Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?
But nothing with fairies is ever simple.
Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He’s heard there’s a curse here that needs breaking, but it’s a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold.
The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman
One brilliant June day when Mia Jacob can no longer see a way to survive, the power of words saves her. The Scarlet Letter was written almost two hundred years earlier, but it seems to tell the story of Mia’s mother, Ivy, and their life inside the Community—an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. But how could this be? How could Nathaniel Hawthorne have so perfectly captured the pain and loss that Mia carries inside her?
Through a journey of heartbreak, love, and time, Mia must abandon the rules she was raised with at the Community. As she does, she realizes that reading can transport you to other worlds or bring them to you, and that readers and writers affect one another in mysterious ways. She learns that time is more fluid than she can imagine, and that love is stronger than any chains that bind you.
As a girl Mia fell in love with a book. Now as a young woman she falls in love with a brilliant writer as she makes her way back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote The Scarlet Letter? And what if Mia Jacob never found it on the day she planned to die?
Spin a Black Yarn by Josh Malerman
Josh Malerman is a master weaver of stories—and in this spine-chilling collection he spins five twisted tales from the shadows of the human soul.
A sister insists to her little brother that their house by a strange presence. But is it the house that’s haunted—or their childhoods? Adying man confesses to homicides he never committed, and reveals long-kept secrets far more sinister than murder. A tourist takes the ultimate trip to outer space but the real journey is into his own dark past. A trendy married couple buys the latest home gadget only to find themselves trapped by their possessions, their history… and each other. A wealthy old bully murders a young man, not knowing the victim was a triplet. The two surviving brothers stage a savage faux-haunting, playing the ghost of their slain brother, with the aim of driving the old murderer mad.
Fever House by Keith Rosson
When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: dark-op government agents who have been hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more and more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal, devastating influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster…
But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.
When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are looped into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents, while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.
Tell Me What I Am by Una Mannion
Nessa Garvey’s sister Deena vanished without a trace in Philadelphia in 2004. In all that time, Nessa has never once doubted what her instincts told her: her sister’s ex-husband has gotten away with an unspeakable crime.
Nessa’s niece, Ruby, is raised by her father, the man Nessa suspects, in rural Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain. Ruby learns how to hunt, how the plants and trees grow, how to avoid making her father angry. The one question she longs to ask is the one she knows she cannot voice: What really happened to her mother?
Over fourteen years, four hundred miles apart, these two women slowly begin to unearth the family history of insidious power and control that has shaped them both in such different ways. But can they reach each other in time?
The Romantic by William Boyd
One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is.
The Trade Off by Sandie Jones
For Stella, deputy editor of The Globe, the choice has always been clear. It doesn’t matter how low she has to stoop—getting the best story is what she’s built her reputation on.
For Jess, The Globe’s rookie reporter, the story stops when the truth does. But she knows that the dirty tricks of the tabloids will be hard to overturn.
And when a celebrity is hounded by The Globe and pays the ultimate price, Jess wonders just how much Stella and the paper are responsible. Determined to show the world what the tabloid is capable of, Jess will do whatever it takes to uncover the truth, but she needs to watch her back, because someone else is prepared to kill to bury it.
The Wolf Hunt by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Lilach has it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam, with whom she has always felt a particular closeness. Israeli immigrants, the family has now lived in the U.S. long enough that they consider it home. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. There, for the first time, he finds a sense of confidence and belonging.
Then, tragedy strikes again when an African American boy dies at a house party, apparently from a drug overdose. Though he was a high school classmate, Adam claims not to know him. Yet rumors begin to circulate that the death was not accidental, and that Adam and his new friends had a history with Jamal. As more details surface and racial tensions in the community are ignited, Lilach begins to question everything she thought she knew about her son. Could her worst fears be possible? Could her quiet, reclusive child have had something to do with Jamal’s death?
In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel by Genevieve Plunkett
When faced with newfound feelings for Theo, the drummer of her band, married young mother Portia must decide whether to follow her heart or question her sanity. Going off her medication feels like waking up for the first time. But could this clarity be harmless daydreaming, or a symptom of something more serious?
Portia’s husband, a well-respected prosecutor in their small Vermont town, is convinced of the latter. He retaliates, initiating an intervention, claiming that Portia’s behavior is proof of her bipolar disorder. With lawyer-like cunning, he uses elements from her past to break her resolve until she agrees to being committed to a psychiatric hospital. In the hospital, Portia’s sense of reality is tested, and hard truths about her marriage, her love for Theo, and her most vulnerable hopes and desires are revealed.
