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—Shelf Awareness

September 30, 2025

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this fall. Read more about it, and enter our Fall Reading Contest for a chance to win one of five copies of I AM YOU by Victoria Redel, which is now available.

PLEASE NOTE: Typically our Fall Reading giveaways are open for just 24 hours, but we are extending the deadline of this contest to Thursday, October 2nd at noon ET. That gives you an extra day to submit your entries!

Virginia Evans, author of The Correspondent

Throughout her life, Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past 10, Sybil sits down to write letters --- to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter. Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Chanel Cleeton, author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes

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.

Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early 20s and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood --- overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences --- swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another --- amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

Lily King, author of Heart the Lover

In the fall of her senior year of college, our narrator meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. The boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Editorial Content for All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation

Teaser

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (EAT PRAY LOVE) and creatively (BIG MAGIC) shows how to break free.

Promo

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (EAT PRAY LOVE) and creatively (BIG MAGIC) shows how to break free.

About the Book

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (EAT PRAY LOVE) and creatively (BIG MAGIC) shows how to break free.

In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER is a landmark memoir that will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love --- or to any other passion, substance or craving --- and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.

Editorial Content for All This Could Be Yours

Teaser

Is a debut author's blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

Promo

Is a debut author's blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

About the Book

Is a debut author's blockbuster bestseller about to ruin her life? A glamorous book tour becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse chase in this new and captivating thriller by "master of suspense" (Publishers Weekly) and USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan.

Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be YoursIn a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband, Henry, and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house.

But there's a chilling problem with Tessa's triumphant book tour. She soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who's obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home.

Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made --- what felt like a genuine deal with the devil --- appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can't untangle who's threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she'll lose her career, her family --- and possibly her life.

Editorial Content for The Blue Hour

Teaser

A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, THE BLUE HOUR recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Paula Hawkins’ place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.

Promo

A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, THE BLUE HOUR recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Paula Hawkins’ place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.

About the Book

The propulsive and powerful new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN.

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.

A masterful novel that is as page-turning as it is unsettling, THE BLUE HOUR recalls the sophisticated suspense of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Paula Hawkins’ place among the very best of our most nuanced and stylish storytellers.

Editorial Content for The Heir: A Young Queen Victoria Mystery

Teaser

For fans of "The Crown," The Young Victoria and all things British royalty is a new mystery set in 1830s London and starring none other than the young Princess Victoria --- the future Queen of England --- as a rebellious amateur sleuth.

Promo

For fans of "The Crown," The Young Victoria and all things British royalty is a new mystery set in 1830s London and starring none other than the young Princess Victoria --- the future Queen of England --- as a rebellious amateur sleuth.

About the Book

For fans of "The Crown," The Young Victoria and all things British royalty is a new mystery set in 1830s London and starring none other than the young Princess Victoria --- the future Queen of England --- as a rebellious amateur sleuth.

Destined for a life beyond her wildest dreams, born fifth in succession to the throne, and determined to get to the bottom of a most foul puzzle, the future queen vows to solve the mystery of a dead man scandalously discovered on the grounds of Kensington Palace --- by her!

The young Victoria remembers nothing but Kensington Palace. Arriving as a baby, she has been brought up inside its musty, mold-ridden walls. Others may see the value of Kensington’s priceless artifacts and objets d’art, but the palace is a jail cell for young Victoria. Raised with an incredibly strict regimen to follow, watched at all times by her mother, the controlling, German-born Victoire, and Victoire’s prized advisor, the power-hungry Sir John Conroy, the bright 15-year-old is allowed no freedom at any time --- except that which she steals or wheedles for, always in the company of Conroy’s resentful daughter, Jane.

But one fateful afternoon, Victoria slips away from her mother to ride out on her beloved gelding, Prince. With reluctant Jane in tow, the princess gallops out from the palace green. But what would normally be an uneventful trot around very familiar terrain presents the mutinous princess with a most bewildering sight --- a dead man, and on the grounds of the palace, no less.

Determined to get to the bottom of the inscrutable puzzle, young Victoria is met with shocking disrespect and any number of obstacles. Sir John lies to her, her uncles and aunts join with her mother to stonewall her questions and curtail her movements. But Victoria will not be deterred. With Jane Conroy as a tentative and untrustworthy ally, Victoria’s first “case” is underway.