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LEFT AND THE LUCKY by Willy Vlautin -- Spotlight

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  Recipient of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize “One of America’s greatest storytellers.”—Jonathan Evison The acclaimed Willy Vlautin returns with a heartbreaking and tender novel about two young brothers, the vicissitudes of fate, and unexpected connection—a beautiful and bittersweet portrait that illuminates the power of friendship and how it can save lives in multiple ways. Eddie Wilkens is a workaholic house painter in his early forties. His wife has left him to her regret, and his main employee, Houston, is a loafer and scoundrel who barely shows up for work. Unassuming and self-reliant, Eddie is a thoughtful man who rarely gets angry, despite life's frequent provocations, but he is ruled by a guilt that he has carried for nearly twenty years. Next door, a woman and her two sons move in with their frail, aging mother. The youngest boy, Russell, eight years old, is quiet and small for his age and lives in constant terror of his increasingly lost and troubled fifteen-year-old br...
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THE CALAMITY CLUB by Kathryn Stockett - Spotlight

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  b NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY  THE NEW YORK TIMES,  GOODREADS , TOWN & COUNTRY, MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE, GARDEN & GUN,  AARP , WOMAN’S WORLD,   COUNTRY LIVING,  AND  OPRAH DAILY The multimillion-copy-selling author of  The Help  returns with a bold, big-hearted novel about a group of unbreakable women, fighting for what’s rightfully theirs—and the power of friendship to change everything. Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable "big girls" at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed.  Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies.  Then, Bi...
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A ZOOM WITH A VIEW by Jess Cannon - Spotlight

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  A fiction debut filled with heart and humor,  A Zoom with a View (Dutton Books)  will make you want to move to Blue Oak—if only the annual Fourth of July festivities didn't end with a dead body. Leo can't believe she's back in Blue Oak. Her small, quirky Texas hometown feels suffocating after trying to make it big as an English professor in New York—especially due to her strained relationship with her overly hair-sprayed mother, Karina. But with Leo’s career in academia in shambles, at least she's able to work as a photographer for her godmother's real estate business. And her best friend, Emily, is around to help her navigate through the mess—and maybe force her to reconnect with her old high school boyfriend, Mack. But while at work, Leo makes a grisly discovery at one of her godmother's properties: the dead body of rival real estate agent and social media influencer Chaz. Even worse, Leo and Emily have been secretly running a snarky Reddit page making fun o...
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LIFT ME UP by Milly Johnson - Spotlight

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  A heartwarming story from  Sunday Times  bestseller Milly Johnson. Tam Remington had her life planned out. Until a conversation in a broken lift—with her worst enemy—changes everything. For a decade, Tam has quietly held YorkMart together whilst others took the credit, making herself smaller in the process. When she’s briefly promoted to acting Managing Director, she finally has a chance to shine—until her promotion is snatched away and handed to Jack Cesaroni—the man brought in to do the job that should have been hers. Tam expects nothing but disappointment from Jack. But when they’re trapped in a lift between floors thirteen and fourteen, he sees what no one else has: Tam is  exceptional . That single word of recognition sparks something Tam thought she’d lost—and an unexpected connection she never saw coming. Now Tam faces an impossible choice: stay being the smaller version of herself she’s become used to, or take a leap and reclaim the vibrant, authentic woman...
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GO GENTLE by Maria Semple - Spotlight

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  OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB • “For all those who crave a good page-turner, this is one wild ride of a story that carries equal parts wit and wisdom. I learned so much about Stoicism—I laughed out loud for real. And underneath the humor there was always something tender . . . a quiet truth about relationships, identity, and what it means to find peace with yourself.”—OPRAH WINFREY Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a "coven"—like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia—and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a c...
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THE ISLAND CLUB by Nicola Harrison - Spotlight

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  An unputdownable novel of loves lost and found, shocking secrets―and the power of female friendship. 1956: On idyllic Balboa Island, just off the California coast, life seems peaceful and welcoming. But when the lives of three women begin to unravel in shockingly different ways, an unlikely friendship―and the game of tennis―may be the only thing that can save them. Milly Kinkaid's plan to fix her crumbling marriage seems to be falling apart before it even begins. She believed that moving her young family from Hollywood to Balboa Island might entice her increasingly distant husband to come home earlier after work. Instead, he's barely coming home at all. Society matriarch Sylvia Johnson and her husband have been pillars of their community for decades, and have just recently begun a new business venture: The Island Club, a place for members to swim, play tennis, and dine in style. But when she learns that he has been risking their financial security and putting their family...
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SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE by Jay McInerney - Spotlight

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  Once again brilliantly combining the lyrical observation of F. Scott Fitzgerald with the laser-bright social satire of Evelyn Waugh, Jay McInerney gives us the stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting final volume in the tetralogy charting the marriage of Russell and Corrinne Calloway, now in their sixties, against the backdrop of various crises that have bedeviled our society in the past forty years. The celebration of the thirty-fifth wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway’s best friend, Washington Lee—the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance, who somehow has become over the years a model husband and father—at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the Covid-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval—frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact—the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have antic...
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