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Week of September 29, 2025

New in Paperback

Week of September 29, 2025

Paperback releases for the week of September 29th include REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT, a brand-new volume from Malcolm Gladwell that reframes the lessons of his groundbreaking first book, THE TIPPING POINT, in a startling and revealing light; PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers, a sweeping, panoramic novel set in the world’s largest ocean where four lives are drawn together; Paula Hawkins' THE BLUE HOUR, a masterful work of fiction that is as page-turning as it is unsettling and recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith; THE SEQUEL, the eagerly awaited follow-up to THE PLOT, in which Jean Hanff Korelitz gives readers an antihero to root for while illuminating and satirizing the world of publishing; and FIRE AND BONES by Kathy Reichs, a twisty, unputdownable thriller featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, who finds herself at the center of an arson investigation that spawns deepening levels of mystery and, ultimately, violence.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins - Psychological Thriller

September 30, 2025

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for 12 hours each day. Once home to Vanessa, a famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared 20 years ago. Now home to Grace, a solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation. But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling. And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge.

Capture or Kill: A Mitch Rapp Novel by Don Bentley - Political Thriller

September 30, 2025

April 2011: On a remote mountaintop overlooking the remains of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, Azad Ashani witnesses a Quds Force demonstration of a capability meant to upend America’s war in the Middle East. Ashani, director of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, recognizes the demonstration’s true significance and the nation-ending conflict it will provoke. Alone, Ashani stands no chance of preventing this rush to madness. But with the help of one man, he just might. In Washington, DC, CIA director Irene Kennedy briefs the president that the operational window to kill or capture Osama bin Laden at his recently discovered compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, is rapidly closing. But before he’ll authorize a commando raid on Pakistani soil, the president demands irrefutable proof of bin Laden’s presence. Proof he trusts just one man to provide.

A Christmas Duet by Debbie Macomber - Romance

September 30, 2025

Hailey Morgan’s life has always revolved around music. She once had big dreams of becoming a professional songwriter, but the reality of life has led her to working as an assistant high school band teacher. As the holidays approach, Hailey dreads the annual tradition of spending Christmas with her family and dodging her mother’s meddling questions about her love life. When Hailey’s close friend offers her the use of her family’s empty cabin for a rejuvenating solo holiday retreat, she finally decides to do something to make herself happy. However, her arrival in the small town of Podunk, Oregon, is anything but peaceful when she discovers the cabin has been invaded by several wild animals. Luckily, Jay, the son of the town’s main store proprietor --- and a former musician to boot --- is more than willing to help.

Everyone a Stranger by Kevin O'Brien - Historical Thriller

September 30, 2025

Washington D.C., 1943: Virginia Abrams believed the war had taken all it could from her when her husband was killed at Guadalcanal. One year later, she’s pregnant and on the run to avoid a ruthless political family that wants to erase all connections between her and the man who assaulted her. Changing her name, Virginia moves to Seattle to start over. Against her better instincts, she’s pulled into the lives of her new neighbors in an apartment complex --- especially Tim, whose mother dies suddenly in a fall. Virginia fears that her whereabouts have been discovered, and she was the intended target. But there are secrets between the residents too. Tim is convinced there are saboteurs among them, hiding in plain sight. Virginia wants to discount his teenage imagination and her own rising paranoia, yet there’s something menacing here.

The Favorites by Layne Fargo - Romance

September 30, 2025

Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating --- and each other --- to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers. Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end. As the 10-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story.” Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story.

Fire and Bones: A Temperance Brennan Novel by Kathy Reichs - Mystery/Thriller

September 30, 2025

Always apprehensive about working fire scenes, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is called to Washington, DC, to analyze the victims of a deadly blaze and sees her misgivings justified. The devastated building is in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood with a colorful past and present, and Tempe becomes suspicious about the property’s ownership when she delves into its history. The pieces start falling into place strangely and quickly, and Tempe teams with a new ally, telejournalist Ivy Doyle. Soon the duo learns that back in the ’30s and ’40s the home was the hangout of a group of bootleggers and racketeers known as the Foggy Bottom Gang. Though interesting, this fact seems irrelevant --- until the son of a Foggy Bottom gang member is shot dead at his home in an affluent part of the district. Coincidence? Targeted attacks? So many questions.

Great Disasters by Grady Chambers - Fiction

September 30, 2025

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year --- as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country --- the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes by Chanel Cleeton - Historical Fiction

September 30, 2025

London, 2024: American expat Margo Reynolds has been hired to find a mysterious book published over a century ago. With a single copy left in existence, it has a storied past shrouded in secrecy. Havana, 1966: Librarian Pilar Castillo has devoted her life to books. So when a neighbor fleeing Cuba asks her to return a valuable book to its rightful owner, Pilar will risk everything to protect the literary work entrusted to her care. Boston, 1900: For Cuban school teacher and aspiring author Eva Fuentes, traveling from Havana to Harvard to study for the summer is the opportunity of a lifetime. It leaves her little time to write, but a moonlit encounter with an enigmatic stranger changes everything. The story that pours out of her is one of forbidden love, secrets and lies. Although Eva cannot see it yet, the book will be a danger and salvation for the lives it touches.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church - Historical/Psychological Thriller

September 30, 2025

Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife, despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu's carefully crafted life begins to unravel. When a new neighbor, Bitsy, moves in, Lulu suspects that something darker lurks behind the woman's constant smile. As her fixation on Bitsy deepens, Lulu is drawn into a web of unsettling truths that threaten to expose the cracks in her own life. The more she uncovers about Bitsy, the more she questions everything she thought she knew --- and others soon begin questioning her sanity. But is Lulu truly losing her mind? Or is she on the verge of discovering a reality too terrifying to accept?

Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories written by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur - Literary Horror

September 30, 2025

The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer’s goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don't last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile, a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall, but later finds he can’t escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute’s dimly lit halls. These violent allegories subtly excavate the horrors of animal cosmetic testing, “conversion therapy,” domestic abuse and late-stage capitalism. 

Model Home by Rivers Solomon - Supernatural Thriller/Horror

September 30, 2025

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. Right away, bad things, scary things --- strange, unexplainable, violent --- began to happen in their house. As adults, the siblings all escaped the horrors of home, leaving their parents alone back in Texas. But when news of their parents’ death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to the house with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present. Their parents did not die a “natural” death. But was it supernatural?

Pictures of Him by Clare Leslie Hall - Domestic Thriller/Romantic Suspense

September 30, 2025

Catherine lives an enviably normal life with her loving husband, Sam, and their two children. But many parts of her past are shrouded in mystery. When a former flame resurfaces, something inside of Catherine gives way, releasing a flood of trauma she had thought was buried long ago. Lying in the hospital after a complete breakdown, language eludes Catherine. As her fragmented memories of her university days sharpen, the threads of her past and present start to coalesce. Catherine is transported back in time to her love affair with Lucian, a charismatic and complicated artist, with whom she shared a passion that was destined to end in tragedy. Fifteen years after the fateful end of their romance, Catherine must finally confront the events that brought her to crisis, while the fragile pieces of her life begin to shift --- and threaten to shatter.

The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy - Essays

September 30, 2025

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things. On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.” On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.” Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations. THE POSITION OF SPOONS is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.

Playground by Richard Powers - Fiction

September 30, 2025

Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a 3,000-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg - Fiction

September 30, 2025

The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn. Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of 21 to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her. But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you --- and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell - Psychology/Social Science

September 30, 2025

Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in 25 years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering.

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz - Psychological Thriller

September 30, 2025

Anna Williams-Bonner has taken care of business. That is to say, she’s taken care of her husband, bestselling novelist Jacob Finch Bonner, and laid to rest those anonymous accusations of plagiarism that so tormented him. Now she is living the contented life of a literary widow, enjoying her husband’s royalty checks in perpetuity. But for the second time in her life, a work of fiction intercedes, and this time it’s her own debut novel, The Afterword. When Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. Someone out there knows far too much: about her late brother, her late husband, and just possibly...Anna herself. What does this person want, and what are they prepared to do?

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang - Historical Fantasy/Romance

September 30, 2025

Xishi’s beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue. When she draws the attention of the famous young military advisor Fanli, he presents her with a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon. One that could topple the rival neighboring kingdom of Wu, improve the lives of her people and avenge her sister’s murder. All she has to do is infiltrate the enemy palace as a spy, seduce their immoral king and weaken them from within. But she knows that Fanli can see through every deception she masters, the attraction between them burning away any falsehoods. Once inside the enemy palace, Xishi finds herself under the hungry gaze of the king’s advisors while the king himself shows her great affection. But the higher Xishi climbs in the Wu court, the farther she and Fanli have to fall.

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones - Memoir

September 30, 2025

Small-town librarian Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo and a porn-pusher. She has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. When she stood up for diverse perspectives at a public library board meeting, she became a target for extremists using book-banning campaigns --- funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians --- in a crusade to make America more white, straight and “Christian.” But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a fight. She sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book-banning crisis occurring all across the nation, THAT LIBRARIAN draws the battle lines in the war against intellectual freedom, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.

Water, Water: Poems by Billy Collins - Poetry

September 30, 2025

In this collection of 60 new poems, Billy Collins writes about the beauties and ironies of everyday experience. A poem is best, he feels, when it begins in clarity but ends with a whiff of mystery. In WATER, WATER, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar.

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher - Gothic Horror/Dark Fantasy

September 30, 2025

After their terrifying ordeal at the Usher manor, Alex Easton feels as if they just survived another war. All they crave is rest, routine and sunshine. Instead, as a favor to Angus and Miss Potter, they find themself heading to their family hunting lodge, deep in the cold, damp forests of their home country, Gallacia. In theory, one can find relaxation in even the coldest and dampest of Gallacian autumns. But when Easton arrives, they find the caretaker dead, the lodge in disarray, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence. The villagers whisper that a breath-stealing monster from folklore has taken up residence in Easton’s home. Easton knows better than to put too much stock in local superstitions, but they can tell that something is not quite right in their home…or in their dreams.