Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips has been a defining voice in American literature for nearly half a century. A recent review lauded her 1979 debut, Black Tickets, as “a short story collection that remains so compellingly singular that it ought to function as a handbook for short story writers.” It won the inaugural and prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Phillips’ later work cemented her legacy as a writer who uses fiction as a tool to give voice to the downtrodden, marginalized, and forgotten. Works of special note include first novel Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), National Book Award finalist Lark and Termite (2009), and Quiet Dell (2013). All are period pieces set in the author’s native West Virginia. Her latest novel, Night Watch, exhibits these and other trademarks of Phillips’ craft. Set in a backwoods asylum in the bleak, near-apocalyptic aftermath of the Civil War, Night Watch garnered a host of literary honors, including the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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Mystery novelist Matt Goldman started his writing career as an Emmy Award winning screenwriter and producer. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld handpicked Goldman as a founding member of the creative team behind sitcom juggernaut Seinfeld. Goldman’s later television credits include work on Ellen and The New Adventures of Old Christine. Goldman published his first novel, Gone to Dust, in 2017. It launched the Minnesota-set and New York Times bestselling Nils Shapiro series. The fourth and latest installment, Dead West, shifts locales to Hollywood and makes gainful use of the author’s first-hand knowledge of the larger-than-life characters drawn to the limelight of show business. Goldman’s newest mystery, Still Waters, is a standalone story. In it, estranged siblings Liv and Gabe Ahlstrom return to their family-run resort on Leech Lake to investigate a relative’s suspicious death. Publishers Weekly notes: “Goldman’s fans will eat this up. Three-dimensional characters and authentic dialogue elevate the mystery premise.”

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Rom-com queen Jasmine Guillory burst onto the romance scene in 2018 with The Wedding Date, the first installment in her loosely connected book series of the same name. Reese Witherspoon selected Guillory’s follow-up, The Proposal, as the February 2019 read for Reese’s Book Club. After third book hit shelves, Cosmopolitan declared: “Everything Jasmine Guillory touches turns to gold, and The Wedding Party is no exception.” Guillory’s more recent releases include By the Book, part of Penguin Random House’s fairytale-inspired Meant to Be series, which features the talents of Guillory alongside fellow romance favorites like Christina Lauren and Zoraida Córdova. By the Book offers a modern spin on Beauty and the Beast. Her latest novel, Drunk on Love, is set in California wine country. This steamy story pairs work-to-live winery manager Margot with Luke, a Silicon Valley dropout who has just returned home to Napa. Booklist opines: “Suffused with tenderness and delight, this is Guillory’s best book yet.”

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Emiko Jean is an accomplished young adult writer, best known for the New York Times bestselling Tokyo Ever After and its sequel Tokyo Dreaming. Described as The Princess Diaries for a new generation, Jean’s series follows Japanese-American teenager Izumi Tanaka, a self-professed outsider who discovers that her long-absent father is the Crown Prince of Japan. Reese Witherspoon selected Tokyo Ever After as a Reese’s Book Club pick in 2021. Jean’s adult debut, Mika in Real Life, centers around a directionless, down-on-her-luck woman who is unexpectedly contacted by the daughter she gave up for adoption. Marie Claire calls it “a truly poignant coming-of-age story that deals with race, adoption, and bodily autonomy.” Mika in Real Life was a Good Morning America Book Club selection in August 2022. Jean’s follow-up is a psychological thriller, The Return of Ellie Black. Detective Chelsey Calhoun is often tasked with finding missing girls but is thunderstruck when young Ellie turns up mysteriously in the woods – a full two years after her sudden disappearance.

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Melanie Benjamin is an acknowledged master of historical fiction, not to mention one of the genre’s bestselling authors. Benjamin’s growing collection of work profiles topics ranging from the Nazi occupation of Paris, to silent movie starlet Mary Pickford, to the real-life inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland. Her most popular novels to date include The Aviator’s Wife (2012), the story of the aviatrix spouse of Charles Lindbergh; The Swans of Fifth Avenue (2016), about the headline-making relationship between famed author Truman Capote and a New York socialite; and The Children’s Blizzard (2021), which breathes new life into an infamous 1888 blizzard that still holds distinction as one of the most deadly natural disasters to ever hit the Great Plains. Her latest, California Golden, turns the spotlight to Malibu in the 1960s – and the formative but factious genesis of California surf culture. Booklist touts: “Benjamin’s novel shows what the sun-kissed highlight reels so often missed.”

