The 50+ Best Books to Add to Your October Must-Read List

Would you live forever if no one remembered you? In this sweeping tale told over hundreds of years, we follow Addie, who after a desperate Faustian deal, is both immortal and destined to be forgotten — until three centuries later, when she meets a man who remembers her name. 

A beautifully haunting take on Peter Pan, V. E. Schwab’s newest novel is a genre-bending tale of self discovery, freedom, and the legacies we leave behind. 

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April is a fanfic and cosplay queen obsessed with the show God of the Gate, but has kept her hobbies away from real life, never showing her face or revealing her real name. 

Marcus, star of said fantasy show, knows all about hiding. He’s been writing fanfic of his show for years, completely against contract regulations. When April finally reveals herself as a cosplayer via twitter, her plus-sized take on the show’s heroine goes viral, and Marcus himself asks her out to spite the haters. But when he realizes April is also his closest online fanfic friend, Marcus struggles to keep his identity a secret while grappling with the increasing attraction between them. 

Fan fiction, fantasy, and real life collide in this friends-to-lovers with a twist romance debut.

Arianna Davis, Oprah Magazine’s digital director, makes her debut with What Would Frida Do, a moving tribute to Frida Kahlo, womanhood, and Latinidad. 

Each chapter offers a story from Frida’s life, and Davis seamlessly blends biography with manifesto, history with guidebook, and not only gives readers a glimpse into all the ways in which Frida lived fearlessly and passionately, but how we can model our own lives after her bravery.

Perfect for fans of Lovecraft Country and The Nickel Boys, P. Djèlí Clark’s novella Ring Shout is a beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy filled with macabre humor and scathing commentary. 

When the movie Birth of a Nation casts a spell, the Ku Klux Klan’s numbers increase astronomically, and their desires and appetite for destruction are more monstrous and beastly than we could have imagined. 

Maryse Boudreaux and her band of soldiers are all that stands in their way, and as she uses whatever tools in her arsenal to send the Klan back to hell, another darkness threatens to undo all the headway she’s made. 

With a badass heroine you can root for, and a unique take on horror and folklore, Ring Shout is the pulpy fiction we’ve been craving. 

The transition between girlhood and womanhood is often marked by menstruation. But when puberty hits Evalene, she receives more than just first blood — she is also gifted with magical abilities, ones that have been passed down to her family since slavery. 

For Evvie, the magic is just another part of growing up that she has no idea what to do with. That is, until a dangerous man comes to town and threatens her family and her future. 

Filled with all the ingredients of a great coming-of-age story — magic, history, loss, love, and bravery — Corthon’s latest work is a compelling addition to the genre.

Exploring the ways in which white feminism is part of a long-standing tradition dating back to slavery and how it is weaponized in all areas today, Ruby Hamad builds on her viral Guardian article to create a new exploration of gender and race. 

Ping-ponging with precision between pop culture criticism, recent media headlines, and historical context, Hamad asks readers to live in discomfort while confronting the legacy and harm white feminism and white womanhood have on the lives of Black and brown women.

Only Alice Hoffman would be so adept at Benjamin Buttoning her way through a book series. In the prequel to the prequel of Practical Magic, Hoffman delves into the Owens’ origin story, matriarch of the clan Maria Owens, the unrequited love that fueled her anger and despair, and the curse that has haunted generations of her descendants. 

Filled with the magic, melancholy, and mischief Alice Hoffman is known for, Magic Lessons is a welcome addition to the Practical Magic collection.

Bethany is obsessed with getting everything just right. Her anxiety is a constant specter, and she is afraid for anyone to see her as less than perfectly poised. Tired of being the underdog of her house-flipping family, she takes on her own project, and poaches Wes Daniels, the 20-something “too-young-for-her” contractor she absolutely does not have feelings for. Right.

As Wes gets under her perfect exterior with his lascivious teasing and surprisingly tender concern, can Bethany let go of her facade long enough to flip the perfect house and find the perfect man? Tessa Bailey’s Hot and Hammered series continues with this enemies to lovers romance that will get you hot and heavy.

Following main character Gifty’s struggle to make sense of her family's history of mental illness and addiction via her Ph.D. research, Yaa Gyasi expounds on previously explored themes of generational inheritances and legacy. 

