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
Schiller, a nonfiction writing professor at Texas Tech, debuts with a moving examination of the complex reality of growing old in the U.S. After her grandmother died of Covid-19, Schiller's grief was complicated by others' assumptions that the loss was somehow less significant because of her grandmother's age. Schiller set out to learn about myriad facets of aging, including the increase in for-profit nursing homes and assisted living facilities (with a median annual cost of $110,000), the rising costs of healthcare (one retired couple she interviewed said they spend about $1,055 per month for Medicare, gap coverage, and supplemental prescription plans), and attempts to address social isolation, including a company that advertises the services of college students as "grandkids on-demand." What emerges is a series of intersecting crises that disproportionately impact the most marginalized elders. While activist groups have worked to improve the conditions that led to "the political and social carving out of old age as separate," which has "allowed for its commodification," Schiller writes, significant challenges remain. Weaving broad social analysis with personal insights, Schiller unpacks a complicated subject with curiosity and empathy. It's a deeply human portrayal of what it means to get older in a society unprepared to care for its most vulnerable. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
The number of languages that have ever existed is placed at between 31,000 and 140,000, but at most only 4,000 will remain by the 22nd century, about half of the current total. Moreover, many of them will not have died natural deaths but been killed off, according to this erudite exploration of "systemic... linguicide." As journalist Smith Galer (Losing It) explains, the loss is more profound than many realize: "Languages aren't dictionaries, but encyclopedias, containing entire worlds of often irreplaceable information." She cites the fascinating case of prostratin, an enzyme derived from the bark of the mamala tree in Samoa that helps treat HIV; prostratin only reached the wider world because of the work of an ethnobotanist who learned about it from conversing in Samoan. As for how and why languages are intentionally destroyed, it comes down to conquest and exploitation: "Just as history is written by the winners, languages often tend to be spoken by them, too." Smith Galer weaves together heart-wrenching accounts of those who have suffered linguicide--such as 19th-century Irish schoolchildren who were "forced to wear tally sticks around their necks, notched for every time they spoke their native Celtic languages"--and interviews with people around the world attempting to reclaim and protect local dialects and languages today. It makes for a spirited reconsideration of language as a natural resource that must be protected. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
Journalist Hansman (Powder Days) makes a convincing case that three largely forgotten women did more to shape America's love of the outdoors than history has recognized. The three women shared a fierce, uncompromising commitment to nature, even when it cost them credibility, comfort, and companionship. Georgie White, drawn to the Grand Canyon in the 1940s after her daughter's death, began recreationally swimming and floating down rapids, more or less creating river-rafting tourism in the process. Anne LaBastille, raised in the 1930s and '40s in a New Jersey suburb where she was pressured to "pursue polite indoor activities," became one of the Adirondacks' most passionate and controversial conservationists, driven by an ache for solitude. Dolores LaChapelle, one of the first female backcountry skiers, survived an avalanche in 1963 and was inspired to ask what it means to give oneself over entirely to a landscape. Hansman draws on psychotherapist Maureen Murdock's concept of the heroine's journey to reveal that these women's stories follow a different arc than the classic male hero's--one marked less by conquest than by spiritual communion with the natural world. She is at her best when exploring her subjects' complexity, acknowledging, for example, that LaBastille clung to her unique status as a female wilderness expert and often minimized other women. It's a nuanced and vivid portrait of pioneering outdoorswomen. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly
FICTION
An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton
Cleeton (The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes) delivers a heartrending yet hopeful story of an astronaut's wife holding on to her husband's memory in the wake of a mission gone wrong. In 1968 Cape Kennedy, Fla., Vivian Mitchell faces her worst fear: her husband Joe's Moon-bound shuttle has lost contact with mission control. As Vivian struggles to come to grips with NASA's report that he and the rest of the crew are lost in space, she seeks to counter suggestions that Joe, the mission's commander, is responsible for its failure. To that end, she agrees to an on-air interview with TV news anchor Graham Carlson, whom she once dated when she was a budding journalist in Washington, D.C., and explains that she hopes to prevent future mishaps by holding NASA accountable. Meanwhile, Vivian begins finding mysterious handwritten messages that seem to be from Joe. One of them reads, "Wait for me," prompting her to seek answers from a scientist who has written about wormholes and time travel. Cleeton drives the narrative forward with her well-crafted time travel conceit and touching depictions of Joe and Vivian's once in a lifetime love. Readers won't want to miss this.-- Kevan Lyon. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly.
Award-winning short-story author Sanders (Company, 2023) returns with a debut novel that is part family saga, part historical fiction, part ghost story, and entirely captivating. We meet Aubrey Lamb on the night her boyfriend of four years ends things and just a year after losing her father. As she struggles to cope and navigate multiple jobs to afford her life in Washington, DC, the inheritance of a family farm in Tennessee offers not only a distraction from her heartbreak, but also an opportunity to connect with her extended family. As Aubrey contemplates the future of her family's land, the complicated and fraught origins of her heritage are told through the story of her great-grandfather. Throughout the novel, the ghosts of her ancestors observe the daily lives of their descendants and the story unfolds under their watchful eyes. Sanders expertly portrays familial relationships, imbuing her characters with pathos and humor as they grapple with the complexities of family legacy. Give to readers of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021), by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Copyright 2026 Booklist.
Clay Lockhart carries his wife's body to the cliffside to bury her in the midst of a ferocious storm. The power of the storm and his heartbreak combine to make his piece of land split off Scotland's coastline and be set adrift as an island. Decades later, 12-year-old Ellie Mills is sent to live with her grandmother in Nova Scotia. One stormy night, she spots a light at sea and rows out, expecting a stranded sailor. Instead, she finds the lost island and Clay, unchanged since the night his wife died. Ellie returns home hours later to discover an entire week has passed. Twenty years on, Ellie has nearly convinced herself the island was a delusion until a podcaster calls with photo and video evidence of its reappearance. When Ellie finally sees it again, she swims out and becomes stranded with Clay, who still has not aged. Adrift together on their small lost island, they watch the world shift around them. VERDICT Ernshaw (A History of Wild Places) crafts a haunting tale of love, time, and climate anxiety. Fans of Matt Haig's How To Stop Time and Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore will be entranced.--Kerri Copus. Copyright 2026 Library Journal.
