Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

BEAUTY OF UNWANTED THINGS d’Astrid Scholte

A darkly bewitching, distinctive, romantic fairytale that is perfect for readers of One Dark Window, Uprooted, and For the Wolf.

BEAUTY OF UNWANTED THINGS
by Astrid Scholte
Wednesday Books, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Thoralea Winyard has been a prisoner her entire life, forced to paint dead animals pushed into her cell each day. For twenty years she has not seen outside her tower. For twenty years she has dreamed of taking revenge on her captors and watching the castle burn.

When one of her dead subjects comes back to life, Thoralea is thrust into the sumptuous world of court life where she can have anything she desires—aside from her freedom. What no one knows outside the castle walls is that the king and queen of Lagonia have ruled for centuries. Their health, and immortality, gifted through the creation of portraits by painters with magic in their veins. Immortality is their one defense in the ongoing battle with Hetchnik: a cursed neighboring realm who seek to bring death and darkness to the land.

Prince Kelter is desperate to join the ranks of the immortal battalion.

Disillusioned with court and his figurehead role, he makes a deal with Thoralea: she will paint the portrait Prince Kelter has been denied by his parents, and he will help her escape the castle. As they grow closer and their attraction intensifies, a deadly secret is revealed, and Thoralea and Kelter will have to put their trust in each other to save the kingdom before the curse comes for them both.

Astrid Scholte is the internationally bestselling and award-winning author of Four Dead Queens, The Vanishing Deep and League of Liars. When she’s not writing, she works in film and animation production. Career highlights include working on James Cameron’s Avatar, Disney’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. She currently works at Industrial Light & Magic on the latest blockbuster.

WANDERLUST de Rachel Lynn Solomon

A senior year trip to Europe holds romantic surprises for two best friends in this sweet and swoony YA novel from a beloved New York Times bestselling author.

WANDERLUST
by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Simon & Schuster BYR, Spring 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

A Young Adult romantic comedy about best friends who vow to lose their virginities on a spring break trip to Europe, ideally to their respective crushes—a plan complicated by their growing feelings for each other.

Rachel Lynn Solomon is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ex Talk, Today Tonight Tomorrow, and other romantic comedies for teens and adults. Originally from Seattle, she is currently navigating expat life with her husband in Amsterdam, where she can often be found exploring the city, collecting stationery, and working up the courage to knit her first sweater.

VOYAGERS de Meg Charlton

As the world unravels under a mysterious signal, two childhood friends reunite to confront their shared past and the possibility of an extraterrestrial future.

VOYAGERS
by Meg Charlton
Harper, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Voyagers is the story of the lifelong friendship between Alex and Ana, narrated by Alex, now in his early 30’s. He’s a lawyer, lives a quiet life. And then the Signal – a narrow-band transmission broadcasting a sequence of pulses from somewhere near Pluto, for which no government claims responsibility – convinces the world that we’re about to make First Contact with aliens. Alex is primed to believe this: when he was 6 years old he went on vacation with his family to Palm Springs, met Ana (vacationing with her mother next door), and during a sleepover the two were abducted by aliens. Or at least, that’s what they told the rescuers who found them after their 36 hours missing, and the story they stuck to as they became minor child stars. As teenagers, their divergence in belief about what “really” happened severed their friendship.

Now, Alex realizes there’s no one he’d rather be with at the potential end of the world than Ana. She has made her living as an ‘experiencer advocate,’ leading retreats for those who’ve experienced extraterrestrial contact, and is coincidentally about to lead one in Palm Springs; Alex will go out to meet her. As the Signal grows louder and starts affecting electronics, grounds planes, and the world devolves into chaos, the two race to meet each other for one final reckoning to uncover what really happened to them as kids – and the reader learns whether there are “really” aliens out there.

Meg Charlton is a writer and screenwriter based in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in VICE, Slate, The Yale Review, Atlas Obscura and Lux, and been anthologized in the collection Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her short fiction has been optioned for film and TV and is currently in development with 3 Arts Entertainment and S/B Films, represented by Alice Lawson and Jason Klorfein at Gersh. She received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College where she was the recipient of the Creative Writing Award.

THE EMILYS de Heather Abel

THE EMILYS is about love’s capacities in a changing world, in which a mother returns to her hometown and reconnects with a lost friend just as a mysterious illness begins to fray the communal fabric of their New England town, for readers of Birnam Wood and The Overstory.

THE EMILYS
by Heather Abel
Random House, 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Eve, the daughter of a renowned, tempestuous writer, is isolated in early motherhood when she runs into an enigmatic childhood friend she calls Demeter. Demeter’s daughter is unable to tolerate sunlight, and no doctors believe that the girl’s illness, which comes to be known as Emily Syndrome, is real. But Eve believes, and even suspects that it is the fact that Demeter is a struggling, under-educated single mother that the medical system shrugs off her daughter’s unusual symptoms. Their captivating, reborn relationship revives Eve, then pulls her into a crisis that engulfs her town and even threatens her own family. Determined to help everyone she loves, Eve learns that when disaster hits, we might not all be heroes, but our own flawed selves can be everything we need.

Heather Abel is the author of the novel The Optimistic Decade (Algonquin, 2018). Her essays have appeared widely, including in the New York Times, Slate, Buzzfeed, Tablet, and the Paris Review Daily. Her short stories have been published by Five Points and Agni and cited as distinguished by Best American Stories. She worked as a reporter and editor in California and Colorado before moving to New York where she received an MFA in fiction writing from the New School University. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and currently teaches writing at Smith College.

BLOOD LIKE WATER de Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

A house party turns deadly in this tightly wound thriller set against an icy Alaskan winter.

BLOOD LIKE WATER
by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Delacorte, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic))

Finley, Mya, River, and Eli. They were inseparable as kids, running wild on Alaska’s vast wide-open spaces. Then tragedy struck, and Finley moved to the lower 48. But now it’s senior year, and Finley’s back in Anchorage. When Mya throws a house party on a snowy Valentine’s Day night, it’s supposed to be a chance for the friends to reforge old bonds. But an encounter with a mysterious stranger quickly turns the evening into a nightmare. What happened that night was an accident, right? Or was there intent? Either way, loyalty takes a dark turn when Mya, the group’s de facto leader, pressures the friends into a pact of silence, plunging them into a web of deception. Now a man’s missing, the police are involved, and Finley doesn’t know what to do or who to trust.

Jennifer Lynn Alvarez is the author of the young adult thrillers, Lies Like Wildfire, Friends Like These, and two middle-grade fantasy series, The Guardian Herd and Riders of The Realm. She earned her degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley and is the Sonoma County Coordinator for SCBWI. Jennifer lives in Tennessee and often travels to Northern California.