Main Characters

Bobby Palmer

For readers of David Nicholls and Sally Rooney comes a new love story that’s at once tender and electrifying—told by everyone but the main characters. 

When Clara and Seb first cross paths in a London square, it’s the start of something exciting. Clara, an aspiring director stuck in an entry-level job, itches to pick up a camera. Seb, having floated between music, modeling, and now acting, struggles to find purpose in his work. Yet as random chance brings the two back together, time and time again, neither could predict that their magnetic connection is set to change their lives.
 
But everyone else does. The spark between Clara and Seb is exactly what falling in love should look like: exhilarating, passionate, undeniable. The two become a whirlwind, their relationship enthralling everyone they come across. But as the years go on and tensions flair, a last-ditch attempt to save their great romance ends with a gut-wrenching betrayal.
 
Set over the course of two decades, Clara and Seb’s love story is bigger than just themselves. Told from the eyes of their audience—friends and flatmates, rivals and lovers, strangers and confidants—Main Characters is a sweeping portrait of all sides of Clara and Seb. Everyone has their version of events, but only the main characters can decide how it ends.

Publication Date: June 30, 2026
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.

The Children

Melissa Albert

The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family’s isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere’s childhood isn’t the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family’s legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she’s spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s fantasy world?

The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It’s for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.

Publication Date: June 2, 2026
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: William Morrow