The Book Lovers List

Nora Stephens’s life is books — as a cutthroat literary agent she’s read them all — and she is not that type of heroine. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute … One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn’t see coming.

Truth and fiction. Jamaica and Britain. Who gets to tell their story? In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to a Victorian England transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as the star witness. Watching the proceedings, and with her own story to tell, is Eliza Touchet — cousin, housekeeper, and perhaps more to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the life you could have had if you had made another decision. Would any of these other lives truly be better? In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

A must-have addition to the shelf for any parent hoping to introduce more inclusive books into the home, with 100+ essential titles for early readers through high school. Soul School offers the best children’s, middle grade, and young adult books available today, each accompanied by discussion questions, activities, and related resource recommendations. Covering toddlers to teens and everyone in between, Soul School is an education for us all.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her — only that her books have been banned — and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her … From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unshakable love.

A mysterious book with a legacy spanning from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day unites three women — and their secrets — in this unforgettable novel from New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton.

From the author of Someone Else’s Shoes, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey as a traveling library through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond in Depression-era America. Funny, heartbreaking, enthralling, it is destined to become a modern classic — a richly rewarding novel of women’s friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond the grasp for the great beyond.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

She found the literary voices that would inspire the world … The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian. “A page turner and history lesson at once, Harlem Rhapsody reminds us that our stories are our generational wealth.” —Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club Pick).

A woman receives an unexpected gift from the man she loved and lost — a year of books, one for every month — launching a reading-inspired journey to live, dream, and love again in this glimmering and heart-stopping novel.

The enchanting story of a bookshop, its grieving owner, a supportive literary community, and the extraordinary power of books to heal the heart.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: A story from his own childhood. Zachary uncovers a series of clues — a bee, a key, and a sword — that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth.

Lucy Hull, a children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. Ian needs Lucy’s help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes. Desperate to save him from the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian when she finds him camped out in the library after hours, and the odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip. But is it just Ian who is running away? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?