Archives de catégorie : Fiction

LOVE WALKED IN de Sarah Chamberlain

A sunshiny American bookstore whisperer clashes with the grumpy British owner of the shop she’s trying to save in this winning opposites-attract romance for book lovers.

LOVE WALKED IN
by Sarah Chamberlain
St. Martin’s Press, September 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

He has a struggling bookshop. She has a knack for bringing bookstores back to life. As soon as she walks into his store, all bets are off…

Mari Cole’s whole life is her dream job: rescuing and revitalizing indie bookstores. Friendship? Love? No thanks. After a hard childhood, she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone. Besides, books have never let Mari down the way people have. Then she gets the offer of a lifetime: rescuing Ross & Co. Once the most prestigious independent booksellers in London, the store is a shadow of its former self and needs an expert outsider to turn things around. But the offer turns out to be a double-edged sword: Leo Ross, the store’s new owner, is as cold and hostile as the British winter.

For as long as he can remember, Leo Ross has known his future is becoming the next generation to run Ross and Co. He’s sacrificed almost everything he cares about, but the bookshop is still failing on his watch, and now there’s an obnoxiously cheerful American woman convinced that she’s going to magically make everything better. Leo’s life is difficult and messy enough as it is, and he doesn’t want her help.

When Mari and Leo are forced to work closely together to bring the store back to life, Leo’s icy surface thaws to reveal the passionate man underneath. As winter gives way to the possibility of new beginnings, Mari begins to see that true love could be even better in real life than in the pages of a book. Can they put their pasts aside and learn to let love in?

« A comfort read for lovers of books, Richard Curtis movies, and romance with a touch of enemies-to-lovers. » ―Kirkus

« The grumpy/sunshine trope animates this charming rom-com… Readers will fall in love with Mari and Leo as Chamberlain skillfully reveals their hidden depths and believable vulnerabilities. The result is a multilayered love story that hits all the right notes. » ―Publishers Weekly

Sarah Chamberlain is a writer, editor, and cookbook translator whose articles have appeared in VICE, The Guardian, Food52, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. When she’s not writing witty, sexy contemporary romance, she enjoys making dinner for her friends and family, watching Cary Grant movies, and setting records as an amateur competitive powerlifter. Originally from Northern California, she lives in London.

THE INNKEEPER de Pradeep Niroula

A witty, dazzling speculative debut for readers of White Teeth and Sea of Tranquility—with a dash of Forrest Gump—the novel braids multiple storylines into a brilliantly converging plot, exploring displaced identity, national mythmaking, privilege, and the search for agency in an age of accelerating mechanization.

THE INNKEEPER
by Pradeep Niroula
Blackstone, Fall 2026
(via Nancy Yost Literary)

Almost everything seems to be going right for our nameless narrator from the secretive nation of Ratnastan. Freshly graduated from a prestigious Northeastern college and newly employed at an AI startup, he appears to be on a path to success—until a chance bicycle collision with a young woman named Samantha sends him careening into an entirely different future.

When Samantha asks him to visit her sprawling, antique-filled house, he discovers it is no ordinary bed-and-breakfast, but a clandestine inn for time travelers—a crossroads of hidden portals stretching from the 1850s into the future.

Unable to travel himself, our narrator becomes the inn’s unlikely steward: host, confidant, and steadying presence to a rotating cast of eccentric and occasionally famous (hello, Herman Melville!) guests from across history. All the while, he juggles the absurdities of his tech job and falls hopelessly for Autumn, a medical student visiting from five years ahead…an almost-romance shadowed by the uncrossable gulf between them.

But when he uncovers a devastating connection between the network of inns, his homeland, and his own family’s past, the careful balance he’s maintained begins to fracture…with consequences that ripple across time itself.

Pradeep Niroula grew up in Nepal and studied physics and fiction at Harvard. After graduation, while working at a startup, he lived in a bed-and-breakfast to save on rent, helping with chores — the setting that ultimately inspired THE INNKEEPER. Pradeep received a PhD in physics and now works as a research scientist in quantum computing and artificial intelligence at JPMorgan. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Scientific American, and his writing has appeared in LA Review of Books, The Drift, and MIT Technology Review, among other publications.

ON SUNDAYS SHE PICKED FLOWERS de Yah Yah Scholfield

In this sinister and surreal Southern Gothic debut, a woman escapes into the uncanny woods of southern Georgia and must contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself.

ON SUNDAYS SHE PICKED FLOWERS
by Yah Yah Scholfield
Saga Press/S&S, January 27, 2026
(via JABberwocky Literary)

When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.

Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.

But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.

