Bookshop.org's Top 10!

"The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift-a vivid and immersive tale of one woman's reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is"--

Being published August 26th, 2025.

As the turbulent twentieth-century nears its end, calls for independence grow increasingly louder in the Soviet Georgia. During this period of great upheaval, childhood friends Keto, Dina, Nene, and Ira grow up in one of the many “Italian courtyards” that define Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighborhood. The four girls are as different as can Dina, the rebellious, daughter of an unconventional mother; Ira, the clever outsider; Nene, the romantic, and niece of the most powerful criminal in the city; and Keto, the sensitive, motherless waif. Rising up to challenges both personal and political —a first love that can only blossom in secret, violence that erupts in the wake of national independence, bloody street battles and civil wars, food rationing and power cuts—the four women’s friendship seems indestructible, until an unforgivable act of betrayal and a tragic death shatters their bond.

Decades later, the three survivors are reunited at a major retrospective of their late friend’s photographs in Brussels. The pictures document not only their story, but that of their country. Confronted by the evidence of their shared past, the trio must contend with memories that emerge from the shadows of their minds. Unexpectedly, something new is glimpsed, and forgiveness seems within reach. Like the International Booker Prize nominated The Eighth Life before it, Nino Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light is an explosive, decades-spanning novel in which to lose yourself, brought to life by the vibrant colors of Georgian culture and its people, and told in the classic style of an epic. It is a glorious book readers will return to again and again.

Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was six, her mother, Hannah, fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister, Kayla, in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.

In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.

"When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn't trust... from bestselling author Isabel Cañas. In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchantparents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family's isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something coldlurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong. Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family's legacy of greed. Alba, as his cousin's betrothed, is none of his business. Which is of coursewhy he can't help but notice her every time she enters a room or the growing tension between them... and why he notices her deteriorate when the demon's thirst for blood grows stronger. In the fight for her life, Alba and Elías become entangled with theoccult, the Church, long-kept secrets, and one another... not knowing that one of these things will spell their doom"--

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.

Morris explains what drove She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

A compelling, propulsive YA graphic novel mystery from acclaimed Eisner Award–winning author of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki, and Eisner-nominated illustrator Nicole Goux

At Wilberton Academy, few students are more revered than the members of the elite Wilberton Theatrical Society—a.k.a. the WTS—and no one represents that exclusive club better than Elizabeth Woodward. Breathtakingly beautiful, beloved by all, and a talented thespian, it’s no surprise she’s starring as Juliet in the WTS’s performance of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. But when she’s found dead the morning after opening night, the whole school is thrown into chaos.

Transfer student Abby Kita was one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive, and when local authorities deem the it-girl’s death a suicide, Abby’s not convinced. She’s sure there’s more to Wilburton and the WTS than meets the eye. As she gets tangled in prep school intrigues, Abby quickly realizes that Elizabeth was keeping secrets. Was one of those secrets worth killing for?

Told in comics, letters, diary entries, and news articles, This Place Kills Me is a page-turning whodunnit from award-winning writer Mariko Tamaki and acclaimed illustrator Nicole Goux that will have readers on the edge of their seats and begging for an encore.

"From the inimitable Rabih Alameddine-National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award-comes a tragicomic saga set in Lebanon, a modern story of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother. Across his oeuvre, Rabih Alameddine has distinguished himself as a master of the intimate and the political, celebrated for his caustic wit and "compelling, often jarring, blend of cynicism and hope" (The Economist). In this lively new work, Alameddine returns to Beirut-the setting of his breakout novel An Unnecessary Woman-and delivers a compulsively readable story of a winning duo navigating modern life in Lebanon. In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high schoolphilosophy teacher and "the neighborhood homosexual," Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son's desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja's work life and love life, boundaries be damned. When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn't be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja itching forpeace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget. Told in Raja's irresistible and wickedlyfunny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities-a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love"-- Provided by publisher.