More than a million readers have been riveted by the New York Times bestselling mystery and Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection about a woman who is determined to learn the truth about her husband’s disappearance. Protect her, Owen Michaels writes in a note to his dear wife of one year before vanishing. Hannah Hall is unsure and terrified, but she understands precisely to whom the letter is addressed: Bailey, Owen’s 16-year-old daughter. Bailey is a young girl who sadly lost her mother. Bailey is adamantly opposed to her new stepmother.
Hannah rapidly discovers her husband isn’t who he claimed to be as her urgent calls to Owen go unanswered, Owen’s boss is arrested by the FBI, a US Marshal and FBI agents show up at her Sausalito house without warning, and more. And that Bailey might be the key to discovering Owen’s real identity—and the real reason for his disappearance. Together, Hannah and Bailey went out to learn the truth. But as they begin to piece together Owen’s past, they quickly discover that they are also creating a new future. Hannah and Bailey couldn’t have predicted this one.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me, I was scared that the wrong person would stay.”
“This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again.”
“The could-have-been boys still love you.”
“People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.”
“Most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better… They want to hear what will make it easier.”
Oren, a strong and important player, ends as a 1st-level Goblin after being deceived and damned by an exceptionally rare spell! He swears to persevere and get retribution on those who deceived him despite having only a small fraction of his former strength. The only things working in his favor are his in-depth familiarity with the game’s environment and his exceptional capacity for immersion. But first, he has to figure out how to continue playing what is essentially a low-level fodder monster for a long enough period of time!
Chief of Police Ed Kapenash learns that every wedding is a minefield and that no pair is ideal as he speaks with the bride, the groom, the groom’s well-known mystery novelist mother, and even a member of his own family. The Perfect Couple, which includes well-known characters from The Castaways, Beautiful Day, and A Summer Affair, demonstrates once more why Elin Hilderbrand is the king of the summer beach read.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The moment their eyes meet, the moment their hands touch. That certainty. That recognition. You. You are the one. This is what it feels like. Nothing, as it turns out, can take the place of love.”
“There is nothing more terrible, she has decided, than the ferocity with which humans can love.”
“June and July are foggy months. In the early summer on Nantucket, warm moist air flows over the colder water. The moist air cools to its dew point and a cloud forms at the water’s surface. This is fog.”
“The charitable acts that count the most, Greer believes, are those done without anyone knowing.”
“Euthanasia is a topic that taps into deeply personal views of dignity and fear but, mostly, spirituality.”
An extravagant party is hosted by four famous siblings to mark the end of the summer. However, during the course of a 24-hour period, their lives will change irrevocably. Malibu: 1983 August. The annual end-of-summer party hosted by Nina Riva is today, and excitement levels are at an all-time high. Everyone wants to be around the well-known Riva family, which includes Nina, a gifted surfer, and supermodel, Jay and Hud, brothers who are both accomplished photographers and surfing champs, and Kit, their adored baby sister. Being the children of renowned musician Mick Riva, the siblings together are a source of intrigue in Malibu and throughout the globe.
Malibu Rising tells the tale of one extraordinary night in the life of a family, the night when each member must decide what to keep from the individuals who helped create them and what to discard.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?”
“Nina understood, maybe for the first time, that letting people love you and care for you is part of how you love and care for them.”
“Family is found…whether it be blood or circumstance or choice, what binds us does not matter. All that matters is that we are bound.”
“Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves.”
“She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.”
The first person to go missing is Shelby Tebow. Shortly after, Meredith Dickey and her 6-year-old daughter Delilah disappear just a few blocks from the area where Shelby was last seen, terrifying the previously tranquil neighborhood. Do these instances have a connection? The case eventually becomes unsolved after an illusive hunt that raises more questions than it does answers.
Eleven years later, Delilah suddenly makes a comeback. Nobody is ready for what they will discover, but everybody wishes to understand what happened to her. The master of suspense and New York Times bestselling author Mary Kubica takes home secrets to a whole new level in this intelligent and unsettling thriller, demonstrating that some individuals will do everything it takes to keep the truth hidden.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Being unbiased is important. Every woman is not me.”
“That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you.”
“I never noticed the whir of the ceiling fan, but the absence of it I do. The absence of it is deafening.”
“They stayed in town, just on the other side of it, where they didn’t have to look out their window and be reminded that bad things happen to good people every day.”
“Sometimes being scared makes you do things you didn’t know you could do.”
Two very close pals, ten summer excursions, and one final opportunity to find love. Alex and Poppy. Poppy and Alex. They are unrelated to one another. He’s dressed in khakis, she’s a wild child. He loves to stay home with a book, whereas she has an insatiable need to travel. They have been the best of friends ever since a tragic car share from college many years ago. While she lives in New York City and he is in their little hamlet for the majority of the year, they have spent one wonderful week of vacation every summer for the past ten years.
