bounty hunter of rogue vampires, and an outcast among his fellow Reapers. His mother was the subject of gossip even before she eloped with a vampire, giving rise to the rumors that Remy is half-vampire himself. Though the kingdom of Aluria barely tolerates him, Remy’s father has been shaping him into a weapon to fight for the kingdom at any cost. When a terrifying new breed of vampire is sighted outside of the city, Remy prepares to investigate alone. But then he encounters the shockingly warmhearted vampire heiress Xiaodan Song and her infuriatingly arrogant fiancé, vampire lord Zidan Malekh, who may hold the key to defeating the creatures—though he knows associating with them won’t do his reputation any favors. When he’s offered a spot alongside them to find the truth about the mutating virus Rot that’s plaguing the kingdom, Remy faces a choice. It’s one he’s certain he’ll regret. But as the three face dangerous hardships during their journey, Remy develops fond and complicated feelings for the couple. He begins to question what he holds true about vampires, as well as the story behind his own family legacy. As the Rot continues to spread across the kingdom, Remy must decide where his loyalties lie: with his father and the kingdom he’s been trained all his life to defend or the vampires who might just be the death of him.

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy. The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book. But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

Librarian's Note: This is the entry for the short story collection. Please don't combine it with the short story of the same name. A triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, misogyny, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men. Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work. In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently. In “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions. And in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.  Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.

The hitherto anonymous author of Olivia is now known to be Dorothy Bussy, sister of Lytton Strachey. Her book is a daring but delicately perfect story of an English schoolgirl's 'crush' on her woman teacher in a French finishing school; and her alarm and shame to find all love's expected symptoms burst into her heart at once - the helpless agony, the uncontrollable joy, the feeling of every new experience being unrepeatable... Olivia is a simple, beautiful and painfully vivid reminder that nevr in our lives do we love so deeply, desperately, selflessly, as during adolescence.

One night. No strings. And a really good puck. Five years ago, Astrid O’Malley experienced the ultimate in public humiliation. Being dumped at the altar by her childhood sweetheart was horrifying enough. That fact that he was a professional hockey goalie and her dad was his coach? It was all anyone in sports could talk about. Eff hockey. Eff goalies. These days, Astrid lives a life (mostly) free of hockey and free to pursue whoever she wants with exactly zero shame in her game. Like tonight’s hook-up. This guy’s nailed the lumberjack aesthetic perfectly. Especially when he has the stamina and creativity to back it up. Because the rule is: it’s one night only. Which is gonna be a problem because she’s just discovered he lives in the apartment upstairs. And he’s joined her dad’s team. As the goalie coach. To train her ex. Now Astrid is in some kind of hockey hell–filled with her ex, her family, and the best sex of her life. And somehow she’s been roped back onto the team. Puck my life.