The List
The List is your one-stop shop for this week's top picks. Featuring new releases and a few ICYMI, these are the books that owner Alison needs you have on your radar and read!
Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of global sensation Lessons in Chemistry returns with an irresistible, delightful, and tender literary novel set in the publishing world of 1980s New York City about a young man whose life turns upside down when he is hired by the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in the world: the renowned Peck & Peck.
Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest.
It’s 1982, New York City. Crime is on the rise, muggings are in the streets, and Batter Gray, recent college graduate with a skill that no one wants—an “ear” for poetry—is worried about his future. While all of his friends have real jobs, he’s folding T-shirts at the Gap. As for love? No. Not unless you count Sallie Mae, the student loan tyrant. He hears from Sallie all the time.
But when Batter gets a dream job at Peck & Peck, the most prestigious poetry quarterly in the world, his life moves into the literary fast lane. Soon Batter is knee-deep in the secret war between the two Editors in Chief, the famous Peck brothers—twins and enemies—as well as being privy to the private affairs of their thirty-nine editors, whose professed mission is the same: Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest.
And by burn, they mean incinerate. Because at Peck & Peck, “good” isn’t good enough, “interesting” doesn’t cut it, plagiarists aren’t tolerated, and parolees run the mailroom. Still want to submit your poem? Go with God.
Welcome to another dazzling and unforgettable novel from Bonnie Garmus. If you loved Lessons in Chemistry, you will love Peck & Peck.
Rottenheart by Kat Dunn
Revenge me. For I am murdered . . .
Odette and her best friend Cecilia live between their grand homes in Hampstead and the imposing, ancient Herne House in Suffolk. Odette’s mother, Lydia, is almost parasitic in her neediness, but despite her, Odette and Cecilia come of age together—free to roam, to learn, and to love. When Lydia inexplicably sickens and dies, a dark veil falls. Odette’s father retreats to his study, while her aunt—the cold and cruel Claudine—increasingly takes charge of the household. Lost in grief and spiraling into madness, Odette disappears into the shadows, leaving Cecilia alone and with her affections tested.
As Claudine is announced as Odette's new stepmother, the girls reckon with this final betrayal, and a sinister presence awakens. To her horror, Odette realizes that her mother never truly left. She now haunts the manor, ready to drag long held secrets into the light and exact revenge against those who thought her dead and gone.
A visceral tale of grief and madness, Rottenheart exhumes the heart of Hamlet to tell a fearless queer love story laced with an unforgettable haunting, asking whether we can truly outrun our suffering, or if we are forever indebted to the vengeful dead.
Hexed (Limited Collector's Edition) by Emily McIntire
This new hardcover edition of the final book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Never After series will have specially printed edges and an exclusive case design.
Venesa Andersen has never been good. She wasn’t good enough for her parents, and she isn’t good enough for the gangster uncle who took her in after they died. But she’s cunning. Beautiful. Dutiful to her uncle’s demands. And she doesn’t have time for a moral compass, anyway. When her runaway cousin returns to their coastal southern town, she brings a man with her…and Venesa soon realizes he’s the only one who’s ever seen her for her.
There’s just one problem: she can never have him.
Enzo “Loverboy” Marino is a wealthy businessman by day and prince of the underworld by night. Underboss to a notorious mafia syndicate, he answers to no one except his father, the strongest don in the Northeast. When he’s tasked with marriage, Enzo doesn’t think twice.
Until he meets his fiancée’s cousin.
Venesa is everything he never knew he wanted, bewitching him with her sultry voice and supple curves. But Enzo learned long ago that for a man like him, life is better without the things you want.
When plans unravel and temptation sings its siren song, they’ll both have to choose what’s more important: duty to their families, or a forbidden love that was never supposed to be.
Mystery Play by Elizabeth Kostova
After his beloved mother passes away suddenly, Jay Turner finds himself at a crossroads. She was always secretive, and when he returns to their Boston home to clear out her possessions, he finds an unusual item: a partially burned scrap of newspaper bearing the name “Gael Brogan.” Soon after, a deliveryman leaves behind a package containing a small antique volume bound in leather—and two bloody footprints.
The sight of the volume is chilling. As a young scholar, his mother had been given the medieval book—one of a set commissioned by Vlad Țepeș, otherwise known as Dracula, just before his death in 1477. She'd always warned Jay of the dangers associated with it, and had donated it to a museum before she died . . . yet here it is, back in his possession.
Jay sets out to learn more about Gael Brogan, a prominent nineteenth-century actor whose last and most famous role was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Jay begins to dig deeper—with the help of a mysterious woman named Rhiannon—he uncovers the frightening story of a young actress who fell under Brogan's sway long ago. Before long, Jay and Rhiannon realize that something similarly implacable is pursuing them.
In this epic and riveting tale, Elizabeth Kostova takes us deep into the Gilded Age of the theater and across the Atlantic in pursuit of an ancient evil and its dramatic followers.
This humorous, heart-pounding, feminist slasher follows an aging scream queen as she is pursued by a serial killer mimicking the murders from her horror films.
In this darkly humorous love letter to the slasher film and the iconic doll, aging scream queen Barbra Jacobs desperately wants to break out of the box Hollywood has neatly packaged her in. Cast as the star of the Mirror horror franchise films twenty years ago, the role that shaped her career has also destroyed her dreams of being taken seriously as an actress. Now forty, and still seeking the approval of everyone around her, Barb makes her living signing old photos of herself and doing meet and greets at horror conventions.