As Gifty hungers for the hard comfort of scientific fact, she also longs for the faith of her childhood, and the warring ideals — and limits — of both beliefs. An intimate portrayal of faith, love, loneliness, and family, Gyasi writes a beautiful tale that is a worthy followup to her debut.

Best-selling romance novelist Alyssa Cole debuts her first thriller novel, When No One Is Watching. 

Inspired by her own experiences of gentrification in NYC, Cole expertly showcases character development she’s known for while weaving in themes of paranoia, unreliable narration, racism, and hidden histories. Sure to be both creepy and cerebral, Get Out meets The Woman in the Window in this Alfred Hitchockian tale with a twist.

Morgan Jerkins uses the personal exploration of her heritage as a launching point to refute the “Black and white binary” she’s always proclaimed to exist in. She traces her roots back to the Gullah Geechee communities, trying to come to terms with what it means to connect to her ancestral homeland of Africa while not having a straight line to it. 

Making her own migration from Louisiana to the Carolinas to Oklahoma to California, and speaking with family, historians, and activists, she follows the question that threads the entirety of her journey: How does Africa survive within Black Americans?

Manu’s eyes mark her as different. And different, in her world, can get you killed. Hiding from ICE agents and her father’s crime family, Manu and her mom have stayed hidden for years, until a loved one is attacked and ICE captures her mom. It is here that Manu discovers that there’s a world hidden beyond, one where lobizónes — werewolves — exist.

Garber blends themes of immigration, oppression, sexuality, and identity seamlessly in this multi-genre fantasy based on traditional Argentine folklore.

We start at the end. Introduced to Vivek via their death, their body dropped on the doorstep of the family. We then journey back to the beginning, are introduced to Vivek as a gentle but mysterious child, and grow with them through adolescence and adulthood. 

Vivek becomes more knowable to us through their relationships, with narration moving quickly between Vivek’s voice and the voices of their family and friends. 

Still, who we are and how we exist to others are not always the same, and Emezi expertly explores themes of self discovery, expectations, sexuality, tradition and found family, leading to a heartbreaking conclusion of a life cut too soon.

Jasmine Lin Rodriguez has just landed the lead role in the hottest, most anticipated telenovela. Jasmine Lin Rodriguez has also just been dumped. 

Determined to focus on the former, she and her gal pals devise a “Leading Lady” plan — a set of rules designed to keep her focused on the right things. That is until her co-star is recast at the last minute by the mysterious Ashton Suarez and she starts to question her plans when their slow-burn on-set chemistry reaches fever pitch off camera. 

Alternating between the voices of Jasmine and Ashton’s onscreen characters and their “real lives,” this show within a book format should appeal to fans of classic telenovelas and comedy shows like Jane the Virgin.

When Linda and Dennis move to Sao Paulo for Dennis’ teaching career, it leaves Dennis knee-deep in new opportunities and Linda increasingly filled with ennui and loneliness. 

Her fateful meeting with Brazilian woman Celia sparks desire: lust for life, for adventure, and for Celia herself. Linda’s housekeeper, the enigmatic Marta, struggles with growing awareness of Brazil’s racial- and color-caste system, made all too obvious by the privileges afforded Linda in spite of her extreme incompetence and increasingly erratic behavior. 

Told in the second person by Linda to her husband, the story seeks to subvert the conversations around womanhood, women’s work, and complexity of our relationships with men, the world, and each other. 

Echoing the maddening loneliness of Charlotte Perkins’ The Yellow Wallpaper, Burnham spins an exquisite tale about the relationship between women and the complicated dance of employer and domestic employee, all umbrellaed under the tense themes of race, class, colorism, and sexuality.

More: 15 Impactful Books on Racism for Kids

In this alternate history of a fantasy novel set just before World War II, people of color carry magical gifts in their hands. 

Phyllis Leblanc is a biracial woman who passes for white in order to use her magical knife-throwing skills to kill in service of New York’s notorious mobsters. Dev is her half-Indian ex-boyfriend — a police chief who has the ability to sense threats from others when he touches them — and Tamara is her best friend, a clairvoyant who can read tarot cards. 