Up until they wrecked everything two years ago. Since then, they haven’t spoken. Poppy is in a rut despite having everything she should want. She is certain that the tragic, last trip she took with Alex was the last time she felt completely content. In order to make everything right, she resolves to persuade her best buddy that they should go on one more vacation together. Amazingly, he consents.
She now has a week to make everything right. Only if she can avoid the one major reality that has silently persisted throughout their ostensibly ideal relationship. What possibly could go wrong?
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.”
“It hurts to want it all, so many things that can’t coexist within the same life.”
“But most of us are too scared to even ask what we want, in case we can’t have it.”
“Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”
“It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.”
Rachel Krall is now a household brand and the final hope for hundreds of individuals seeking justice after the first season of her true crime podcast went viral and freed an innocent man. She is accustomed to being identified by her voice rather than her appearance. Which makes it much more frightening when she discovers a message addressed to her on the windshield of her car. The note begs for assistance.
A tragic rape trial is tearing apart the little village of Neapolis. The cherished granddaughter of the police head has been accused of being raped by the town’s golden child, a swimmer who is destined for Olympic success. Rachel works tirelessly to conduct interviews and conduct investigations under the pressure to make Season Three a success, but the enigmatic notes continue to surface in odd locations. Rachel is being followed, and the person will not stop until she learns what occurred to her sister 25 years ago. Officially, Jenny Stills perished tragically, but the letters indicate that she was killed, and when Rachel begins to probe questions, no one appears to want to respond. As Rachel discovers unexpected links between the two cases, the past and present begin to converge in a way that will alter the trajectory of the trial and everyone involved’s lives.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“To tell you the truth, I don’t get how we can almost unanimously agree that murder is wrong, yet when it comes to rape some people still see shades of gray.”
“When school kids are shot by a random shooter, nobody asks whether the victims should have taken more precautions. Nobody suggests that maybe the victims should have skipped school that day. Nobody ever blames the victims. So why is it that when women are attacked, the onus is on them?”
“Yes, I have been a victim of a sexual assault. Well, probably several really. Funny how we were conditioned to accept these situations as unpleasant instead of outrageous.”
“What happens during a moment of intimacy is complicated and confusing. When we put it under a spotlight in a court of law, we discover that, a lot of the time, there is no black and white. Just shades of gray.”
“That’s the thing about mistakes. Not all of them can be fixed.”
An emotional comedy about a crime that never happened, a would-be bank robber who vanishes into thin air, and eight incredibly anxious strangers who discover they have more in common than they ever imagined comes from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and “writer of astonishing depth” (The Washington Times).
Viewing an apartment is often not a life-or-death experience, but this open house does turn into one when a failed bank robber storms in and kidnaps everyone inside. The eight strangers gradually start to open up to one another as the pressure builds and divulge long-kept secrets. The whimsical story of Anxious People serves up memorable insights into the human condition and is a friendly reminder to be kind to all the anxious people we come across every day. It is rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled humanistic approach” (Shelf Awareness).
Best Quotes from this Book:
“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”
“Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”
“We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is watching life on earth go on without her while adjusting to her new place in heaven, a place that is very different from what she had anticipated. Her friends are spreading rumors about her whereabouts, her killer is attempting to hide his tracks, and her grieving family is breaking apart. The Lovely Bones manages, somehow, to create a story full of hope, humor, suspense, and even joy out of awful tragedy and loss.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
“Nothing is ever certain.”
“Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.”
“Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.”
“Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut, public library, withdrew to one of the back study carrels, and prayed to God that the sacrifice he was about to make would be considered acceptable.
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, one of the most acclaimed books of our time, is a tale of alienation and connection, destruction and restoration. It is simultaneously joyful, sorrowful, poignant, mystical, and wonderfully, genuinely human.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”
“With destruction comes renovation.”
“Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”
“I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway. ”
“The greatest griefs are silent.”
When Calla Fletcher’s mother grabbed her and fled the Alaskan wilderness because she couldn’t take the solitude of the harsh, rural lifestyle, she left behind Calla’s father, Wren Fletcher, who was only two years old at the time. Calla never looked back, and at age 26, all she knows is a bustling life in Toronto. But when Calla finds out that Wren’s time on earth may be numbered, she realizes that the time has come to return to the far-off frontier village where she was born.
She risks everything to meet her father, a man who, despite his many flaws, she can’t help but love, despite the wandering wildlife, sporadic daylight hours, high expenses, and even the occasional—dear God—outhouse. Jonah, the untidy, loud, and proud Alaskan pilot who helps keep her father’s charter aviation company functioning, can’t imagine calling anywhere else home even as she battles to adapt to this harsh climate. And he’s obviously waiting to take this city girl back to her rightful place with one hand on the throttle because he thinks she’s too spoiled to handle the wild.
