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—Kirkus

—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

—Book Riot

—Library Journal

—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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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