Love By the Book

Jessica George

Friendship is the love story you can count on.

Remy is lucky. Her debut novel, based on her three best friends, became an instant bestseller when it was released, and her agent and publisher are clamoring for a follow-up. But just as Remy’s creative inspiration seems to leave her, so too do her friends: one moves to New York, one gets pregnant, and one gets back together with her (awful) boyfriend. After an ill-advised one-night stand complicates matters further, Remy is left deeply alone—and unable to find her next book idea.

Simone is successful. A Kindergarten teacher with a passion for kids, and a well-paying side hustle that affords her all the material comforts she desires, she doesn’t have time for a robust social life. All Simone needs is her close-knit family—but after the true nature of her work is revealed, they cut her off, and she realizes for the first time just how isolated she is.

When Simone and Remy bump into each other (literally) in a bookstore, it isn’t exactly soulmates at first sight. Simone is guarded and prickly, Remy is insecure and heartbroken, and each woman is harboring a secret. And yet they might just be the missing piece the other has been searching for—if only they can let each other in.

Can Simone help Remy make one of the most important decisions of her life—and can Remy help Simone recover all that she’s lost? In Jessica George’s heartwarming, funny, and soulful second novel, she explores the restorative nature of female friendship and the life-changing power of platonic love.

Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

The Radiant Dark

Alexandra Oliva

Arrival meets Wild Dark Shore in this captivating novel that follows a family over fifty years—a bold and compassionate exploration of the universe around us and what it truly means to be human.

It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist too. And so begins a decades-long exchange of messages with this mysterious, faraway civilization. 

As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol’s bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander. 

Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is a stunning examination of a family navigating their lives with the knowledge that we are not alone.

Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Publisher: SJP Lit

Our Sister Keeper

Jasmine Holmes

Mississippi, 1927. The groanings are coming.

No town is perfect, but East Cobb comes close. It’s a wealthy all-Black Free Town—untouched by white oppression—where ambitious Thea Elliot and her husband plan to make good on their big dreams. Little do they know that the idyllic town teems with ghoulish, walking nightmares . . . that only the women can see.

Marah knows the groanings well. She is one of the carriers—women with the ability to pull traumatic memories from men. Populated by men entirely freed of their pain, East Cobb has flourished, even as the remnants of their memories haunt the town’s women. When an unexpected death drives Marah to discover more about her own power, Thea’s and Marah’s worlds collide. The sisters must confront the rotten core at the heart of East Cobb’s prosperity and choose what—and who—will survive the reckoning.

A gripping blend of historical fiction and Southern gothic psychological horror, Our Sister’s Keeper is a fierce exploration of Black sisterhood, rage, and resistance.

Genre: Gothic Fiction; Horror
Publication Date: June 9, 2026
Publisher: Bindery Books

Japanese Gothic

Kylie Lee Baker

In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.

October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.

October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.

One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.

Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

Genre: Horror
Publication Date: April 14, 2026
Publisher: Hanover Square Press

Dear Monica Lewinsky

Julia Langbein

From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites.

Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels.

In a frenzy of guilt and regret, Jean finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness as if she were a secular saint, a figure of both suffering and sympathy. To Jean’s shock, Saint Monica appears—powerful, radiant, wise, and witty—and guides Jean like the Ghost of Christmas Past back to the summer of 1998. Had Jean merely been naive and stupid, as she has told herself for so long? Was it sheer weakness that led her into the affair? Or will Jean, with Saint Monica by her side, see past blame to the beauty of her younger self’s search for pleasure, connection, and transcendence?

Told in flashbacks of those sunlit six weeks in France, replete with Saint Monica’s flinty, fiery insights and interspersed with retellings of the lives of real historical martyrs, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and wholly original examination of desire and its costs, of appetite and its denial, and of certain defeat and surprise renewal. It asks what grace and forgiveness might look like both in our own individual lives and as a society.

Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: April 14, 2026
Publisher: Doubleday

Love Galaxy

Sierra Branham

A romantic science fiction thriller in which a young woman from a dead-end planet gets cast on a reality TV show to compete for the hand of the prince—or princess. But not everyone is there for the right reasons…

Temmi, a young trash collector stuck in a dead-end job on a garbage planet, finds herself with a golden ticket she never expected: the oppor­tunity to be cast on an interstellar dating show starring the brother and sister heirs to the galactic empire. Through diplomatic challenges and dramatized dates, twenty-four women will compete to marry the prince and princess—and to win the dynasty’s favor for their home planet.

Temmi may have been hand-picked to date the quiet, bookish prince, who is immediately taken by her brash personality and their shared passion for the sciences. But she can’t seem to keep away from the princess—and even though she’s strictly off-limits, their chemistry is undeniable.

But when contestants start turning up dead, whispers begin to circulate that some competitors might be harboring anti-imperialist motivations—Temmi among them. And suddenly it’s clear that so much more than feelings are at stake.

In fact, very few of the participants of Love Galaxy have come on the show to find love.

Sexy, snarky, and revolutionary, this fast-paced thrill ride will hook lovers of reality TV, fans of thoughtful sci-fi, and anyone who lives for drama.

Genre: Romance; Science Fiction
Publication Date: April 21, 2026
Publisher: DAW