Archives de catégorie : Fiction

HEART OF GLASS de Jennifer Hillier

A serial killer recants his long-ago confession regarding a small-town high school girl—and her then-best friends are forced to confront what really happened that night and what’s happening now.

HEART OF GLASS
by Jennifer Hillier
Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press, August 2026

Twenty-five years ago in Seaside, Washington, a charming drifter named Sam met three inseparable teenage girls at the local amusement park. Days later, one of them was found dead, her body surfacing in a flooded cranberry bog not far from where she was murdered.

Barb and Nicolette were shocked to learn that the man they all met at Wonderland was the Carnival Killer. After he’s arrested for the murders of five young women – one of whom was their best friend, Lorelei – Nicolette moved to the city to pursue her dreams of being famous. Barb stayed behind in Seaside, eventually becoming a reporter for the local paper. Their past safely behind them, they’ve both moved on with their lives.

But when the Carnival Killer recants his confession and a new body washes ashore on the eve of Wonderland’s grand reopening, the secrets that Barb and Nicolette have worked so hard to bury begin to resurface, threatening to destroy everything in their carefully constructed lives.

Instant New York Times bestseller

« Jennifer Hillier is the master of suspense. » —Freida McFadden

« Amazing dialogue, complex characters and a dazzling plot. Never has betrayal seemed so fascinating. . . No one maps the valley of fear that exists in the hearts of her characters better than Jennifer Hillier. She doesn’t just write thrillers, she creates epics that take you beyond the event horizon where what we think we know breaks down and we just hold on for dear life. Not to be missed! » ―S.A Cosby

« Hillier delivers another knockout thriller with compulsively readable prose and sly, subtle twists. A must-read. » —Booklist (starred review)

Jennifer Hillier was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and lived in the Seattle area for years before returning home to Toronto, where she now lives with her family.

WHEN THE WOODS CALLED US HOME de Rachel Griffin

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Griffin comes an atmospheric and haunting adult debut in which a disappearance rattles a small town, forcing one woman to confront her fate and unravel the dark secrets of the past—perfect for fans of Once There Were Wolves and The Unmaking of June Farrow.

WHEN THE WOODS CALLED US HOME
by Rachel Griffin
Atria, February 2027
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

In the rural town of Bone Creek, Emma Pierce has devoted her life to caring for the wind-battered trees of the rugged Washington coast, feeling more grounded one hundred feet up than with both feet planted firmly on land.

When she’s climbing, Emma can almost convince herself that the curse claiming the Pierce women’s lives is nothing more than hollow gossip. When she’s climbing, the changes in her sister don’t seem so alarming.

But when her boyfriend Eli’s brother goes missing, not even the trees can calm the dread in Emma’s gut. Both Eli and her sister fall under the town’s suspicion, and Emma throws herself into the search for answers. Soon, she discovers that the town is holding onto secrets—and so too is her own family.

Forced to confront what the people she loves most are capable of, Emma must uncover her forgotten memories from the night her mother died. A generations-old feud has been simmering beneath the surface of Bone Creek…and it’s coming to a lethal boil in the very woods where Parker vanished.

Rachel Griffin writes novels inspired by the magic of the world around her. She is the #1 New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of atmospheric, spellbinding books for teens and adults. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Rachel has a deep love of nature, from the mountains to the ocean and all the towering evergreens in between. When she isn’t writing, you can find her wandering rain-soaked forests, reading by the fire, or drinking copious amounts of coffee and tea. She lives with her husband beneath the moody skies of western Washington.

MAKESHIFT de Peter Rock

An uncompromising act of good faith, a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.

MAKESHIFT
by Peter Rock
Soft Skull Press, August 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Abandoned on a remote island known as Makeshift, three sisters—Ari, Heiko, and CeCe—believe they’re the last humans on Earth.

These three, left alone after a band of foreigners slaughtered their entire community, must learn to fend for themselves. They fish and forage in the shallow waters of their protected cove, salvage useful treasures from the rusting hulks of ships that ran aground on its offshore reefs, and entertain themselves with half-remembered tales from their time before.

But when they stray beyond the island into a wider, broken world, they find that life may not be as they believed. And upon their return to the island, they face further revelations that strain their bonds, hint that secrets may be everywhere, and affirm their need for one another in the face of a perilous future.

MAKESHIFT is a singular novel of hope and survival set on a small rock-bound island in the coastal Pacific Northwest, and a testament to devotion and allegiance rendered with the haunting grace of Rock’s precision prose.

Peter Rock is the author of eleven previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and John Dos Passos Prize, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

SURVIVAL NOTES de Michelle Haines Thomas

What happens when an influencer couple, famous for their ‘free-range parenting’ let their nine-year-old son and his friend sleep overnight in the bush… and the boys don’t come back?

SURVIVAL NOTES
by Michelle Haines Thomas
Text Publishing, January 2027

When nine-year-old Freddie and his friend go missing in the bush, their parents scramble to blame each other. Why did they let the boys camp out alone? And why did the boys disappear? In the small hinterland town, the online backlash against the adults is brutal.

The terrifying threat of a bushfire accelerates the race to find the children. The editor of the local newspaper, single-mother Justine, has her own secrets to protect. Then her elder daughter goes missing, too. As everything implodes around Justine, her past comes back to haunt her. How far will she go to rescue the children?

Michelle Haines Thomas takes us into the hearts and minds of characters confronting their worst nightmare. SURVIVAL NOTES is a superlative heart-in-your-mouth literary thriller, with commercial overtones.

Michelle Haines Thomas has been writing novels most of her life, in between her work as a journalist and raising a family. She is the recipient of a residential writing fellowship at Varuna, has a MA in Writing from the University of Technology in Sydney, and has published or broadcast fiction and reviews in a range of publications. Michelle now works in marketing and lives with her family on the NSW Central Coast.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES de Jim Shepard

Twelve compressed masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, hideously mismanaged wars, gargantuan wildfires, and apocalyptic storms.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES
by Jim Shepard
Knopf, September 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.

“Jim Shepard is a fantastic writer—compassionate, funny, and fearless—[whose work] does what great writing always does: inspires us to look more closely at life, and be more caring.” —George Saunders

« A deft, audacious artist. » —Norman Rush, National Book Award-winning author of Mating

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. He also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He previously taught at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife Karen and two beagles.