Jonah is most likely correct, but Calla is out to disprove him. She soon discovers that she is developing an unusual bond with the bulky pilot. His underlying criticism starts to fade and is replaced with friendship—or maybe something deeper? But Jonah won’t ever leave, and Calla isn’t staying in Alaska. She would be unwise to start a relationship and follow in her parent’s footsteps, something they tried—and failed at—years before. It’s a straightforward truth that ultimately proves to be complicated.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I might take risks, but they’re always worth it.”
“And just like that, I sense a circle closing. Back to the beginning, and near to the end.”
“I’m now unmistakeably attracted to the yeti.”
“As long as I’m flying my planes and you’re with me, I’ll be happy. But this going-our-separate-ways bullshit? This isn’t working for me, Calla.”
“What hold does Alaksa have on them? What makes this place worth giving everything else up?”
In the most significant interview of her career, Type-A Manhattan attorney Dannie Kohan is asked this question, and she is prepared with a carefully written response. Later, after acing her interview and saying yes to her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep confident that her five-year plan will be accomplished.
She suddenly finds herself in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and standing next to a completely different man when she awakens, though. She can barely make out the date scrolling on the television news, which is playing in the background. The date is December 15, 2025, however, it is five years later.
Dannie awakens once more at the stroke of midnight in 2020 after spending an extremely intense and scary hour. She is unable to escape what happened. She is not the type of person who believes in visions, yet it felt far more real than just a dream. That gibberish only works when spoken by those with a free spirit, such as Bella, her best friend for life. She stores the strange sensation in the back of her mind with a determination to disregard it.
That is, until four and a half years later when Dannie accidentally crosses paths with the very same man from her vision. Brimming with joy and anguish, In Five Years is an amazing love story that reminds us of the strength of commitment, friendship, and the unexpected unpredictability of destiny.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”
“I am constantly trying to learn the rules, only to realize that the people who win don’t seem to follow any.”
“Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”
“I think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”
“You are not wrong for loving what you do. You are lucky. Life doesn’t hand everyone a passion in their profession.”
In Colleen Hoover’s tragic yet upbeat novel, which is the #1 New York Times bestselling author, a disturbed young mother longs for a chance at atonement. In an effort to reconcile with her 4-year-old daughter, Kenna Rowan returns to the town where everything went wrong after serving five years in jail for a catastrophic error. But it seems difficult to repair the bridges Kenna burned. No matter how hard Kenna attempts to establish herself, everyone in her daughter’s life is determined to keep her out. Ledger Ward, the proprietor of a nearby tavern and one of the few people still connected to Kenna’s kid, is the only person who hasn’t totally shut the door on her.
But if anyone were to find out how Ledger is gradually taking over Kenna’s life, both would run the risk of losing the respect of everyone who matters to them. Despite the pressure they are under, the two connect, but as their romance develops, the risk increases. In order to create a future based on healing and optimism, Kenna must discover a way to put her past transgressions behind her.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Now that I’ve forgiven myself, the reminders of him only make me smile.”
“There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you.”
“Reading is a hobby, but for some of us, it’s an escape from the difficulties we face. To all of you who escape into books, I want to thank you for escaping into this one.”
“We’re all just a bunch of sad people doing what we have to do to make it until tomorrow.”
“A good person who had one bad night. It happens to the best of us. The worst of us. All of us. Some of us are just luckier than others, and our bad moments have fewer casualties.”
The Color Purple, a significant work of modern American literature, portrays the experiences of African American women in rural Georgia in the early 20th century. Sisters Celie and Nettie, who have split apart when they were young, continue to be devoted to and hopeful for one another despite the silence, distance, and time. The work takes readers into its rich and unforgettable depictions of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia and their experience through a series of letters lasting twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to one another despite their uncertainty. The Color Purple broke the taboo surrounding domestic and sexual abuse by telling the stories of women’s lives through their suffering and adversity, friendship and development, tenacity and fortitude.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”
“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”
Hollywood’s sexiest young actress is revealed to be having a steamy affair with a best-selling French author when Rose McCarthy’s crew at Mode magazine proposes a cover shoot with her. The author also happens to be Rose’s son-in-law, which puts her in a difficult situation. Talented interior designer Nadia, her daughter, has been fighting to keep her marriage intact while keeping the truth from their young girls, her family, and the public. However, her errant husband Nicolas is enamored with a younger lady who is also carrying his child, and he is also blinded by his desire for her.
Nadia’s three sisters form a tight circle around her, flying from Los Angeles and New York to Paris to provide support and give their wildly different pieces of advice. Athena, a cheerful celebrity chef in Los Angeles with her own TV show, is wary of getting married. Superior court judge Olivia, a strict conservative from New York, is plagued by a stunning secret of her own. Venetia, a crazy fashion designer who is happily married and a mother of three, has the kindest, most grounded perspective. Despite their well-intended suggestions, Nadia needs to consider her own thoughts and decide what to do next.