When a producer calls her to ask about hosting The Monsters We Made, a hot new horror docuseries, she sees it as a step in the right direction. But when fans begin dying around her—and in ways that mimic the kills in her films—Barb is thrust back into a role she can’t seem to walk away from: the final girl.
Will she ever break out of the display-box life, or will Mirror Man end it all in Barbie’s Scream House?
Once in a Timeline by Iman Hariri-Kia
For fans of The Love of My Afterlife and Ashley Poston comes a clever and swoony novel following an aspiring New York lifestyle influencer who gets trapped in her own “day in the life” video and the mysterious stranger who must help break them both out before they're lost in the algorithm for good.
Laia Grace Shirzan is the New York City lifestyle influencer...or at least, she’s determined to be. She’s left everything behind to pursue her dream: family, friends, expectations, even her insecurities (or so she tells herself), which means failure isn’t an option. So every day she films the same pristine routine—the perfect light, the perfect latte, the perfect life. Until one morning, her feed starts to glitch. Her neighbors flicker. Her best friend loops. And Laia realizes she’s no longer the influencer, she’s the content, trapped inside her last posted “day in the life” video.
That's when a brooding, unshaven, very unfiltered man crashes into her routine. Because Noah's been stuck in Laia's timeline too, and he’s desperate to break them both out. As Laia and Noah fight to outsmart the algorithm that’s captured them, the line between performance and personhood blurs. To escape, Laia will have to do what she’s never dared before: turn the filter off and finally face what’s real.
Look What the Cat Dragged In by Jason Rekulak
From the New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Pictures and The Last One at the Wedding comes a new supernatural thriller about a young woman pet-sitting a cat with a mysterious secret, featuring more than eighty pages of illustrations.
Penny may be a cat person, but she’s starting to think Godfrey is no ordinary cat.
Fully illustrated with more than eighty pages of original artwork, Jason Rekulak’s new novel is intensely plotted, wonderfully frightening, and wildly clever. He more than lives up to his reputation as having “a freakishly fertile imagination” (The New York Times).
Crossed (Limited Collector's Edition) by Emily McIntire
**This new hardcover edition of the fifth book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Never After series will have specially printed edges and an exclusive case design.**
He is righteousness. She is sin.
Father Cade Frédéric is a holy man. Brought up in the streets of Paris, he has dedicated his life to the church. But there’s a monster that lingers just beneath the surface. A sickness. One that bleeds darkness and feeds on the damned. When he’s tasked to become the priest in Festivalé, Vermont, a town both beautiful in architecture and riddled with despair, his sickness sings, demanding he rid the place of evil.
Amaya Paquette is Festivalé’s beautiful mystery. She spends her days caring for her younger brother and her nights transforming into Esmeralda, dancing for greedy eyes and shameless lips. Although she longs for love, she shies away from companionship, afraid of being abandoned again.
When Father Cade lays eyes on Amaya, he finds himself ensnared, convinced she’s using witchcraft to lure him to her. He can’t eat. Can’t breathe. Can’t think unless it’s of her.
And temptation is a devastating mistress.
She’s his weakness, so he decides he’ll be her demise…even if it means killing the only woman he might ever love.
The Woman of the House by Kate Mooney
A terrifying, twisty, and impossible-to-put-down supernatural thriller that reminds us that houses are never just houses—and secrets never stay buried.
Rose Crawley isn’t the perfect wife—or the perfect woman—that her husband thinks she is. And she isn’t about to let him find that out, ever. She’s finally gotten everything she’s ever wanted: a house by the lake, an adoring husband, and a fresh start from the past she’s long tried to outrun.
But the house she now calls home seems to have other plans. She wakes with bloody scratches lining her arms. She sees reflections in mirrors, only to find she’s standing alone. She hears the floors creak under invisible footsteps. And when Rose lies awake in the dark, the air feels heavy, like the house is pressing in on her, waiting for her to crack.
When Rose learns that the previous occupant, a wife and mother named Angela, vanished under suspicious circumstances, she becomes obsessed with uncovering what happened. Drawn deeper into the disappearance by her peculiar and prying neighbor, Rose digs into Angela’s past. But the more she discovers, and as the house's strange occurrences escalate, Rose finds herself questioning not just what happened to Angela, but whether she’ll share the same fate.
Monstera by Delilah S. Dawson
A reclusive young woman moves into what seems like the perfect apartment and is obsessively drawn to her mysterious neighbour, who keeps a lush garden and is hiding a deadly secret… Eat the Ones You Love meets Wilder Girls in this sensual, sapphic, botanical horror novella from the New York Times-bestselling author of Bloom and House of Idyll.When Lucy McClintock moves into a dreamy Victorian in downtown Savannah after years of suffering under the rule of her overbearing grandfather, she feels like she’s won the lottery—well, outside of the creepy landlord. She soon notices a glorious green haven in the backyard and meets her downstairs neighbor, Saskia, a weightlifter who lives in a magical apartment overflowing with plant life and beautiful artwork. Naïve and lonely Lucy is drawn to strong and secretive Saskia, and as the two women grow closer, they discover they share more than just an apartment building…
A seductive, heady, sinister read: breathless romance and bone-chilling suspense collide in this sweet and deadly tale.