FREE RIDE de Noraly Schoenmaker

The debut memoir by the massively popular female adventure travelers and the creator behind the 2.4-Million follower YouTube account Itchy Boots, taking readers behind the scenes of her first 20,000 mile motorcycle journey through the world’s most remarkable and remote places.

FREE RIDE:
Heartbreak, Courage, and the 20,000-Mile Motorcycle Journey that Changed my Life
by Noraly Schoenmaker
Atria, June 2025
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)

In 2018, Noraly Schoenmaker was a thirty-something geologist living in the Netherlands when she learned that her live-in partner had been having a long-term affair. Suddenly without a place to stay, she quit her job, sold her house, and flew to India, planning to spend a year exploring before returning home. But an excursion on a rented motorcycle through the Himalayas changed her life forever—she had found a new obsession. Soon, she decided to purchase a motorcycle and a GoPro, and set off on more unconventional adventures.

When she first left Delhi, climbing mountain passes and crossing rickety wooden bridges into Myanmar, she had no idea that her journeys would come to surpass one-hundred-sixty-thousand kilometers (and counting) through sixty countries on five continents. All she knew was that on the back of her motorcycle, she felt instantly and profoundly free while riding.

FREE RIDE recounts Noraly’s first twenty thousand miles from India to Southeast Asia, then the Middle East, Central Asia, and finally back through Russia and Europe to the Netherlands. More Bruce Chatwin, Cheryl Strayed, and The Motorcycle Diaries than Elizabeth Gilbert, FREE RIDE is a travel memoir like no other because Noraly is a traveler like no other.

Noraly Schoenmaker is the creator of Itchy Boots, a YouTube channel with more than two million loyal subscribers. A motorcycling obsessive, her journeys have taken her the length of the American continent, from Argentina to Alaska; from the northernmost point of Europe to the southernmost point of Africa; and to some of the least traveled regions of the globe. Trained as a biologist and geologist, she is based in the Netherlands.

SO FAR GONE de Jess Walter

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the wild, propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

SO FAR GONE
by Jess Walter
Harper, June 2025

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he’d done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. 

Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. SO FAR GONE is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and ultimately moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers, The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

MILENA AND MARGARETE de Gwen Strauss

A profoundly moving and expertly researched WWII history from the author of The Nine. A celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances, Strauss sheds light on both an untold WWII love story and an untold chapter in queer history.

MILENA AND MARGARETE:
A Love Story in Ravensbrück
by Gwen Strauss
St. Martin’s Press, August 2025

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

Gwen Strauss is the author of The Nine and a collection of poetry, Trail of Stones. Her poems, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The New Republic, London Sunday Times, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. She was born and spent her early years in Haiti. Strauss lives in Southern France, where she is the Executive Director of the Dora Maar Cultural Center.

THE GLOW CODE de Michelle McIvor

Readers seeking a « holistic, approachable guide to approaching middle age with verve » (Foreword Reviews) will appreciate this « comprehensive and chatty guide » (Publishers Weekly) with inspiring and practical advice to navigate aging well.

THE GLOW CODE:
A Cheat Sheet for Feeling, Looking, and Being Your Best at Any Age
by Michelle McIvor
Rowan & Littlefield, June 2024
(via The Rights Factory)

When I was 41, I learned how to wash my face. Turns out I’d been doing it wrong. (Hint: ditch cleansing wipes!) This made me wonder what else I didn’t know. Like: Cardio or weights? Why can’t I sleep? Is there a trick to ordering good wine? Or buying art? I figured if I still had questions about how to adult and age like a superwoman, maybe you did too.

The Glow Code provides all the answers you need to feel, look, and live better in midlife and beyond. Rich in advice from top scientists, psychologists, makeup artists, fitness and nutrition authorities, and others, this book offers strategies and tips for better fitness, friendships, sex, creative practices, and more. And to make sure it works, I’ve tested it all—with sometimes hilarious results.

Fun, practical, and inspiring, THE GLOW CODE is the manifesto to aging joyfully. For all of you with minimum free time but maximum ambition to rock this next stage of life, welcome to your cheat sheet.

Michelle McIvor is a journalist on a mission to age gratefully. A former columnist with the Calgary Herald, she has written for Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Best Health, among others, and ghostwrote the #1 Canadian bestseller Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters. Michelle lives in Calgary with her husband and kids.

KAPUT de Wolfgang Münchau

The story of the rise and decline of a huge industrial giant, and of how and why it happened.

KAPUT:
The End of the German Miracle
by Wolfgang Münchau
Swift Press UK, November 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success. Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true ‘leader of the free world’, and Germany’s export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity. But recent events – from Germany’s dependence on Russian gas to its car industry’s delays in the race to electric – have undermined this view.

In KAPUT, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany’s economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country’s industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China – and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe’s biggest economy.

Wolfgang Münchau is a journalist and commentator who focuses on the European economy and the European Union. He is director of leading news service Eurointelligence and a columnist for the New Statesman.