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!
NONFICTION
In 2024, women swept the Grammy awards, prompting headlines about their arrival in music. However, women have been shaping pivotal musical developments over the past 3,000 years. A History of Women in Music from Antiquity to the Present Day is a magisterial survey of their manifold contributions to musical history around the world, from Sappho to Nicki Minaj, M.S. Subbulakshmi to Madonna, and Hildegard of Bingen to AKB48. Here are the stories of the women who worked their way from the secret palace performers of sixteenth-century Italy to the quasi-divine operatic divas of nineteenth-century France, whose artistry made the Blues a profitable venue for Black vocalists at the dawn of the recording age, who composed chaste love ballads in the Middle Ages, and less chaste Hyperpop lust ballads in the TikTok Age, all while carrying out the decades-long battle of fighting for representation in some of the world's most male-coded musical forms, as singers of boleros and rancheras in Central America, heavy metal warriors and rap queens in the United States, operatic composers in Europe, reggaeton divas in Puerto Rico, and instrumentalists in a jazz landscape that only barely tolerated their presence as vocalists for forty long years. This book tells the long story of a global movement carried out at first country by country and woman by woman, until the weight of their amassed contributions burst open the gates of resistance, and cleared the way for women's musical prominence today. Whether you're trying to escape another Manic Monday, are curious What Love Has To Do With It (answer: quite a lot), or simply want to step Into The Groove for a while, there are stories and songs here aplenty to let you connect with the long and fascinating lineage of women who took the world by the ears, and poured therein the full measure of their rich musical genius. -Provided by publisher.
"Salt lakes are some of the world's most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them-from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea and beyond-are drying up. Their decline is already the second-largest contributor to sea level rise, and their future loss will create widespread dust storms, threatening the water cycle, migratory birds, and human health. In Salt Lakes, Caroline Tracey takes readers on her travels across the American West, to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan, exquisitely describing the strange world of salt lakes, documenting their loss, and tracing efforts to save them. She delves into Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings to make sense of how salt lakes have reflected the fast-changing natural world around us, while unraveling the lakes' lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world. Salt Lakes is a love letter to a strange and delicate ecosystem-and a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives."
-Provided by publisher.
Bestselling travel writer McCarthy (Walking with Sam) offers a heartwarming meditation on male friendship. A pointed question from his son—“You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”—inspires the author to reconsider his “self-induced isolation” and set out on cross-country drive to reconnect with former close friends. Over the course of a sprawling journey from Appalachia to the Southwest, McCarthy not only rekindles his relationships but makes impromptu, thematically appropriate stops—like at a museum dedicated to lonesome musical legend Roy Orbison—and, most intriguingly, chats with men he meets in bars and other hangouts about their friendships or lack thereof. He encounters several sets of lifelong best friends (including Mississippi duo Chuck and Dan, whose grandfathers were also best friends) and a slew of alienated loners (“I stick to myself,” one construction worker explains). These surprisingly open conversations allow McCarthy to interrogate what blocks male connection, particularly men’s fear of vulnerability and their sense that it’s easier to be emotional with women. McCarthy’s journey exposes how infrequently friendship is discussed at all in American culture—as one journalist notes, “People are reluctant to discuss friendship because it has no immediacy, no monetary value”—even as there is a widespread hunger to talk about it. The result is a poignant, life-affirming look at American men yearning for closer bonds. -Copyright 2026 Publisher’s Weekly
FICTION
Jessen (Yin Yang Love Song) offers up a charming mix of romance and philosophy in this well-crafted contemporary. Perpetually unlucky data analyst Hazel Yen is having an awful day: her apartment building's pipes burst, she's laid off, and her divorce is finalized. She impulsively heads to a fortune teller, hoping for reassurance about things to come--only to have the reading interrupted by a drenched man in tie-dye walking a cat on a leash. He's Logan Wells, a perpetually lucky carpenter, and he offers Hazel half of what turns out to be a winning Powerball ticket as an apology for barging in. Their unexpected win causes their fortunes to flip, with Hazel experiencing a run of good luck and Logan bad, setting them on a quest to understand the very nature of luck--and each other. Though their initial meet-cute feels a bit contrived, the central couple is easy to root for: Logan is a golden retriever of a hero who gradually learns from overly honest Hazel how to work through the negative instead of ignoring it; meanwhile, Hazel learns to set boundaries with her gambling addict father and wannabe-influencer brother. Readers will be well-pleased with this insightful romance between two people who, in discovering more about each other, discover a lot about themselves. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
The relationship between the men and women in blue and the citizens of Chicago has been a tenuous one. Curtis Thompson experiences this every day while walking the beat as a Chicago cop, and each interaction carries the potential of escalation. The night he and his partner stop two young people, Truth and Dontell, it accelerates into a shooting that could end his career and tear the city apart. Buddy Mack is Curtis's brother-in-law and teaches at Mayfield High School on Chicago's South side. The ideological opposite of Curtis, he cares about his students, and when Truth's cousin Zeke informs him about certain information he has discovered, Buddy wants to help in any way he can. However, when Buddy learns of Curtis's culpability in the shooting of one of his students, his loyalties are torn between family and his career. This is a poignant novel that explores the tragic consequences of corruption, moral compromises, and the family ties that are often as polarizing as they are binding. VERDICT Boyd (The Weight) has composed a gritty and compelling drama with a stellar plot featuring a fascinating group of characters and a stirring denouement. -Copyright 2026 Library Journal
Upward Bound by Woody Brown
The residents and staff of an underfunded adult care center in Los Angeles form the core of Brown's singular debut novel. Chief among them is narrator Walter, who, like the author, is nonspeaking and autistic. Describing his autism as "like ADHD times a thousand," Walter is observant and capable, transcribing his thoughts. Though he has graduated with honors from community college, he can't be left on his own. When his father dies and his mom has to return to work, he is forced to spend his days at Upward Bound. Readers meet others at the facility through Walter's eyes and the characters' own, including "gentle giant" Jorge, movie-star handsome Tom, who has cerebral palsy, saintly aide Carlos, summer lifeguard Ann, and many more. "The story of my people isn't being told, or it's being told wrong," Walter thinks, and he sets out to remedy that situation. Brown's sly sense of humor and ability to inhabit, without condescension, the experiences of those often marginalized, including the bumbling but well-intentioned caregivers, make the novel both quietly surprising and gently enlightening. Copyright 2026 Booklist
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