New Books

This is my favorite book of 2026, and I doubt that anything I read in the next three months will knock it off the tippy top of my yearly top ten list. I feel like this book was written for me—and anyo... (Liz)

For everyone waiting for Bonnie Garmus’s follow-up to her brilliant Lessons in Chemistry in 2022, it’s finally here. Peck & Peck is a New York poetry journal run by twin brothers, who also hate ea... (Doree)

The phrase that kept coming to mind as I read Lady X was “incandescent female rage.” Set in 1977 and 2024, the ingrained sexism inherent in both times sets the stage for women taking matters into thei... (Doree)

The Solo-Millers are complacently wealthy, inevitably good-looking, and eccentrically old-fashioned. Are they paragons of good behavior and high standards? Or are they smug monsters? And is Polly, the... (Tom)

Gabby, decked out in a tutu, cape, crown, and spatula, proclaims it's time for a parade. And whatever Gabby says, people tend to listen. She and her gramma make their way down the city street, adding... (Haley)

More than half a million people walk the Camino de Santiago each year, and each person has their own reason for doing so. Lotte, a middle-aged wife, mother, and chocolatier from the Netherlands, is wa... (Doree)

Katie Clapham is an author and bookstore owner in the small English seaside town of Lytham St Annes. I've been enjoying her weekly Substack newsletter, where she recounts the highs, the lows, the quir... (Haley)

What would you do to have more time with the people you love most? Would you go to the ends of the earth? Test new scientific theories about time? Laurel and Eli are scientists who face an unimaginabl... (Doree)

This masterclass in historical fiction has a long, slow-burning fuse and a culmination that blew me away. Along with expert world (re)building and insightful character (re)animation is a key feature o... (Liz)

Braiding has taken elementary school class 203 by storm—they're even braiding shoelaces! But Noah doesn't have anything to braid. His teacher tears a classroom rag into strips, which become the start... (Haley)

The Wild Beneath is an epic love story as well as a love letter to the ocean: its danger, mystery, and beauty. In the aftermath of a Pacific Northwest tsunami, Annie—who has lived on a sailboat nearly... (Anika)

Like the authors of some of my favorite recent memoirs—Hilary Peach's Thick Skin, Finn Murphy's The Long Haul, Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt—Paré-Poupart had access to the class-elevating levers of edu... (Tom)

This is only my second time reading SGJ, but this novella has made me a fan. This Indigenous coming-of-age story is short but deep, subtle yet horrifying. After Junior's father dies in an accidental d... (Anika)

“One morning/the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,/and didn’t see me—and I thought:/so this is the world./I’m not in it./It is beautiful.” There is a reverent curiosity in Mary Oliver... (Shane)