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Alice Winn is the pen behind one of 2023’s most talked about literary debuts. In Memoriam is a moving story of first love set against the cataclysmic backdrop of World War I. When young Henry Gaunt enlists in the British Army to dispel rumors of his family’s pro-German leanings, boarding school classmate Sidney Ellwood is quick to follow him to the front line. Harrowing experiences in the trenches nurture a forbidden love. In a starred review, Booklist raves that: “Winn’s finely accomplished debut novel is a rare thing: an intoxicating romance and an impossible-to-put-down war story in one. She captures the war as it looked, sounded, and smelled; but the ultimate death-defying acts here are in literature, breathtaking bravery, and love.” Among other high honors, In Memoriam received the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize in 2022 and the Waterstones Novel of the Year Award in 2023.

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Kiley Reid burst onto the literary scene in 2020 with Such a Fun Age, a fast-paced social satire about privilege in America. The New York Times bestselling debut hinges on the layered relationship between newly minted college graduate Emira Tucker and Alix Chamberlain, a wealthy businesswoman who hires Emira as a babysitter. Such a Fun Age was longlisted for the Booker Prize, selected as a Reese’s Book Club Pick, and charted high on Best Book of the Year lists from sources as varied as The Washington Post and Good Housekeeping. Reid’s “masterful, nuanced take on racial biases and class divides” (Entertainment Weekly) is on display once again in Come and Get It. Her sardonic sophomore work follows enterprising writing professor Agatha Paul and dormitory assistant Millie Cousins. In service to an unusual, clandestine writing project, Millie allows Agatha to eavesdrop on her wards through a hole in the dormitory walls. Notes Publisher’s Weekly: “In this blistering send-up of academia… every page sparkles with sharp analysis of [Reid’s] characters.” It hit shelves in January.

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Cristina Henríquez is best known to many as the author behind the modern classic The Book of Unknown Americans (2014). In it, Mexican teenager Maribel suffers a traumatic brain injury, forcing the Rivera family to move to the United States to secure medical care. A budding relationship with a neighbor boy, Panamanian immigrant Mayor Toro, sets in motion a series of events with profound repercussions for all involved. The Washington Post lauds The Book of Unknown Americans as “a ringing paean to love in general: to the love between man and wife, parent and child, outsider and newcomer, pilgrims and promised land.” Henríquez’s own Panamanian heritage and experiences also loom large in much of the author’s other work, including the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart (2007) and novel The World in Half (2010). Her latest, The Great Divide, hits shelves in March 2024. It centers around the decade-long construction of the Panama Canal and the unsung workers who made this herculean feat of engineering possible.

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Fiction phenom Nita Prose is the author behind the #1 New York Times bestselling mystery The Maid. Readers and critics alike praise Prose’s mastery of plot and place, but reserve greatest acclaim for her memorable protagonist, “realistically different heroine” Molly Gray (NPR). Molly is neurodivergent. Her unique lens on the world proves invaluable for the young maid when a real estate magnate turns up dead at her five-star hotel – and Molly herself becomes a prime suspect. The Maid won Prose the prestigious Anthony and Barry awards for debut novel, among many other industry honors. It also holds distinction as a Good Morning America Book Club pick and as one of only a handful of mystery debuts from the past decade to sell more than one million copies worldwide. Oscar nominee Florence Pugh is set to star soon in a much-anticipated screen treatment. Nita Prose – and Molly Gray – returned in November 2023 with The Mystery Guest.

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Science fiction superstar John Scalzi has gained a large and loyal following through what Kirkus Reviews calls his “insufferably good, trademark brand of fun yet think-y sci-fi adventure.” His debut, Old Man’s War (2005), won Scalzi speculative fiction’s Astounding (formerly John W. Campbell) Award for Best New Writer and launched the New York Times bestselling series of the same name. Scalzi also penned the Locus Award winning Interdependency trilogy and a host of popular standalone novels. The latter includes Redshirts, winner of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and The Kaiju Preservation Society, winner of the 2023 Locus Award and other high science fiction honors. Scalzi’s latest novel, Starter Villain, centers on an unassuming substitute teacher who unexpectedly inherits a long-lost uncle’s supervillain business – complete with island volcano lair. Publishers Weekly raves that Starter Villain is “a breezy and highly entertaining genre send-up [which] subverts classic supervillain tropes with equal measures of tongue-in-cheek humor and common sense.”

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