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
Pulitzer-winning journalist Ojito (Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus) makes her fiction debut with an affecting parallel narrative of two women, each exiled from their island home nearly a century apart. In 2019, 50-something Cuban American reporter Mara Dennis is assigned to cover the drowning of African refugees en route to the Canary Islands. The location triggers her fear of the ocean, which she’s had since she fled Cuba four decades earlier on a small boat. The past is dredged up in other ways, as Mara’s emotionally distant mother, Lina, asks her to obtain the birth certificate of her great-grandmother, Catalina, in Tenerife. Alternating chapters follow Catalina from her birth in the Canary Islands in 1900 through her tumultuous affair with a star-crossed lover, arranged marriage, and ill-fated voyage to Cuba aboard the steamship Valbanera, which is shipwrecked in a hurricane off Key West. Generations later, as Mara digs into Catalina’s life, she contends with a series of mysteries, including that Catalina’s name was missing from the Valbanera’s manifest for its final voyage. Ojito vividly portrays the two women’s struggles, and the dramatic story ends on a hopeful note as Mara attempts to resolve her feelings about the past and improve her relationship with Lina. This one’s tough to shake.
Copyright 2025 Publisher’s Weekly.
From the internationally bestselling author of the Morisaki Bookshop novels comes a charming and poignant story set at a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles. Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Numata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time. While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives where we feel lost—and how we find our way again. Copyright 2025 NetGalley
Life has taught Margaret Finch the importance of paying attention. When she arrives at work (she’s a lab assistant to botanist Jonathan Deaver) and discovers her boss’s dead body, she immediately knows there’s something strange about the scene. There’s an empty Diet Coke bottle nearby, but Dr. Deaver never drank the stuff, and a cocktail glass is missing from next to the bottle of whiskey he enjoyed on special occasions. The campus police come to believe that Dr. Deaver died as the result of a heart defect. However, Margaret is not convinced of this theory, which means it is now up to her to draw upon her scientific training and find out who killed her beloved boss. Readers enamored with Nita Prose’s endearingly offbeat sleuth Molly Gray will be equally smitten with the delightfully quirky Margaret, while those who miss the botanical mysteries of Rebecca Rothenberg will find much to appreciate in Townsend’s cleverly crafted, science-centric puzzler. VERDICT Written with a delectably deadpan sense of humor and graced with an exceptionally entertaining cast of characters, Townsend’s (The Beautiful and the Wild) latest is a blooming treat for fans of either cozy or traditional mysteries. Copyright 2025 Library Journal
NONFICTION
The American Revolution reframed as “a world war in all but name.” The struggle of 13 North American colonies for independence from Great Britain quickly turned into a global conflict, writes Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Patriot leaders cultivated the support of England’s major rivals, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, which began by covertly supplying the rebels with weapons and by 1779 were engaging in open warfare. French and Spanish fleets turned the Caribbean into a major battlefront, forcing England to send troops from North America to protect its precious “sugar islands,” while American privateers inflicted huge losses on British merchant ships and boosted the rebel colonies’ economy. A separate Spanish-British war in Florida and South America also weakened England’s attempt to suppress the independence, as did French efforts to incite revolts in India against British rule. The repercussions after Americans won their independence also extended beyond the Eastern seaboard. Spain and Britain both tightened their controls over remaining colonies. Native American tribes lost what little protection England had provided against white settlers’ incursions on their lands, which grew increasingly aggressive after independence. Enslaved African Americans who fought for Britain on the basis of promises of freedom were resettled first in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone; their odyssey is the subject of a particularly fascinating chapter. Bell’s international emphasis occasionally leads him to overreach, as when he claims that the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London were “also an expression of popular opposition to the American war,” but his basic argument is sound (and there was considerable antiwar sentiment in England). Based on solid and deep research, his book is written in clear, accessible prose—with entertaining minutiae such as the fact that the minutemen at Lexington and Concord fired guns made in Spain—that will appeal to general readers with an interest in history. A fresh perspective on a familiar subject. -Kirkus Reviews
Former NBC News journalist Adams debuts with an illuminating history of America’s Black-owned bookstores. She begins with Black abolitionist David Ruggles, whose Tribeca shop, opened in 1834, established a template that many Black booksellers would follow: prioritizing community and politics. From there Adams tracks how different store owners’ political convictions shaped their approach to art and activism over time; along the way, she makes professional associations and book distribution into the stuff of riveting drama. In discussing radical bookshops that emerged in the 1960s, for example, she outlines how they were spied on by COINTELPRO operatives (in at least one case, booksellers will be paranoid to hear, by a store “regular”). Later, in addressing existential challenges facing the Los Angeles bookstore Eso Won in the 1990s, she hints at disagreements within the city’s Black community over which of its Black-owned bookstores was more legitimate, as some stores turned away from politics and embraced a more commercial mindset. She also touches on blockbuster Black authors, from W.E.B. DuBois to Angela Davis, and the history of the Black publishing industry. A final focus on a new generation of Black bookstore owners—along with a long list of shops all over the U.S.—makes for an invigorating conclusion. This will hold immense appeal for bibliophiles. (Nov.) Copyright 2025 Publishers Weekly.
* A lens on “an extraordinary time.” In 17 long-form essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker in the past two decades, environmental journalist Kolbert gracefully balances a realistic awareness of losses brought about by human activity—particularly by the use of fossil fuels—with a sense of wonder at just how much there is still to learn about this “little-known planet” and admiration for those who quixotically explore and attempt to heal it. Often, she travels with the subjects of her profiles, as when, in the title essay, she accompanies entomologist David Wagner on a caterpillar-collecting expedition in Texas, finding “one marvel after another.” The book includes brief notes on many of the essays, updating the reader on whatever situation an essay describes. While certain undercurrents run through the pieces, notably a brief rehearsal of how Earth has warmed over the past centuries and how impossible a quick turnaround of that trend is, the book doesn't feel repetitious. The author’s emphasis on the particular, and her quirky sense of humor—evident, for example, in her descriptions of her adventures in beekeeping as documented in “Stung”—make the pieces fascinating variations on a complicated theme in which despair and hope dance together. Horror and admiration mix in essays like “Killing Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,” which evokes in gruesome detail the delight that New Zealanders take in disposing of the invasive mammals that have hurt the ecosystem there. Kolbert isn’t afraid to tackle difficult topics: A section of pieces grouped under the title “Big Ideas” addresses questions such as “Should the Natural World Have Rights?” and “Can Carbon Dioxide Removal Save the World?” Thought-provoking speculations about a world on the edge of violent change.
-Kirkus Reviews
