Next Reads Fiction/Non-Fiction
Discover a curated collection of must-read fiction and non-fiction, featuring standout titles like Stieg Larsson's *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo*, Joe Hill's *Horns*, and Jung Chang's *Wild Swans*. From gripping thrillers and haunting literary fiction to powerful memoirs and histories, this handpicked list spans haunting ghost stories, psychological dramas, and unforgettable biographies. Dive into award-winning works from authors like Jhumpa Lahiri, Ma Jian, and Peter Straub—perfect for avid readers seeking their next captivating page-turner in books, fiction, and true-life narratives.
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Audition
by Ryu Murakami
In this thriller from the best-selling Japanese author, a widower stages an open casting call with his filmmaker friend to attract the perfect wife and is taken in by a striking young ballerina with a mysterious past. Original.
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Big Machine
by Victor LaValle
Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God. Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The thrilling first book in the Millenium series featuring Lisbeth Salander: “Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel” (The New York Times). Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.
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Horns
by Joe Hill
The "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Heart-Shaped Box"--a major player in 21st-century fantastic fiction ("Washington Post")--returns with a relentless new supernatural thriller.
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Long for This World
by Sonya Chung
Pushcart Prize nominee Sonya Chung has displayed her stunning talent in her award-winning short fiction and essays. Now, she renders the compelling story of a troubled family straddling cultures, fleeing and searching, in her piercing and profoundly humane first novel. . In 1953, on a small island in Korea, a young boy stows away on the ferry that is carrying his older brother and his wife to the mainland. Fifty-two years later, Han Hyun-kyu is on a plane flying back to Korea, leaving behind his own wife in America. It is his daughter, Jane—a war photographer recently injured in a bombing in Baghdad and forced to return to New York—who journeys to find him in the small town in South Korea where his brothers have settled. Here, father and daughter take refuge from their demons, flirt with passion, and, in the wake of tragedy, discover something deeper and more enduring than they could have imagined.. Just as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane introduced readers to a world that is both exotic and immediate, Long for This World illuminates the complexities and the richness of family bonds and establishes Chung as an exciting new voice in fiction..
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Mr. Shivers
by Robert Jackson Bennett
It is the time of the Great Depression. Thousands have left their homes looking for a better life, a new life. But Marcus Connelly is not one of them. He searches for one thing, and one thing only. Revenge. Because out there, riding the rails, stalking the camps, is the scarred vagrant who murdered Connelly's daughter. No one knows him, but everyone knows his name: Mr. Shivers. In this extraordinary debut, Robert Jackson Bennett tells the story of an America haunted by murder and desperation. A world in which one man must face a dark truth and answer the question-how much is he willing to sacrifice for his satisfaction?
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A Thread of Sky
by Deanna Fei
Widowed after a devastating accident and fearful of facing her grief alone, Chinese-American Irene Shen reunites three generations of independent women from her estranged family--including her mother, sister, and daughters--during a tour of mainland China.
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Termite Parade
by Joshua Mohr
In this unnerving yet entertaining follow-up to Mohr's first novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me (Two Dollar Radio, 2010), Mired, the self-described `bastard daughter of a menage a trois between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath and Eeyore', catalogues her 'museum of emotional failures', the latest of which is her boyfriend Derek, an auto mechanic (whose body may or may not be infested with termites), who loses his cool carrying her up the stairs to their apartment. As Derek's termites wreak havoc on his nervous system, chaos ensues.
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Winter's Tale
by Mark Helprin
When master mechanic Peter Lake attempts to rob a mansion on the Upper West Side, he is caught by young Beverly Penn, the terminally ill daughter of the house, and their subsequent love sends Peter on a desperate personal journey. Reissue.
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The Solitude of Prime Numbers
by Paolo Giordano
In an award-winning first novel, misfits Alice and Mattia bond as teens over shared experiences of suffering before mathematically gifted Mattia accepts a research position that takes him far away, a situation that restores their isolation before they meet by chance years later. A first novel.
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The Best of Joe R. Lansdale
by Joe R. Lansdale
Gathers stories combining horror with Westerns, mysteries, and satire that reveal the Texas author's distinctive perspective, as well as an autobiographical work.
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The Disappeared
by Kim Echlin
A searing, fiercely beautiful love story, "The Disappeared" traces one woman's three-decades-long journey from the peaceful streets of Montreal to the war-torn villages of Cambodia, as a brief love affair turns into a grand passion of loss, mourning, and remembrance.
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The Missing
by Tim Gautreaux
A masterful novel set in 1920s Louisiana, The Missing is the story of Sam Simoneaux, a floorwalker at a New Orleans department store. When a little girl is kidnapped on Sam’s watch he is haunted by guilt, grief, and ghosts from his own troubled past. Determined to find her, Sam sets out on a journey through a world of music and violence, where riverboats teem with drinking and dancing, and where dark swamplands conceal those who choose to live by their own laws. With the fate of the stolen child looming, The Missing vividly depicts an America lurching away from war, where civilization is only beginning to penetrate the hinterlands, and a man must choose between compassion and vengeance.