When Dev senses a threat that sends them upstate to get away and lay low, their lives become more intertwined than ever, and Phyllis must make a choice: Let the ghosts of her past overtake her or look towards the future — and freedom. 

Plus-size fashion blogger Bea is trying to stop pining for her best guy friend. To take her mind off of the heartbreak, she indulges in Main Squeeze, America’s most popular dating show. After a scathing twitter thread about the lack of size (and racial) diversity, she gets the opportunity of a lifetime: to star in the next season of Main Squeeze.

Bea agrees on the condition that no one expects her to really fall in love. Easy, right? But when filming starts, she realizes that “not falling” might be more complicated than it seems — and her happily ever after might not look the way she expects. This is a heartwarming, laugh-out-loud story that you’ll want to finish in a single sitting.

Exploring the eerily familiar and timely conversation around feeling trapped in place and the dissolution of domestic bliss, Zoje Stage’s newest novel follows a family on their new move to the Adirondacks. 

Husband Shaw becomes fixated on a centuries-old pine on the property, and increasingly distant towards wife Orla and their two children, ignoring their fears around the strange occurrences in the new house — all seemingly designed to keep them trapped inside. Stage’s lyrical writing shines through in this paranormal thriller of a tale that's perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House.

Stephen Graham Jones' proclivities as a horror writer shine in his latest, The Only Good Indians. 

Lewis and his three friends have all moved away from their childhood home on the Blackfeet reservation. But home seems to be following Lewis in terrifying ways when he starts seeing an entity in the form of an elk, and the people around him start dying. 

As he further descends into madness and paranoia, Lewis must reckon with the dissonance and crisis of assimilating into white mainstream culture while knowing that its entire existence is based on the death of his own. 

Jones asks the question, “How does abandoning home harm?” in this chilling, finely crafted addition to the horror genre that will thrill old fans and new. 

Simran has a perfect life — living in NYC, studying for her graduate degree in psychology, and engaged to her high-school sweetheart. But after a chance encounter with a journalist sparks a long-abandoned ambition, Simran is rethinking not just her career, but her spouse. Since her relationship with her mom is too fraught for true understanding, she goes to India to visit her grandmother Mimi. 

Back home, Simran’s mother Nandini is also experiencing her own crisis regarding paths not taken and familial strain, but it may be just the thing that brings these three generations of women together. 

This is a story that reminds us that the strongest bonds are sometimes the ones between family, that true love is not always romantic, and that choosing yourself is sometimes the biggest leap of faith. 

Desiree and Stella are identical twins. At 16, they decide to run away from their small color-struck community, and as adults, live completely separate lives. 

Desiree is a single mother of dark-skinned child Jude, and Stella is married to a white man and passing for white. The twins’ decisions have far-reaching repercussions in their own lives, the lives of their children, and their community. 

Spanning nearly 50 years, The Vanishing Half explores themes of longing, desire, and generational trauma and inheritance in this page-turning follow-up from Bennett. 

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s twist on classic Gothic goes full on horror in this satisfyingly chilling tale. 

When socialite Noemí Toboada gets a disturbing letter from her cousin Cataline — who has recently married Virgil, the heir of a dwindling mining empire — she is deeply disturbed by what she reads. Cataline speaks of an evil she cannot see or name that lingers in the castle, and begs for Noemí’s help. Noemí arrives to find very few allies, blatant racism, and startling visions of blood, doom, and decay. 

Noemí’s journey to save herself and her cousin is a wonderfully terrifying story that blends Mexican folklore with the classic “horror house” tale in the vein of H.P Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson.

Malik has no choice but to kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran. His sister has been abducted by a spirit who demands her life for his sisters. 

Karina has no choice but to kill a king. She is determined to resurrect her mother, and only the still-beating heart of a king will do. So she offers her hand in marriage to the victor of the Solstasia competition as a means to an end. 

When Malik swindles his way into the competition, neither knows they are after the others head, nor does either know what to do when their hearts start to get involved with each other. 

In the first of a fantasy duology, Brown's world-building, courtly intrigue, and gripping romantic tension is reminiscent of Tomi Adeyemi and Sabaa Tahir.  

