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Featured Guide

Susan Wiggs, author of Wayward Girls

In 1968, we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd, a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns. They include Mairin, the free-spirited daughter of Irish immigrants, committed to keep her safe from her stepfather; Angela, who was denounced for her attraction to girls and was sent to the nuns for reform --- but instead she found herself the victim of a predator; Helen, the daughter of intellectuals detained in Communist China who saw her “temporary” stay at the Good Shepherd stretch into years; Odessa, who was caught up in a police dragnet over a racial incident --- but she found the physical and mental toughness to endure her sentence; Denise, who was sentenced for brawling in a foster home and dared to dream of a better life; and Janice, who couldn’t decide where her loyalties lie --- except when it came to her friend, Kay.

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Megan Miranda, author of You Belong Here

Beckett Bowery never thought she’d return to Wyatt Valley, a picturesque college town in the Virginia mountains steeped in tradition. Her roots there were strong: Beckett’s parents taught at the college, and she never even imagined studying anywhere else --- until a tragedy her senior year ended with two local men dead, and her roommate on the run, never to be seen again. For the last two decades, Beckett has done her best to keep her distance. Then her daughter, Delilah, secretly applies to Wyatt College and earns a full scholarship, and Beckett can only hope that her lingering fears are unfounded. But deep down, she knows that Wyatt Valley has a long memory, and the past isn’t the only dangerous thing in town.

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Meredith Lavender, author of Happy Wife

Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will Somerset: a prominent 46-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter, and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship. But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him. Going back and forth between Nora and Will’s romance and the search in the wake of Will’s mysterious disappearance, Nora must answer the question from all angles: Where. Is. Will?

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Francesca Giannone, author of The Letter Carrier

Salento, Italy, June 1934: A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a tight-knit village where everyone knows each other. A couple gets off: The man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home after a long time away; the woman, Anna --- his wife --- is a stranger from the North. Carlo’s brother is there to meet them, and he and everyone else can’t help but notice that Anna is as beautiful as a Greek statue. But Anna is not like the other wives, and there aren’t many options for a woman with her sensibilities. So when she learns that the post office is hiring, she leaps at the opportunity. A female letter carrier? It is unthinkable! But Anna passes the postal exam and soon becomes the invisible thread connecting the town. Letters convey information and emotion, but for some in Lizzanello, they are too little and too late.

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Aisling Rawle, author of The Compound

Lily --- a bored, beautiful twentysomething --- wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside 19 other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave. Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur.

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Beck Dorey-Stein, author of Spectacular Things

Mia and Cricket have always been close. The gifted daughters of a young single mother, the “Lowe girls” are well-known in the small Maine town they call home. The responsible and academically minded Mia assumes the position of caregiver far too young, while Cricket, a bouncing ball of energy and talent, seems born for soccer stardom. But the cost of achieving athletic greatness comes at a steep price. As Mia and Cricket grow up, they must grapple with the legacy of their mother’s secret past while navigating their own precarious future. Can Mia allow herself to fall in love at the risk of repeating a terrible history? Will Cricket’s relentless chase of a lifelong goal drive her sister away? When does loyalty become self-sabotage?

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Adriana Trigiani, author of The View from Lake Como

In blue-collar Lake Como, New Jersey, family comes first. Recently divorced from Bobby Bilancia, Jess Capodimonte Baratta moves into her parents’ basement to hide and heal. Jess is the overlooked daughter, who dutifully takes care of her parents, cooks Sunday dinner and puts herself last. Despite her role as the family handmaiden, Jess is also a talented draftswoman in the marble business run by her dapper uncle Louie, who believes she can do anything (once she invests in a better wardrobe). When the Capodimonte and Baratta families endure an unexpected loss, the shock unearths long-buried secrets that will force Jess to question her loyalty to those she trusted. Fueled by her lost dreams, Jess takes fate into her own hands and escapes to her ancestral home, Carrara, Italy.

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Lisa Scottoline, author of The Unraveling of Julia

Lately, Julia Pritzker is beginning to think she’s cursed. She’s lost her adoptive parents, then her husband is murdered. When she realizes that her horoscope essentially foretold his death, she begins to spiral. Then a letter arrives out of the blue, informing her that she has inherited a Tuscan villa and vineyard --- but her benefactor is a total stranger named Emilia Rossi. In Tuscany, Julia is horrified to discover that Rossi was a paranoid recluse with delusions of grandeur, who believed herself to be a descendant of Duchess Caterina Sforza, a legendary Renaissance ruler. Julia is stunned by her uncanny resemblance to Rossi, and even to Caterina. Then she unearths eerie parallels between them. Before long, Julia suspects that she’s being followed, and strange things begin to happen.

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Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, 17-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating each of them in the accident. During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. But Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident --- suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal.

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B.A. Shapiro, author of The Lost Masterpiece

B.A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-19th-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot --- the one woman in their midst who never got her due --- and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. Tamara discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil.

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