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Dean Koontz, author of The Friend of the Family

The human “oddities” in the Museum of the Strange are less wondrous than the gawking rubes had been promised. But Alida is something else. The real thing. Traveling Depression-era America from carnival midways to speakeasies, Alida is resigned to an exploited and lonely life on the road as the museum’s golden ticket. Until she’s rescued by two compassionate strangers. Franklin and Loretta Fairchild see in Alida a gifted and uncannily well-read girl in need of a loving touch and a family. With the openhearted couple and their three precociously imaginative children, Alida finds it. Yet despite everyone’s overwhelming generosity and acceptance, Alida knows she is still a very different kind of girl. Her dreams bear that out. They’re vivid, unsettling and threatening. Alida fears that they’re also warnings. And that it’s the Fairchilds who may need rescue from a bad, bad world.

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Week of July 20, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of July 20th include MY FRIENDS by Fredrik Backman, an unforgettably funny and deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life 25 years later; THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, an emotional story about family, sacrifice and transcendent love from Dean Koontz, in which a girl liberated from a carnival sideshow discovers her mysterious purpose; Francesca Serritella's FULL BLOOM, a stunning novel about ambition and untapped desire that finds a woman's life forever changed by a mysterious perfume; and POSITIVE OBSESSION by Susana M. Morris, a magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, Octavia E. Butler, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.

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