Dani is into no-strings-attached sex. So when security guard Zafir Ansari rescues her from a workplace fire drill, she is ready to be all over him. Literally. 

But as their rescue video goes viral, Zafir has another plan in mind: for Dani to play his fake girlfriend so the publicity from the viral video will help with his sports charity for kids. 

It's Dani’s game, but as she plays his girlfriend in streets while trying to seduce him in the sheets, she realizes that getting Zafir into bed might be more complex than she originally thought, especially since she realizes both he — and she — are catching feelings. 

Hilarious, raw, and sexy, Talia Hibbert continues to deliver complex heroines and dreamy leading men in her latest romance novel.

Is the government a terrorist too? In this timely debut from Majumdar, a Facebook post from Jivan — a Muslim woman living in the Indian slums — poses this very question and sparks the central conflict in this tale.

As Jivan is ironically considered a terrorist for her post and thrown in jail, we follow her story along with two others: Jivan's former physical education teacher PT Sir, and Lovely, who is hijra (a third gender recognized in India) and dreams of stardom. 

With PT’s rise in a right-wing party hinged on Jivan’s descent and Lovely’s rising stardom is threatened by an alibi only she can give, we are swept into a world that tackles class, corruption, and gendered violence in this fully realized, genre-bending debut.

Yahaira Rios has not spoken to her dad in almost a year — not since she found out that he has another family living in the Dominican Republic. Camino Rios lives in DR, where her father visits every summer and she dreams of going to Columbia University in grand NYC. 

Their lives are both forever altered when their father’s plane crashes, and each girl is forced to grieve his death, reconcile with his secrets, and lean on the half-sibling they never knew about in the process. 

Told in her signature verse style, Clap When You Land is a poetic, urgent story about betrayal, heartbreak, and the complexity of love and family.  

Tabloids are vicious. Hollywood royalty Jo and her assistant Emma learn this first-hand when the blogs and mags see them together on the red carpet and instantly declare them the next “it” couple. 

With Jo’s film project quickly approaching, this is the last thing they need, but Emma has a way of just making everything better, both in anticipating Jo’s needs and getting her to open up and be comfortable in a way she never has. 

But that’s just what an assistant does, right? There are definitely no sparks. Wilsner’s debut romance is a hilarious slow burn guaranteed to bring the heat and sweet.

All Maggie wanted — or all she was expected to want — was a love like her parents’: intimate, intense, and long-lasting. But for 27 years, it's eluded her. That is, until she meets Lucia. 

It is with new love that Lucia that she learns of her mother’s death in a car crash, and returns home to find her father and brother not just devastated, but angry. Her mother’s will included five envelopes, each addressed to men none of them had ever known. 

As Maggie makes the journey to hand-deliver each envelope, she contends with her mother’s past, her mother’s disapproval of her sexuality, and a growing realization that she actually understood very little about her mother at all. 

A wonderful debut about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships and the wonderful, terrible, foreign process of realizing the humanity of your parents.

Alice has just lost her grandmother Chloe, and inherited a fully furnished apartment from her upon her death. Alice and her parents travel to Paris, still overcome with grief, to find out exactly where this apartment came from. 

It is there that the family discovers pictures of a girl no one knew about and a diary that turns out to be from a great-aunt Adalyn, Chloe’s sister no one knew existed. 

Told in the altering voices of Adalyn and Alice, we learn of Adalyn's time as a French resistance worker posing as a Nazi sympathizer. The girls lives are parallel in haunting, beautiful ways as Taylor explores themes of grief, depression, love, loyalty, and the price of secrecy. 

Childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are explored by LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson in his debut work All Boys Aren’t Blue. Johnson pens a series of essays exploring both the extraordinary and the mundane moments that encapsulate his journey toward adulthood; stories around gender policing, institutional violence, first love, sexual awakenings, and family. 

Johnson is intentional about centering the feelings, experiences, and unique perspectives of queer Black boys while also using his work to hold accountable those who would consider themselves allies. 

Part memoir, part primer, All Boys Aren’t Blue beautifully renders the complexities of young, queer, Black boyhood in America.

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Patricia is bored with life. The everyday sameness of it and the monotony that is only broken by a true-crime loving book club she runs with her Charleston friends. Then Patricia is attacked by an elderly woman, which prompts her assailant's handsome nephew to visit their small town. 

