Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE de Vanessa McCausland

A small-town mommy blogger kayaked across the lake each morning at dawn, snapping selfies in the early-morning sun. Everyone obsessively watched her document a picturesque life on Instagram. But when an ominous, brooding image is posted to her account and the next day she is discovered drowned, immediately everyone wonders – suicide or was her online persona a façade?

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE
by Vanessa McCausland
Crown, June 2025

Paige has always lived a picture-perfect life, now documented closely on her social media. The world she has curated exudes an old-fashioned, wholesome lifestyle set against a quaint, lakeside town in Australia. Her page is littered with breakfasts lakeside with her daughter, sunny afternoons in the family van, and romantic picnics with her husband.

Jane was one of Paige’s childhood best friends, but left her and their small town behind to pursue a bigger life in Sydney. When Paige’s death makes national news, Jane, a journalist, finds herself reluctantly traveling back to where it all began. Struggling with the morality of covering her friend’s death, and forced to come back to her childhood home, Jane must confront the friends and family she abandoned, and the secrets she left in her wake. But one thing Jane is sure about? This was not a suicide.

Readers will fall in love with Vanessa McCausland’s THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE, told through Paige’s perspective from the beyond, Jane’s present-day narration, an anonymous voice that watched Paige each morning, and flashbacks to Paige and Jane’s high school days, all leading towards a shocking, gasp-worthy ending.

“Compelling, haunting, and beautifully written, THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE is a clever, page-turning modern mystery as well as a thoughtful exploration of female friendship, family dynamics, and the complex impact of social media on self-identity. You’ll be thinking about it long after you turn the last page!” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Vanessa McCausland studied English and Australian literature at Sydney University and graduated with honors in theatre and performance studies. She worked as a journalist for nearly twenty years, including as a news and arts journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and her writing has appeared in numerous other publications. She’s published four novels in Australia, and now lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter.

INTO THE STORM de Cecelia Ahern

A storm lies ahead of her. Freedom lies beyond it …

INTO THE STORM
by Cecelia Ahern
HarperCollins UK, October 2024
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

Enya is driving home on a dark and rainy night in the Dublin mountains when she stumbles across an accident. As a fierce storm rages, a teenage boy her own son’s age lies between life and death. A doctor, Enya provides life-saving CPR. But soon the police are asking her about the accident, the taxi driver first to the scene is stalking her at work and at home, and her soon to be ex-husband is wondering why she was on those Dublin mountain roads in the first place.

Fixated on the teenage boy who now lies in a coma, Enya leaves her husband and takes a temporary physician’s gig in a small rural village. Her life spiraling, she hopes to anchor and empower herself again in a new community. But as the wheel of the year turns and she tries to reconcile her past and forge a new future, the secrets that drove her from Dublin begin to rise, and Enya is faced with an inevitable choice that could lead to the destruction of life as she knows it.

“A terrific story! It had me completely gripped from the very first page.” —Karin Slaughter, NYT Bestselling author of Pretty Girls

Cecelia Ahern was born and grew up in Dublin. Her novels have been translated into thirty-five languages and have sold more than twenty-five million copies in over fifty countries. Two of her books (Ps, I Love You and Love, Rosie) have been adapted as films and she has created several TV series. She and her books have won numerous awards, including the Irish Book Award for Popular Fiction for The Year I Met You. She lives in Dublin with her family.

DOLL PARTS de Penny Zang

The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You with a dash of the horrors of Nightbitch in this debut suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring girls they attended college with decades ago.

DOLL PARTS
by Penny Zang
Sourcebooks Landmark, August 2025

For Nikki and Sadie, life at Loch Raven College was supposed to be filled with poetry and days spent trying on thrifted clothes. But there’s a dark story that plagues the school halls – that of the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the death of multiple Sylvia Plath adoring girls, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the stories, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. To satiate her obsession, Nikki begins to dig into the deaths, and she soon suspects there’s more to the story than just a tragic group of sad girls – a suspicion that will lead to a tragedy of its own, one that will tear her and Sadie apart.

It’s been twenty years since Sadie saw her estranged friend. Now, Nikki is dead. And when Sadie ends up pregnant with Nikki’s grieving husband, she finds herself stepping into her seemingly perfect life. But Nikki’s eerily preserved home seems to hold clues for Sadie from beyond-the-grave, and soon, she’s spiraling into a deep obsession that will make her question her own reality. Because it seems Nikki never stopped looking for answers about what happened to the girls of the Sylvia Club, and she may have been its latest victim.

A provocative and irresistible debut, DOLL PARTS is at once an exploration of the dark chasms that break apart friendships, an ode to the aching beauty of girlhood, and a sharp portrayal of grief that can physically haunt you.

Penny Zang is from Maryland and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and Superstition Review, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She lives in South Carolina, where she teaches English at a two-year college.



FELLOW CREATURES d’Emma Lowther

Obsession and ambition collide in FELLOW CREATURES when outsider Shannon – a new student at one of London’s most prestigious drama schools – becomes dangerously infatuated with a fellow classmate. Perfect for fans of dark academia and toxic friendships, FELLOW CREATURES is Saltburn meets If We Were Villains, with a dash of The Talented Mr Ripley.

FELLOW CREATURES
by Emma Lowther
Quercus, April 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

I wasn’t like the ‘Victoria’s of the world.
My future wasn’t written in the stars.
It was scratched in the dirt…

Shannon Bell is a nobody. She’s the girl who hangs around the edges, the girl whose name you forget. But Shannon has a hidden talent: she can act.

When she’s accepted into one of London’s most selective drama schools, northerner Shannon finds herself uprooted from her old life and thrown into a dazzling yet cut-throat new world.

It’s there that she meets the beautiful, wealthy and well-connected Victoria, who is everything Shannon has always wanted to be. When Victoria takes a liking to her, the two become inseparable, forming an intense bond. And suddenly, Shannon is no longer a nobody – instead she finds herself on the inside, part of Victoria’s exclusive group of friends.

But Victoria’s privilege soon begins to prove its worth – winning her countless auditions and opportunities. Poisonous jealousy begins to seep into her relationship with Shannon and the others, driving the group apart, with deadly consequences.

Emma Lowther is a queer, neurodivergent, Northern writer. She was the winner of the 2021 London Writers Award. She trained as a performer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and now works as an actor, voiceover artist and freelance copywriter. FELLOW CREATURES is her debut novel.

EL DORADO DRIVE de Megan Abbott

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout comes a simmering, atmospheric novel of friendship and betrayal, following a women-led pyramid scheme in suburban Detroit.

EL DORADO DRIVE
by Megan Abbott
Putnam/PRH, June 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

« Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre. » —NPR

All I want is to be innocent again. But that’s not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel.

The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.

The Wheel offers women like themselves—middle-aged and of declining means—a way to make their own money, independent of husbands or families. Quickly, however, the Wheel’s success, and their own addiction to it, leads to greater and greater risks—and a crime so shocking it threatens to bring everything down with it.

Megan Abbott turns her keen eye toward women and money in El Dorado Drive, a riveting story about power, vulnerability, and how desperation draws out our most destructive impulses.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of eleven crime novels, including You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand and the New York Times bestseller The Turnout, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, now streaming on Netflix. Her latest novel, Beware the Woman, is now in paperback.