Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her. Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic. When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. And the highwayman? He just so happens to be the King’s nephew, Captain of the most dangerous men in Blunder…and guilty of high treason. Together they must gather twelve Providence Cards—the keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

In this “vivid and immersive” (Liz Moore) debut, Eli Raphael conjures the windswept coast of Washington State and a boarding school steeped in privilege and deadly secrets—a remarkable story of grief, power, and the dangerous price of belonging.It is true that I wished him dead dozens of times. Hundreds, even. But I, Lenny Winter, did not kill that boy.    Lenny Winter is fifteen years old when she moves with her parents to an aging houseboat off the rugged coast of Washington. She imagines a quiet life spent charting constellations and chasing her dream of becoming an astronomer. Instead, a sudden tragedy shatters her world and catapults her to Blanchard, a renowned boarding school for the Pacific Northwest's elite, where wealth and tradition rule.   Blanchard is dazzling, insular–and haunted by its own legends. At its heart lurks the Pascalianum Club, a secret society known to shape the school's greatest and most notorious students, and whose influence stretches far beyond campus walls. Hungry to belong, Lenny is drawn into its orbit, even as she senses that the club feeds on the very vulnerabilities she is desperate to hide. As privilege collides with grief and loyalty warps into obsession, Lenny’s choices will lead to an unforgettable reckoning—and a murder investigation that will test every story she tells herself about guilt, power, hope, and who she is becoming. Sweeping, suspenseful, and deeply moving, Bright Work is both a gripping mystery and a profound coming-of-age story—asking what we risk, what we become, and who we hold dear, when the need to belong eclipses everything else.

Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining. “You always wanted magic to be real.” Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common both Korean American teenagers, raised by a single mother, each searching for her identity in the California suburbs. But during finals week, high schooler V experiences strange impulses during a last-day celebration with her friends and ends up crawling into the hollow trunk of an immense tree. That night, after breaking into a raging fever, V sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her a script that flows between her and her mother, leading to Sharon’s long-forgotten diary. With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s uncontrollable memories spill onto the old diary pages. Unexpectedly, V witnesses Sharon as she maps out her time at college in the form of lost histories, diagrams, and drawings. Young Sharon once accepted a backhanded invitation to Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college as storied and white as Camelot. Here legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over narratives that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one—until Sharon’s discoveries began to crack open Alvsdahl’s secrets. Her bewitching narrative of classroom rivalries and animal professors, debauchery in the woods and sleeping princesses, threatening Godmothers and world-shattering powers, unfold as V desperately tries to help her mother—only to see how Sharon’s story is destined to transform them both. Lyrically written and highly imaginative, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering on two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies and family sagas that connect us all together.