But something is different about him — something even more sinister than she can ever imagine — and it seems he is determined to ruin all that she holds dear. This nod to vampire lore of old is smart and wickedly thrilling, turning the bored housewife and the overdone handsome vampire tropes on their head. 

The Brown Sugarettes Mastermind Group had big plans. But somewhere along the way, the four college friends stopped fighting for their individual goals and started putting everyone (but themselves) first. 

Ten years later, Reina, Kara, Nikki, and Sienna restart their group, looking for love, friendship, accountability and growth from the only people who’ve given them the space and courage to follow their dreams: each other. 

What do you do when the life you ended up with leaves you wondering what could have been? Sharina Harris pens "a love letter to black women who have often sacrificed themselves, their goals, happiness, and dreams for others” in this heartwarming, no-holds-barred story of sisterhood, dreams deferred, and second chances.  

This coming-of-age story is set in a world where the internet doesn’t exist and is instead replaced by Curios, inanimate objects that offer emotional support (and perhaps foster sadistic tendencies) for the people who own them. At the center of it is Belt, a young man writing a memoir about his life that helps give voice to his discontent and feelings of not belonging. 

Belt owns a Curio named Blank, and though it is inanimate and mass-produced, Belt (and the reader) can’t help but become attached to the highs and lows of owning such a thing — as well as question just what it is (if not the facelessness of the internet) that fosters human cruelty. 

A self-aware, funny novel, Bubblegum offers social commentary that is sweetly biting in its delivery. 

Two years after the death of her fiancé, Sloan is still struggling to cope. Then she finds a stray dog that she can’t resist taking home, and starts to realize he might be just what she needed to help her  press play on a paused life. 

But this dog actually has an owner — a hot, creative, musician who somehow makes her laugh. And though she wants to push him away (and still keep the dog) she can’t help being drawn to him. 

Will Sloan be able to make peace with her past and move forward? Jimenez beautifully explores tragedy, grief, and second chances in this heartwarming romance filled with humor.

Told in the time before and after the Civil War, Conjure Women follows the intertwined lives of midwife May Belle, her daughter Rue, and Varina, the daughter of the man that owns them both. Rue, resistant to becoming a midwife like her mother, nevertheless learns the craft, including the spells and healing abilities that mark her as a conjure woman. 

When a strange baby is born and a series of illnesses mark the land where they live as cursed, Rue and Varina must work together to save a town on the precipice of destruction. 

Based partially on narratives of formerly enslaved people, Conjure Women is soul-baring in its honesty and masterfully focuses its lens on the bonds of family, the complexity of morality, and which people and places are worth saving.

Antonia, a retired literature professor and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, has strong feelings about what it means to be an American. 

With her husband newly dead, her life — and moral compass — seems to be spiraling. But when her sister goes missing and she finds an undocumented pregnant teen in her garage, Antonia’s beliefs are challenged, and she is forced to reckon with all the ways she has kept her head buried in the sand (and in books) instead of facing the realities of the country she’s chosen.

In the Time of the Butterflies author Julia Alvarez returns to fiction almost 15 years later with this witty, heartbreaking story about grief, sisterhood, faith, and the courage it takes to examine the fallacy and frailty of the American Dream.

N.K. Jemisin, known for being the first author to win the Hugo Award three consecutive years for The Broken Earth Trilogy, is back with new series starter The City We Became.

Fans of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will love this sweeping experiential saga about the birth and growing pains of five everyday people-turned-avatars who are tasked with protecting NYC from an alien being.

The title of this book comes from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed — the full quote reads, "In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn."

Editor Patrice Caldwell gathers a group of amazing writers — phoenixes in their own right — to tell Black female and gender nonconforming stories, centering these voices in a way that is rarely seen in fantasy and sci-fi anthologies.

From aliens to mermaids, fantasy to folklore, these stories are written with the care and joy of Black people being their authentic selves, and this makes it a wonder to read.

Lydia and Freddie have been inseparable for over a decade. True soulmates. Then Freddie dies, and Lydia comes undone. Just as she’s making her way toward a new life and a possible new love, Lydia is given the opportunity to be with Freddie again. Will she choose her old love — and her old life — or the glimmering promise of this new one?

