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
Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love by Michael Schur & Joe PosnanskiAn award-winning sportswriter (Posnanski) and an Emmy-winning television producer (Schur) travel across the U.S. and abroad to explore and examine the notion of being a sports fan. The format meanders from journalistic pieces to email exchanges, and conversational chats as the two discuss and deliberate on the depth of peoples' love or hatred for a given team, sport, or event. This smorgasbord of fandom introduces readers to everyone from the unlikeliest NASCAR fan to a maestro of crossword puzzles. Amid the stories of their travels, Posnanski and Schur discuss the origins of their own love/hate affairs with their favorite teams and deliberate whether fans are born and nurtured to teams or if people can develop into a fan of a sport with study and effort. Several interludes include messages from individuals describing their passion for an event, and in one endearing chapter they have their daughters describe their love for Taylor Swift. An entertaining, humorous, and thought-provoking examination of the human obsession with sports and entertainment told in a delightful, self-deprecating style that will appeal to a variety of readers. Copyright 2026 Booklist For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage by Stephanie Coontz
Historian Coontz follows her return to the subject of marriage, which she addressed in Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (2005), with this exploration of the reasons behind rising fears and uncertainty about the institution. In chapters covering the historical, social, economic, and political factors that have driven partner relationships, she effectively analyzes the role of marriage from the Paleolithic era through the post-WWII U.S. Examples ranging from division of labor among early humans to the evolution of the title "Mrs." from one of power to one of subservience to letters written between courting couples support the salient points. Coontz busts many myths--especially those of the male as sole provider in early America and the breadwinner in the 1950s--which are fueling the current trad wife fad. An afterward by gender-inequality expert Haley Swenson supports Coontz's hope that relationships can transcend inherited patterns and norms to become healthy and adaptable to today's world. This is accessibly written and provides extensive endnotes for those interested in learning more about this timely subject. Copyright 2026 Booklist The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright: The True Story of Mass Murder in Paradise by Casey Sherman
Journalist Sherman (Blood in the Water) recounts the murder of Frank Lloyd Wright's lover in this fascinating work of true crime. In 1909, Wright made headlines for running off to Europe with his neighbor's wife, translator and feminist advocate Martha "Mamah" Borthwick Cheney. The couple were hounded by reporters abroad, so when they returned from Europe, Wright built the Taliesin compound in Wisconsin where they lived together happily. Then, in 1914, while Wright was in Chicago designing Midway Gardens, a handyman killed Mamah, her two children, and several of Wright's staff before burning Taliesin down. Sherman lingers on the mystery of the act--the suspect swallowed acid and died in jail while awaiting trial, so historians remain unsure if he was criminally insane or carrying out a targeted attack--but pays greater attention to the ways that Mamah's death haunted Wright, who considered her the love of his life. Though he remarried, Wright was buried next to Mamah at Taliesin in 1959. Sherman exhibits both a novelist's sense of pace and a reporter's eye for detail in this arresting true crime narrative of great passion and great tragedy. It's a heartbreaker. Photos. Agent: Peter Steinberg, UTA. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
FICTION
Offseason by Avigayul SharpA cynical PhD dropout tries to make do in her new digs at a girl's boarding school, in Sharp's distinctive debut. It's winter and the unnamed narrator has traveled to a seaside tourist town somewhere in the Northeast, where she's been hired to teach English literature. On double doses of her prescription stimulants, she lectures on subjects she's obsessed with, such as the life of Stalin and Dickens's Bleak House, noting how the students "stared back at me with the vacant curiosity of idiot fish whose aquarium had just been tapped by a finger." As the narrator settles in at the school, where "every year the cottages sank another inch into the earth," she befriends quirky students like Cordelia and begins dating fellow teacher Thomas, who's recently returned from leave, which he claims was due to a family illness. The lightly plotted narrative casts a spell on the reader, thanks to Sharp's powers of observation and the narrator's eccentric disposition, as when her seatmate on a train pretends he's sleeping and plays footsie with her, and she welcomes the touch. This pensive and offbeat work is an acquired taste. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
The Kindness of Strangers by Emma Garman
Garman's debut is an intriguing, slow-build mystery with a nicely drawn, morally gray cast of characters bouncing off one another in post-World War II London. Honor Wilson runs a genteel boarding house in London, inherited from her husband, and surprises her boarders one day when she takes in a stranger named Jimmy Sullivan who has appeared on their doorstep. Though the other tenants are surprised at the sudden addition to the household, they do their best to make Jimmy welcome, even as they sense undercurrents between him and their landlady. The stories Jimmy tells of his past seem to change depending on whom he's talking to, and it's clear that he holds secrets. In the weeks he is with them, it also becomes clear that he is interested in learning all of the boarders' secrets and, perhaps, using those secrets against them for his own purposes. Tensions rise, mistrust grows, and murder becomes inevitable. The tenants all agree to take Jimmy out, but can they get along for long enough to make sure no one goes down for the murder? VERDICT: Readers seeking character-driven mysteries will find much to enjoy in this beautifully written novel. Copyright 2026 Agent Jane Jorgenson, Library Journal
Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker Whitaker's latest (after The Animators, 2017), is a sharp, hard-hitting novel about the perils of capitalism, the pain of denying oneself, and the ugliness hiding below the joy of normal family life juxtaposed with the resilience inside the most unlikely people. Fred and Fran are co-owners of a small southern chain of stores, faced with the choice of buying out another small chain and expanding or keeping things the way they are. On the advice of family members and friends, they take out a $2 million loan and expand, only to find that things are not what they seem . . . and that capitalism itself is an open maw, forever swallowing those who fall victim to it, only to spit them back out. Fred, easygoing and kind, becomes harsh and even dangerous, and Fran soon realizes that she wants more in life--and that ""more"" is Wendy, a sweet, no-nonsense employee. With engaging characters and immersive prose, Whitaker shows readers both an intimate family portrait and a lesson in the perils of greed, and by the book's thoughtful, softly bittersweet ending, a commentary on humanity's determination to make beauty despite society's rejection of it. Copyright 2026 Booklist






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