Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close: Here are the three things the Sullivan family knows to be true: the Chicago Cubs will always be the underdogs; historical progress is inevitable; and their grandfather, Bud, founder of JP Sullivan’s, will always make the best burgers in Oak Park. But when, over the course of three strange months, the Cubs win the World Series, Trump is elected president, and Bud drops dead, suddenly everyone in the family finds themselves doubting all they hold dear. Outrageously funny and wickedly astute, Marrying the Ketchups is a delicious confection by one of our most beloved authors.
Fairy Tale by Stephen King: Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours. A story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.
People Person by Candice Carty-Williams: If you could choose your family…you wouldn’t choose the Penningtons. Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. People Person is a vibrant and charming celebration of discovering family as an adult.
A Feather on the Water by Lindsay Jayne Ashford: Just weeks after World War II ends, three women from different corners of the world arrive in Germany to run a displaced-persons camp. They long to help rebuild shattered lives—including their own. Charged with the care of more than two thousand camp residents, Martha, Delphine, and Kitty draw on each other’s strength to endure and to give hope when all seems lost. Among these strangers and survivors, they might find the love and closure they need to heal their hearts and leave their troubled pasts behind.
Robert B. Parker’s Fallout by Mike Lupica: The small town of Paradise is devastated when a star high-school baseball player is found dead at the bottom of a bluff just a day after winning the team’s biggest game. For Jesse, the loss is doubly difficult—the dead teen was the nephew of his colleague, Suitcase Simpson, and Jesse had been coaching the young shortstop. As he searches for answers about how the boy died and why, he is stonewalled at every turn, and it seems that someone is determined to keep him from digging further.
The Woman Could Fly by Megan Giddings: Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother’s disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman–especially a Black woman–can find herself on trial for witchcraft. In this powerful and timely novel, Megan Giddings explores the limits women face–and the powers they have to transgress and transcend them.
Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen: Right off the coast of South Carolina, on Mallow Island, The Dellawisp sits. It’s named after the tiny turquoise birds who, alongside its human tenants, inhabit an air of magical secrecy. When Zoey comes to claim her deceased mother’s apartment at the Dellawisp she meets her quirky and secretive neighbors, including a young woman with a past, two estranged middle-aged sisters, and a lonely chef, and three ghosts. The sudden death of one of Zoey’s new neighbors sets off a search that leads to the island’s famous author and to a long-estranged relative of the sisters.
On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton: At home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore. On the Rooftop is a stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives—set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco.
The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith: The latest installment in the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Strike series finds Cormoran and Robin ensnared in another winding, wicked case .When frantic, disheveled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation. The co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie’s true identity.