Perfect for fans of P.S., I Love You and Landline, Josie Sliver delivers another raw, emotional read that you'll consume in a single sitting and remember long after it’s done.

From the author of Pulp comes a new work of historical fiction centered around two girls and the national gay rights battle that changes the trajectory of their lives.

Set in San Francisco during the summer of 1977 and told through letters and diary entries, main characters Tammy and Sharon go from reluctant pen pals to much-needed confidantes in their quest to find their place in the world.

Anu Desai is not exactly sure what she’s doing. Having gotten married at 20 and now recently divorced with a 5-year-old daughter, she is everything her traditional family has tried to warn against.

When she makes the snap decision to leave her daughter with her ex-husband, go on an extended vacation to London, and buy a run-down yoga studio, she realizes that pressing reset on your adult life isn’t always as easy as it looks.

With Sonya Lalli’s signature wit and delightfully insightful style, we follow Anu on a journey that may just help her realize that sometimes the biggest romance in life is the one you have with yourself.

Part chilling thriller, part evocative literary novel, Lakewood tells a tale all too familiar for some. It's about a young woman forced to drop out of school in order to take care of her family. She takes a too-good-to-be-true job to provide for them and learns just how much she's willing to compromise to make sure the ones she loves stay above water.

Main character Lena faces mental, physical, and emotional duress she's never imagined while participating in a secret government program. Her story masterfully reveals and dissects the fears many Americans of color face when it comes to their bodies being used in the name of science and progress. Megan Giddings’ debut novel is horror at its most raw and thought-provoking.

Leslie Gray Streeter was many things. She was a 40-something Black woman in a mixed-race marriage. She was a new parent to a not-quite-but-almost adopted child. But suddenly, she is one new, unexpected thing: a widow.

From wondering where her husband should be buried (he was Jewish, she’s Baptist) to marveling at new parallels with her own mother (also widowed), Streeter examines life after death with unflinching humor, honesty, and heart.

Rena Jackson is a big romantic with an even bigger crush on the mysterious loner dude, Axel, who's always at her bar. She’s also just about ready to quit — both the dive bar where she works and waiting for Axel to make a move — until he suddenly makes a major effort to win her heart.

Chronicling the lives of those who are often pushed to the sidelines, this book centers on the perspectives of Black women in the United States through a historical lens. It follows enslaved women, free women, and women both within and outside the law.

Authors Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross tell these essential, complex stories with nuance, love, and grace.

Claire's sister Alison is dead. When Alison's body is found in a remote spot on the Caribbean island where they were vacationing together, two local men are arrested. But with barely any evidence found, the suspects are let go, and the case goes cold.

Years later, a chance encounter with one of the accused men sends Claire down a dark path to uncover the truth about the sister she barely knew, and the murder that was never solved.

A gripping, heartbreaking read, Saint X is perfect for fans of Emma Cline's The Girls.

Wedding planner Caroline Santos has been left at the altar before. But just when she's finally moved on from her last heartbreak, an amazing work opportunity arises — and it forces her in close quarters with the best man from her almost-nuptials.  

History, folklore, and romance combine in this quirky, haunting tale. It's about a child with otherworldly abilities, a kidnapped girl, and the female detective charged with finding her. Along the way, the detective also uncovers secrets hidden in the underbelly of Victorian London.

In Kiley Reid's debut novel, we meet Emira and Alix, two women tied together by their employer/employee relationship, and not much else. But a grocery-store-run-turned-racial-profiling-incident bonds them in ways they would never have thought.

Reid beautifully highlights issues around race, class, and performative politics with insight and care.

The opioid epidemic encompasses both hyper-visibility and dehumanization. There is a plethora of media coverage on this issue, but it centers around a mostly faceless, nameless group of people often deemed unworthy of help.

Liz Moore starts and ends her novel with names; it’s a successful attempt to bring to light the people who have been successfully rendered invisible. 

Long Bright River is as complex as its subject: a tale of the opioid crisis wrapped in a story of two estranged sisters, covered in a classic murder mystery. The result is a gorgeous, poignant story worth diving into.