Haunting and thought-provoking, On Sunday She Picked Flowers explores retribution, family trauma, and the power of building oneself back up after breaking down.

“One of the most visceral, intense, brutal, and yet honest, works of horror I have read in a long time.” —P. Djèlí Clark

“A ferociously talented writer. Scholfield writes with insight, beauty, and the wildness of real art.” —Victor LaValle

“Scholfield tells a story that’s as haunting as it is cathartic, as beautiful as it is devastating.” —Arts Atlanta

Yah Yah Scholfield’s work has been featured in a number of horror and speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, including Fiyah Lit Mag and Death in the Mouth Vol. 1. They have also published a short story collection, Just a Little Snack. When they’re not terrifying innocents, Yah Yah is a professional stay-at-home daughter in Atlanta with their cats, Sophie and Chihiro.

MAGICIAN de Tracy Lynne Oliver

A dark magic debut novel featuring the Boy who becomes the Magician and the villainous Mother whose sadism might end it all—for fans of Our Share of Night and The Changeling.

MAGICIAN
by Tracy Lynne Oliver
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, May 2026

The unnamed protagonist is born into a brutal childhood filled with unspeakable cruelties; the Boy only survives through a powerful magic that intervenes moments of need.

When he escapes, a circus troupe welcomes him into their chosen family and the Boy begins to imagine a life beyond survival. He discovers a new, whimsical potential for his magic and eagerly apprentices under the circus’s conjurer—only to realize his gifts far outstrip his mentor’s illusions. As the Boy’s ambition takes control of his magic, he becomes the Magician, but at a cost. Looming is a primal threat, determined to end the Magician, his magic, and all he holds dear, forever.

With the immersive horror of Gerardo Sámano Córdova and the fairytale cadence of Helen Oyeyemi, Tracy Lynne Oliver’s Magician welcomes readers into a spellbinding world of twisted patriarchal darkness and a powerful survival magic that threatens to consume everyone, including its wielder.

Tracy Lynne Oliver is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has been published online at a variety of places such as Medium, Fanzine, and Occulum. She co-authored the graphic novel, The Sacrifice of Darkness, with Roxane Gay. Her story, “This Weekend” included in Best Microfiction 2019.

FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL de Sahar Delijani

The highly anticipated follow-up to Sahar Delijani’s internationally bestselling debut, Children of the Jacaranda Tree, which was inspired by her parents’ political persecution and subsequent imprisonment in post-revolutionary Iran. Now, in her sophomore novel, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL, Sahar turns her attention to life after prison, examining the intergenerational legacy of trauma born of incarceration.

FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL
by Sahar Delijani
Melville House, April 2027
(via Writers House)

Set between the violent aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the recent Woman Life Freedom uprising in 2022, this novel also explores both the power and the limits of storytelling to grapple with that trauma: what happens when we metabolize our personal suffering through writing? What does it mean when that intimate story becomes part of a larger collective memory? And does the act of telling that story hold the power to stop history from repeating itself?

Tehran, 1980s. The daughter of political dissidents, Neda is born inside the walls of the notorious Evin Prison. She doesn’t meet her parents again until they are released when she is four years old, but their estrangement doesn’t end with their long-awaited embrace. Neda feels shy and awkward around Azar and Ismael, who in turn wrestle with how to be parents as they process the brutality they have been subjected to and struggle to rebuild their shat­tered lives…

Manhattan, 2022. Neda, now in her forties, and on her way to a reading for her second novel, grapples with the weight of her literary success. As a renewed wave of violent crackdowns on protesters fighting the same regime that once persecuted her family takes hold of the country of her birth, Neda struggles to prepare herself mentally and emotionally to face an audience. She is so weary of walking the tightrope between public and private, spokes­woman and survivor, and increasingly aware that she has made a career of writing about the trauma of others without fully examining her own…

As warm-blooded and intimate as it is politically engaged, FOR EVERY PERSON YOU KILL is a work of autobio­graphical literary fiction for readers of Homeland Elegies and In the Shadow of the Banyan. It joins the canon of lit­erature about the act of writing literature, alongside such works as the Neapolitan Novels and The Book of Goose.

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree an autobiographical novel which has been trans­lated into 30 languages and published in more than 75 countries. It was a Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group selection, an Indie Next Pick, a CBS Local Best Book Club Pick, a finalist for Italy’s Elle Gran Premio, one of Vogue India’s Top 10 Big Reads, and a candidate for France’s Prix des Lecteurs Sélection by Le Livre de Poche. Born in Iran in 1983, she grew up in California, lived for many years in Italy, and currently resides in New York City.