Nail Biters (09/16/2025): Society of Lies

September 17, 2025 Spinecrackers

Maya has returned to Princeton for her college reunion – it’s been a decade since she graduated, and this visit is special because she will also be attending the graduation of her little sister, Naomi.
But what should have been a dream weekend becomes Maya’s worst nightmare when she receives the news that Naomi is dead. The police are calling it an accident, but Maya suspects that there is more to the story than they are letting on.

As Maya pieces together what happened in the months leading up to her sister’s death, she begins to realise how much Naomi hid from her. Despite Maya’s warnings, Naomi had joined Sterling Club, the most exclusive social club on campus – the same one Maya belonged to. And if she had to guess, Naomi was likely tapped for the secret society within it.

Maya knows that her sister isn’t the first person in the society to turn up dead. Now every clue is leading Maya back to the past . . . and to the secret she’s been keeping all these years. […]

Forever Young (10/13/2025): The Weight of Blood

September 12, 2025 Forever Young

When Springville residents—at least the ones still alive—are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation … Maddy did it.

An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she’s dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.

After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High’s racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to host the school’s first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it’s possible to have a normal life.

But some of her classmates aren’t done with her just yet. And what they don’t know is that Maddy still has another secret … one that will cost them all their lives. […]

Stranger than Fiction (10/07/2025): In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust

September 12, 2025 Stranger Than Fiction

These powerfully illuminating and inspiring profiles pay tribute to the incredible deeds of the Righteous Among the Nations, little-known heroes who saved countless lives during the Holocaust. Less than a century ago, the Second World War took the lives of more than fifty million people; more than six million of them were systematically exterminated through crimes of such enormity that a new name to describe the horror was coined: the Holocaust. Yet amid such darkness, there were glimmers of light—courageous individuals who risked everything to save those hunted by the Nazis.

Today, as bigotry and intolerance and the threats of fascism and authoritarianism are ascendent once again, these heroes’ little-known stories—among the most remarkable in human history—resonate powerfully. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, has recognized more than 27,000 individuals as “Righteous Among the Nations”—non-Jewish people such as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler who risked their lives to save their persecuted neighbors.

In the Garden of the Righteous chronicles extraordinary acts at a time when the moral choices were stark, the threat immense, and the passive apathy of millions predominated. Deeply researched and astonishingly moving, it focuses on ten remarkable stories, including that of the circus ringmaster Adolf Althoff and his wife Maria, the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Italian cycling champion Gino Bartali, the Polish social worker Irena Sendler, and the Japanese spy Chinue Sugihara, who provided hiding places, participated in underground networks, refused to betray their neighbors, and secured safe passage. They repeatedly defied authorities and risked their lives, their livelihoods, and their families to save the helpless and the persecuted. In the Garden of the Righteous is a testament to their kindness and courage. […]

Unicorns and Spaceships (10/14/2025): A Sorceress Comes to Call

September 12, 2025 Unicorns and Spaceships

Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn’t allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother’s beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.

After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.

Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind. […]

Oh, the Horror! (09/30/2025): Piñata

August 27, 2025 Oh, the Horror!

Carmen Sanchez is back in her home country of Mexico, overseeing the renovation of an ancient cathedral into a boutique hotel. Her teen daughters, Izel and Luna, are with her for the summer, and left to fill their afternoons unsupervised in a foreign city.

The locals treat the Sanchez women like outsiders, while Carmen’s contractors openly defy and sabotage her work. After a disastrous accident at the construction site nearly injures Luna, Carmen’s had enough. They’re leaving.

Back in New York, Luna begins acting strange, and only Izel notices the chilling changes happening to her younger sister. But it might be too late for the Sanchez family to escape what’s been awakened…

Piñata is a bone-chilling story about how the sinister repercussions of our past can return to haunt us. […]

The Next Chapter (09/19/2025): Tom Lake

August 16, 2025 The Next Chapter

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today. […]

Friends of Fiction (09/10/2025): Interesting Facts about Space

August 14, 2025 Friends of Fiction

Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favorite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her.

As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself. […]

Unicorns and Spaceships (09/09/2025): How High We Go in the Dark

August 13, 2025 Forever Young

Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible. […]

Stranger than Fiction (09/02/2025): Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics

August 6, 2025 Stranger Than Fiction

When he signed up for a psychedelic retreat run by a mysterious Argentine woman deep in Brazil’s rainforest in early 2018, Ernesto Londoño, a veteran New York Times journalist, was so depressed he had come close to jumping off his terrace weeks earlier. His nine-day visit to Spirit Vine Ayahuasca Retreat Center included four nighttime ceremonies during which participants imbibed a vomit-inducing plant-based brew that contained DMT, a powerful mind-altering compound.

The ayahuasca trips provided Londoño an instant reprieve from his depression and became the genesis of a personal transformation that anchors this sweeping journalistic exploration of the booming field of medicinal psychedelics. Londoño introduces readers to a dazzling array of psychedelic enthusiasts who are upending our understanding of trauma and healing. They include Indigenous elders who regard psychedelics as portals to the spirit world; religious leaders who use mind-bending substances as sacraments; war veterans suffering from PTSD who credit psychedelics with changing their lives; and clinicians trying to resurrect a promising field of medicine hastily abandoned in the 1970s as the United States declared a War on Drugs.

Londoño’s riveting personal narrative pulls the reader through a deeply researched and brilliantly reported account of a game-changing industry on the rise. Trippy is the definitive book on psychedelics and mental health today, and Londoño’s in-depth and nuanced look at this shifting landscape will be pivotal in guiding policymakers and readers as they make sense of the perils, limitations, and promises of turning to psychedelics in the pursuit of healing. […]

Spinecrackers (09/05/2025): The Woman With the Cure

August 6, 2025 Spinecrackers

She gave up everything— and changed the world.

A riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic, from the bestselling author of Mrs. Poe.

In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities in lockdown. Some of the world’s best minds are engaged in the race to find a vaccine. The man who succeeds will be a god.

But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants, to becoming a doctor –often the only woman in the room–she hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood.

This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine—and to decide what is forgivable, and how much should be sacrificed, in pursuit of the cure. […]

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