The hard process of learning who you are, what you want, and how much forgiving and compromising you are willing to do in order to be loved is the subject of The Affair. It is about coming to a crossroads in life where everything is at stake.
The Posts are celebrating their daughter Sylvia’s high school graduation and Franny and Jim’s 35th wedding anniversary by taking a two-week vacation to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their friends and family. The island’s beaches, mountains, tapas, and tennis courts all offer a getaway from the simmering conflicts back in Manhattan.
However, things do not go as expected: during the holiday, secrets are revealed, humiliations both old and new are felt, old rivalries are rekindled, and old wounds are made worse.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best.”
“There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self of so many years ago, and to make the same decision. Marriages, like ships, needed steering, and steady hands at the wheel.”
“Once Charles arrived, Franny would start laughing the way she had when she was twenty-four, and the rest of them could start setting one another on fire for all she cared. That’s what best friends did: ruin people for everyone else.”
“A good swimming pool could do that—make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon.”
“So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.”
At the age of 32, Russell Green has it all: a beautiful wife, a devoted daughter who is six years old, fulfilling work as an advertising executive, and a sizable home in Charlotte. His union with the alluring Vivian is at the heart of the fact that he is living his dream. Russ is more shocked than everyone else when he discovers that every part of the life he had taken for granted has been turned upside down. Fault lines are starting to form beneath the glittering surface of this flawless living. Within a few months, Russ found himself without a wife or a career, taking care of his little daughter while attempting to come to terms with a strange and unsettling world. Russ plunges headfirst into the wilderness of single parenthood, starting a journey that is both terrifying and rewarding. This trip will put his skills and emotional reserves to the test like nothing he has ever experienced.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If it comes, let it come. If it stays, let it stay. If it goes, let it go.”
“Guilt, in other words, isn’t always wasted. It can keep us from making the same mistake twice.”
“I love autumn”, Emily said to me. “It wins you over with its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.”
“I wish I could simply forgive myself and move on, but then again, if I really wanted to change, why didn’t I?”
“Because counseling isn’t about changing someone else. It’s about trying to change yourself.”
After a night of erotic hijinks, two couples develop a toxic relationship, and Robyn Harding tells a compelling story about the manipulative adolescent at the center of it all who is hiding a deadly secret. The average teen is not Low Morrison. You could point the finger at her counterculture parents, her intimidating height, or her depressingly lonely hometown on an island in the Pacific Northwest. What’s more, Freya, an airy beauty and former social media influencer who already runs the neighborhood pottery shop, also feels out of place.
Low enrolls in a class and is instantly enchanted by Freya. And Freya is pushed to divulge her darkest secrets and most intense wants as a result of Low’s admiration. Finally, both of them get a sense of home. That is until Jamie enters the studio. She and her husband moved to the island in the hopes that the idyllic setting would lead to pregnancy because they were desperate to start a family. Low is once more by herself after Freya and Jamie, as well as their husbands, quickly become friends.
After a wild dinner party, Freya then suggests switching partners. Instead of upending their lives, what could have been a simple flirtation between two consenting adults turns into a one-night binge. And gives Low the ideal chance to let loose her mounting wrath.
A young couple and their ostensibly nice neighbors are the subjects of a domestic thriller debut that takes readers on a twisting, wild ride through lies, betrayal, and marital secrets. . . Anne and Marco Conti appear to have it all: a perfect marriage, a lovely house, and their adorable little Cora. On the other hand, a dreadful crime is committed one evening when they are at the dinner party next door. The parents are immediately the target of suspicion. The fact, though, is a considerably messier tale.
A frightening narrative of what truly transpired is told inside the curtained house. Detective Rasbach is aware of the worried couple’s secret. Marco and Anne quickly come to the realization that the other is harboring long-kept secrets. What happens next is the terrifying dissolution of a family—a chilling story of deception, dishonesty, and infidelity that will keep you gasping until the shocking conclusion. What happens next is the terrifying dissolution of a family—a chilling story of deception, dishonesty, and disloyalty that will keep you gasping until the shocking conclusion.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Her thoughts speed up and become less rational; her mind makes fantastic leaps. It’s not that things don’t make sense to her when she’s like this — sometimes they make ‘more’ sense. They make sense the way dreams do. It’s only when the dream is over that you see how odd it all was, how it actually didn’t make sense at all.”
― Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door
“The wife is always the last to know, right?”
― Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door
“…nobody makes that much money without taking advantage of somebody. It’s much easier to make money if you don’t care who you hurt. If you have scruples, it’s much harder to get rich.”
― Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door
“Everyone is faking it, all of them pretending to be something they’re not. The whole world is built on lies and deceit.”
― Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door
“She knows how judgemental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else.”
― Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door