American Dirt won a ton of press attention, but if you're looking for a more thoughtfully rendered migrant story, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's debut memoir, Children of the Land, is the better choice. 

Immigration has become a hot topic in the United States, but like many hot-topic stories, the faces behind the headlines get lost in the shuffle. Castillo's poignant memoir seeks to rectify that travesty, speaking of his own experiences as a young, undocumented person who learned quickly how imperative it was to blend in and stay vigilant.

He speaks on the tragedy of families who live lives undocumented — families ripped apart, mental and physical health compromised, and unimaginable decisions made to be with the ones you love and give them a better life. Castillo speaks to the trauma of growing up in the dual shadows of fear and faith with heart, honesty, and wisdom.

Fans of Sally Rooney will love Miranda Popkey's Topics of Conversation, a debut novel that is as plainly laid out as its title. We follow an unnamed narrator through her life via conversations with strangers, friends, and family, who are all primarily women. 

The result is a salacious, intimate, uncomfortable story that really makes you believe that you are overhearing conversations you aren't supposed to be — at some points, as if someone has been spying on conversations of your own. 

It's a provocative novel worth having on your bookshelf, having your closest friends read, and having some conversations of your own about it.

Married high school sweethearts Rosie and Dominic are stuck — stuck in their careers, in their hobbies, and most of all, in their marriage. Rosie signs them up for marriage bootcamp, and to her surprise, Dominic agrees. 

Hilarious hijinks and steamy almost-reconciliations ensue in this heartwarming second-chance romance that asks, is it ever to late to get that old thing back?

Toni Morrison called her “one of the greatest writers of our time.” Zora Neale Hurston’s exceptionalism can not be overstated — her newly released collection of short stories only adds to her genius. Hurston treads familiar topics for her: Black migration, gender and sexism, racism, class, and Black folklore.

The collection includes some known short stories as well as eight “lost” stories uncovered in archives. Experience Hurston in a brand-new way with a collection that both fleshes out her voice and gives us new ways to think about long-covered conversations.

The 2016 book Girls and Sex was a groundbreaking hit, facilitating what many considered taboo conversations around pleasure, sex, and agency. Peggy Orenstein's follow-up is sure to do the same. 

Pulled from interviews with psychologists, academics, and of course, young men, Orenstein explores everything from empathy and binary stereotypes, to “locker room talk” and the space boys take as both victims and perpetrators of toxic masculinity (and the sexual violence that stems from it). It’s a provocative read that should be on everyone’s list.

What does it mean when an industry sells you a dream, and in the midst of pursuing it, the rose-colored glasses dissolve? 

Anna Weiner's debut memoir finds her in the midst of a major cultural and professional shift, one where the tech industry power and prestige is growing at an unprecedented rate. Weiner leaves the publishing industry to chase a better future ripe with growth, and instead sees for herself the cost of start-up culture and the world it purports to be building. 

Critical, nuanced, and revelatory, Uncanny Valley is indictment on Silicon Valley culture that’s worth diving into.

Cultural critique meets insightful memoir in P. Carl’s Becoming a Man, which follows his life growing up as a queer woman, his career, marriage and life during that time, and his gender transition after realizing he still felt not fully himself while living that way. 

Interspersed within his personal narrative are stories around power, toxic masculinity, the #MeToo movement, and living as a queer person in the age of Trump. A fully realized, complex narrative is crafted with Becoming a Man — one that should be on everyone's reading list. 

The follow-up to Brigid Kemmerer's sleeper hit A Curse So Dark and Lonely is one of the most anticipated YA releases of the year. 

We are back in the world of Emberfall, following not just Prince Rhen but his loyal guard Grey, who has fled the country after finding out that he's the true king. Grey wants nothing more than to run away from the responsibility of ruling a country and confronting prince Rhen for the throne. 

The world of Emberfall is just as addicting as the first book, and you'll be swept away in this modern fairytale about love, duty, triumph, and war.

Del has a crush on Kira. So when Del signs up for a purity pledge with her at their church, he thinks she's worth playing the game to get what he wants. But what does Kira want? 

Lamar Giles' first contemporary teen novel tackles societal pressure and toxic masculinity in a way that's both relatable and refreshing, with the nuance and complexity the conversation deserves.