Thoughtful Gifts for Fiction Readers

One late summer evening, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge ready to jump when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both. An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.

From Laila Lalami — the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR) — comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives earlier.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian — an enigmatic and volatile man — spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island where she finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed. Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

From WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

From the author of Once More We Saw Stars comes a gripping novel about four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy. Set in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur, the story challenges our understanding of consciousness and humanity.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and The Guncle, a heartwarming story about finding oneself in one of the most romantic cities on Earth. Capturing Steven Rowley’s signature wit, insight, and indelible characters, The Dogs of Venice offers another timeless story of love lost, and independence found — a holiday tonic for the soul.

A bold novel about a Black painter caught up in the currents of art, faith, and desire. Minor Black Figures is a vividly etched portrait, both sweeping and tender, of friendship, creativity, belief, and the deep connections among them.

From the Booker prize-winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an immersive exploration, across time and history, of what we can ever truly know.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale comes a remarkable, career-spanning collection of short fiction and essays about love, aging, culture, and all the things in between.

A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: A socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter’s wedding. Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.

Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning — longlisted for the National Book Award — is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. A piercing and propulsive tour de force.

Milwaukee 1932. With the Great Depression going full blast, Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with.

A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends.

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard. “Tender as a ballad and pleasurable as a pop song, Deep Cuts is both a romp into the indie sleaze era of the early aughts and a timeless love story” (Coco Mellors, author of Blue Sisters).

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life. Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work — India, England, and America — and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.

From an Emmy Award-winning writer comes a funny, wise, heartbreaking story about a woman journeying into the unknown in the wake of sudden loss. An emotional mystery spanning years, continents, and relationship statuses, Loved One introduces Aisha Muharrar as a novelist intimately attuned to the intricacies of love, memory, and ambiguous loss. An engrossing and profoundly moving coming-of-age story with a powerful love at its heart, Loved One is poised to become an instant classic.

The author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child returns to the mythical landscapes of Alaska with an unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks the question: Can love save us from ourselves?

Hard to figure how so much awful horror could’ve started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named … From the bestselling author of House of Leaves comes a magisterial novel about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.

Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “A cause for celebration” — an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.

An “urgent [and] ingenious” (The New York Times Book Review) novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean — from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin.

From the bestselling and award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked — a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St. Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style.

A stunning deluxe edition for the 40th anniversary of an unparalleled cornerstone of feminist literature, featuring the original cover art and a short, unpublished essay penned in 1986 by Margaret Atwood, “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times).

Hailed as “an American epic” (NPR), this captivating story weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century. Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Set in the tumultuous period of the Tudors’ ascent, The Pretender brings to life the little-known story of Lambert Simnel. From humble beginnings as a peasant boy, Lambert’s life takes an astonishing turn when, at just ten years old, he becomes a claimant to the English throne as one of the last of the Plantagenet line. As Lambert navigates the treacherous waters of royal intrigue and court life, complex themes of identity, power, and destiny unfold, weaving a tapestry of ambition and survival in a world where the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In this “stunning” (People), “riveting” (Entertainment Weekly) historical novel, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father — and herself.

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day — partner, parent, creator, muse — and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Two people, one hotel room, and all the choices and complications that make up a life. “[A] crafty new locked-room thriller of adultery and disaster … a fresh take on middle-class marital malaise … Kennedy’s page-turner brings [our] fundamental human fears into the blazing light of a towering inferno” (The Washington Post).

By a striking new voice in fiction, an electric coming-of-age novel that explores grief, family, sexuality, and love as an ambitious young woman from Washington Heights tries to make it on Broadway.

The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 National Book Award winner and bestseller, Hell of a Book. In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: Characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss.

In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. “This inventive, boundary-pushing follow-up to Detransition, Baby … [takes] on gender, transness, and lives on the margins in all of their gorgeously complicated glory” (People).

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is … complicated. So when her real dad — a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago — suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you — about love, and what it actually means to be family.

A gifted portrait artist and a high-powered subject confront past wounds to embrace new love in this poignant novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel.

A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition from the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer.