Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE NEW NEIGHBOURS de Claire Douglas

You know your neighbours are plotting a crime but no one believes you . . .

THE NEW NEIGHBOURS
by Claire Douglas
Penguin UK, March 2025
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Do you trust the couple next door?

When Lena overhears a conversation between her next-door neighbours, she thinks she must have misheard.

After all, the Morgans are a kind, retired couple who have moved to a suburban street in Bristol where nothing ever happens.

But it sounded like they were planning a crime.

Her family and friends tell her she’s made a mistake.

Yet the more Lena looks into the Morgans, the darker things seem.

And the more she fears it might be linked to a secret from her own past.

Because, if her suspicions are true, then someone is in real danger.

And it might just be her…

Claire Douglas worked as a journalist for fifteen years, but had dreamed of being a novelist since the age of seven. She finally got her wish after winning the Marie Claire Debut Novel Award with her first novel, The Sisters. She is a Sunday Times bestseller and a frequent Richard & Judy Book Club pick. Her books have sold nearly two million copies in the UK alone. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.

THE GREAT WHEREVER de Shannon Sanders

From an award-winning writer of “riotous and dazzling” stories (Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies), a debut novel that paints a sweeping portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction to the present day.

THE GREAT WHEREVER
by Shannon Sanders
Holt, July 2026
(via DeFiore and Co.)

At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a serious relationship. When Aubrey learns that she has inherited a shared stake in a sizable Tennessee farm from her father, she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt.

Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm, and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the choices and mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family and faces pressure from developers, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hoped to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the

land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it divides the family, turning Thomas’ descendants against each other and drawing the attention of neighbors eager to wrest the land from Black hands, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes down through the decades.

Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.

An expansive family saga perfect for fans of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and told with a wry and very modern voice, THE GREAT WHEREVER is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our family, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including One StorySewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature, and received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons. 

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS de Hank Phillippi Ryan

Is a debut author’s blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by « master of suspense » (Publishers Weekly) and USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Minotaur, September 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house.

But there’s a chilling problem with Tessa’s triumphant book tour―she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who’s obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home.

Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made―what felt like a genuine deal with the devil―appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can’t untangle who’s threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she’ll lose her career, her family―and possibly her life.

« A nail-biting thriller. » ―People

« ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS is a captivating and irresistible portrayal of the deals we make, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when the fine lines between fiction and reality blur under the searing pressure of fame, fans, family ― and a secret sinister bargain. A propulsive page-turner with a hugely satisfying reveal. »
Elle Cosimano, New York Times bestselling author of Finlay Donovan is Killing It

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan has won five Agatha Awards, five Anthony Awards, the Daphne, the Macavity, and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won thirty-seven Emmy Awards and many more journalism honors. A past president of national Sisters in Crime, a founder of Mystery Writers of America University, and a board member of International Thriller Writers, Ryan lives in Boston.

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES de Malavika Kannan

Malavika Kannan stands on the shoulders of The Idiot, Luster, the works of Sally Rooney and Honor Levy, asking: Which comes first: experience or narrative?

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
by Malavika Kannan
Holt/Macmillan, Fall 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Our story begins as a love letter to the distinct, batshit, yet canonical experience of the Queer Homoerotic Friendship. We enter the coming-of-age story of Rishi, an Indian-American girl from Orlando who beaches herself on the shores of Stanford “for the plot.” She sees nothing ahead of her except freedom, experience and love, and begins her journey with her sexuality and queerness as fast as humanly possible. Her roommate Georgia, a wealthy white girl from Maine and the daughter of two scientists, quickly becomes her best friend and confidant in all things. But the friends and love affairs that fill Rishi’s days (and the recaps she gives Georgia every night) and make her believe she is truly becoming herself begin to unravel with the abrupt onset of Covid. (I haven’t yet seen a Gen Z voice that talks about this period and the intense loss of possibility, just when they had reached the thing that had worked so hard for: college!).

Rishi and Georgia and their friends endure going back to the homes they had just left, but soon strike out on a new adventure: the Covid Gap year, where they join a farm collective and grapple with political radicalization and growing disillusionment…along with sexual tension and responsibility. Things start to get interesting with Georgia: she and Rishi get drunk and make out. Rishi thinks that she and Georgia have « gotten past » the kiss — she rationalizes it to herself that it is very normal for best friends to kiss, and if they are meant to be in love, they will figure it out much later. Georgia thinks otherwise.

Rishi has been focused on herself as the main character of her story, one rooted in her feminist and queer sensibilities of progress and agency, but by the end of the novel she faces painful experiences that shatter her sense of narrative, so all she can really do is feel her way through it, and trust that she will understand it later. Along for the ride, we may see the mistakes Rishi is making, but we learn something about ourselves and the world around us alongside her.

Malavika Kannan is a writer and organizer from Florida. According to men online she is « lazy, dumb, and loose, » but she prefers to identify as an advocate for queer women of color, online and IRL. She’s been featured by Seventeen Magazine, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, and graduated from Stanford University this year. Her YA novel, All the Yellow Suns was published by Little & Brown in 2023. She’s also written about Gen Z and culture for San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She draws viral cartoons and posts about queer identity for an audience of 40,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida, she organized with March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, and is forever committed to centering queer youth in movements for justice and joy.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES d’Emily Jane

America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel. From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
by Emily Jane
Hyperion Avenue, September 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, AMERICAN WEREWOLVES brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

Emily Jane is the USA Today bestselling author of On Earth as it Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide. She grew up in Boise, Boulder, and San Francisco. She earned her BA in psychology from the University of San Francisco and her JD from UC Law San Francisco. She lives on an urban farm in Cincinnati with her husband, Steve; their two children; their cats, Scully and Ripley; and their husky, Nymeria.