New Releases - February 2026 Edition

Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

FICTION

The Astral Library by Kate Quinn
Historical fiction author Quinn (The Alice Network) turns her hand to magical realism in this charming tale about the joy of reading and the necessity of public libraries. Alix Watson, 26, struggles to make ends meet in Boston, with only $36.82 to her name and a revolving door of low-paying jobs. Finding refuge at the Boston Public Library, she stumbles across a magic portal to a place where the library’s patrons live inside a book of their choosing. There are rules: the book must be in the public domain, Alix cannot become a named character in the narrative, and the course of the story cannot be changed. Alix chooses Around the World in Eighty Days, but before she enters the book, the library comes under attack from a mysterious force. She and the librarian set out to rescue patrons trapped in other books and rehouse them in paintings, where they cannot be so easily found. The plot becomes a bit unwieldy, but underdog Alix keeps the reader invested with her boisterousness and determination. Bookworms will be enchanted. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly

The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick
A 30-something poet navigates the vagaries of freelance copywriting work in Poppick’s reflective and often funny debut novel (after the poetry collection Fear of Description), which unfolds as a series of journal entries. The narrator, D__, has devoted his life to poetry. His partner, Lucy, with whom he lives in New York City, is also a poet, as are his friends Ruth and Will. Though he’s invested in these relationships, something ineffable is missing from D__’s life. A “permalancer” for a failing consumer product company, he keeps a fire wall between his “stupid” copywriting and his poetry. Sometimes he tosses gigs to Will, who, hilariously, doesn’t make the same distinction and turns in product descriptions that read like absurd prose poems (“The era of normal umbrellas is over. That’s why this umbrella isn’t normal: it’s kind of cool. This is a cool umbrella”). After D__ is laid off, he and Lucy break up, and he finds he can’t write poetry anymore. He drives Ruth across the country to where she’s entering a PhD program, makes notes about the poems he longs to write, and reads Proust to try and understand the nature of time. D__ is a frank and companionable narrator, who endears himself to the reader with his devotion to the “parallel dimension” contained in poetry. This portrait of a modern-day Bartleby is a blast. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly

A Good Animal by Sara Maurer
Maurer’s dazzling debut chronicles a boy’s coming-of-age in rural Michigan. Everett, born into a sheep farming clan in Sault Ste. Marie, plans to spend the rest of his life on his family’s land, which goes back generations. He’s 17 in 1995 when he meets Mary, the daughter of a Coast Guard officer, who’s lived in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Puerto Rico. Living in town for her senior year in high school, Mary has her sights set on leaving what she perceives as a stultifying rural community for art school in California. The author paints a tender portrait of their growing romance against the backdrop of the myriad travails of sheep farming. Everett is a thoughtful soul and Mary finds him delightful, but when she gets pregnant, their plans go awry. Maurer’s artful prose evokes the characters’ deep feelings for each other as well as a strong sense of place (“Her braids caught the wind and blew out behind her like kite tails”). Along the way, she builds tension as Everett tries to convince Mary to give up her dreams and spend her life with him. The result is a deeply felt examination of the heartbreaking choices people make for love. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly

NONFICTION

Kutchinsky's Egg: A Family's Story of Obsession, Love, and Loss by Serena Kutchinsky
A daughter investigates her father’s passion. Journalist Kutchinsky makes her book debut with a family history, centered on her father, Paul Kutchinsky, who, inspired by Fabergé, became obsessed with creating the world’s largest jeweled egg: an opulent 2-foot tall object made of 15 kilograms of gold, encrusted with 24,000 diamonds, featuring mechanized doors that opened to reveal a miniature library and portrait gallery. Paul hoped to sell it to a Middle Eastern oil baron for 7 million pounds, but the egg never did sell, instead plummeting the family into debt; bankrupting the House of Kutchinsky, a famous jewelry emporium that had been in the family for generations; and ending his marriage. “This breathtaking object caused such devastation that, for a long time, my family decried its existence,” the author writes. “Mum raged against it as if it were human.” After her father’s death, the author became obsessed, too, with locating the egg that had apparently disappeared. Her hunt led to startling discoveries about her family, a clan she describes as “Secretive. Machiavellian. Never trusting each other.” She uncovered feuds, betrayals, hatreds, and unlikely alliances—such as her grandfather’s with Oswald Mosley, who helped bring family members to London; Mosley, her grandfather thought, was “‘more rational’ than the other Fascist leaders plaguing Europe.” For years, she left the hunt. She got married, had two sons, and began her career. But in the end, like her father, she became obsessed. With the help of private detectives, museum experts, jewelers, and diamond firms around the world, Serena finally got to see it: “An object of excess. A totem of ambition and passion. A vanity project that spiraled out of control. The embodiment of Dad’s flawed ego. A jagged line marking the end of my childhood.” An engaging tale of a doomed quest. Copyright 2025 Kirkus Reviews

I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right by Matt Kaplan  Science, which in an ideal world would be immune to prejudices, egos, jealousies, and politics, has fallen victim to these forces for hundreds of years, according to this enlightening history from journalist Kaplan (The Science of Monsters). Upstart researchers are often denigrated by the entrenched scientific community, he explains, recounting Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis’s discovery in the 1840s that doctors washing their hands largely eliminated cases of puerperal or childbed fever, a fatal bacterial infection that commonly affected women after childbirth. Despite years of convincing research, Semmelweis’s results were dismissed by the medical community, many of whom were unwilling to accept that they had been the direct cause of so many women’s deaths. Kaplan also relays modern examples, such as the story of biochemist Katalin Karikó, whose research into mRNA was continually rejected and underfunded, but eventually became the basis for the Covid-19 vaccine. Kaplan proposes practical solutions for removing biases, such as implementing a lottery system to allocate research funding, but at the end of the day, he astutely notes, scientists must remember that “we are all here for the sake of humanity.” This is a timely and important call for change. Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly

Tony Stark, Odysseus, and the Myths Behind Marvel Ancient Heroes in the Modern World by Peter Meineck
Ancient myths live on. Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and their cohort stand as fantastic incarnations of great heroes from the past. Stories of strength and hubris, ingenuity, and craft live on in comics. Meineck, a professor of classics at New York University, invites us to find new meaning in these myths. “In these times of increasingly accelerating technological advancements, when the algorithm is by now certainly out of Pandora’s jar, myths can offer us a path back to our humanity. They can show us what happens when we get too close to the sun and, like Odysseus, remind us that for all our inventiveness, we are only as strong as the earth we live on and where we chose to plant our oar.” Each chapter addresses a character and a legend. We find Helen of Troy and Achilles. We hear the pantheon of Norse Asgard behind Thor and Loki. We remember tales of Atlantis behind Black Panther. We smell the berserkers in Wolverine. There is the legacy of Joseph Campbell in this book—the hero with a thousand faces prompts reflection on just why so many superheroes wear a mask. “Masks are one of the most mythic elements of the Marvel universe,” Meineck writes. “They connect us cognitively and viscerally to the ancient traditions of mythic performance that are found in all our cultures. Masks transport, transform, and take hold of us in ways that sometimes seem to defy explanation.” Our modern comics grant us purgation and catharsis—the emotional and moral goals of tragedy and epic, the feeling, truly, of being a mere mortal, yet capable of great deeds and greatheartedness. A lively introduction to world mythology, read through the lens of modern Marvel heroes. Copyright 2025 Kirkus Reviews