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Lark and Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips
National Bestseller New York Times Notable Book Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. Award-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips intertwines family secrets, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all.
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A Dark Matter
by Peter Straub
Old friends try to come to grips with the darkness of the past--a secret ritual that left behind a gruesomely dismembered body--and find themselves face-to-face with the evil they helped create.
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A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
Simultaneous release with the September hardcover from Knopf
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The Girl with Glass Feet
by Ali Shaw
An inventive and richly visual novel about young lovers on a quest to find a cure for a magical ailment, perfect for readers of Alice Hoffman Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure. Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass? The Girl with Glass Feet is a dazzlingly imaginative and magical first novel, a love story to treasure.
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Alice I Have Been
by Melanie Benjamin
In this spellbinding historical novel, readers meet the young girl whose bright spirit sends her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole--and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.
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The Tale of Halcyon Crane
by Wendy Webb
A young woman travels alone to a remote island to uncover a past she never knew was hers in this thrilling modern ghost story When a mysterious letter lands in Hallie James's mailbox, her life is upended. Hallie was raised by her loving father, having been told her mother died in a fire decades earlier. But it turns out that her mother, Madlyn, was alive until very recently. Why would Hallie's father have taken her away from Madlyn? What really happened to her family thirty years ago? In search of answers, Hallie travels to the place where her mother lived, a remote island in the middle of the Great Lakes. The stiff islanders fix her first with icy stares and then unabashed amazement as they recognize why she looks so familiar, and Hallie quickly realizes her family's dark secrets are enmeshed in the history of this strange place. But not everyone greets her with such a chilly reception—a coffee-shop owner and the family's lawyer both warm to Hallie, and the possibility of romance blooms. And then there's the grand Victorian house bequeathed to her—maybe it's the eerie atmosphere or maybe it's the prim, elderly maid who used to work for her mother, but Hallie just can't shake the feeling that strange things are starting to happen . . . In The Tale of Halcyon Crane, Wendy Webb has created a haunting story full of delicious thrills, vibrant characters, and family secrets.
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The House of Tomorrow
by Peter Bognanni
Homeschooled teenager Sebastian Prendergast is forced by his grandmother's stroke to venture out of his geodesic dome habitat and befriends a chain-smoking teen who introduces him to pop culture through the punk band they form together.
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Burnt Shadows
by Kamila Shamsie
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award An Orange Prize Finalist Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white. In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events. Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" (Salman Rushdie).
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The Alchemy of Murder
by Carol McCleary
Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, and Louis Pasteur team up during the 1889 World's Fair in Paris to find a killer connected to a virulent plague infecting thousands of Parisians.
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Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
Dai Wei, a PhD student and protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, was caught by a soldier's bullet and fell into a deep coma. But as the millennium draws near, he begins to emerge from unconsciousness, and to sense the massive changes in his country. At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, and a seminal story of the Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing Coma is Ma Jian's masterpiece.
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A Free Life
by Ha Jin
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao — as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
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The City & The City
by China Miéville
Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel.
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The Boat
by Nam Le
The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection take us across the globe, guiding us to the heart of what it means to be human. From the slums of Colombia to Iowa City and from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, here are thrilling versatile tales that herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer.
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One More Year
by Sana Krasikov
One More Year is Sana Krasikov’s extraordinary debut collection, illuminating the lives of immigrants from across the terrain of a collapsed Soviet Empire. With novelistic scope, Krasikov captures the fates of people–in search of love and prosperity–making their way in a world whose rules have changed.
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Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. “Glorious.... Showcases a considerable talent in full bloom.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden–where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories–a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate–we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome. Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.
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Wild Swans
by Jung Chang
Memoir of three Chinese women, Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother in twentieth-century China.
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Neon Angel
by Cherie Currie
Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the groundbreaking lead singer of '70s teenage all-girl rock band the Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls—Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums—who could play rock like no one else. Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, they catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums, headlining shows with opening acts like the Ramones, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie. Currie lit up the stage with the provocative teen-rebellion songs "Cherry Bomb," "Queens of Noise," and "Born to Be Bad," riding a wave of hit songs and platinum albums, all while touring around the world. On the face of it, Currie's is a riveting story of girl empowerment and fame. But it is also an intensely personal account of her struggles with drugs, sexual abuse, and violence. She and her bandmates, runaways all, were thrown into a decadent, high-pressure music scene where on the road, unsupervised for months at a time, they had to grow up fast and experience things that no teenage girls should. Neon Angel exposes the side of the music industry fans never get to see, and chronicles the group's rise to fame and their ultimate demise. Shocking and inspiring, funny and touching, Neon Angel stunningly re-creates a bygone era of rock and roll, all the while providing an inside look at growing up hard under the relentless glare of the public eye, and chronicling one tough woman's fight to reclaim her life.
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Nothing to Envy
by Barbara Demick
"Nothing to Envy" follows the lives of six North Koreans over 15 years--a chaotic period that saw the unchallenged rise to power of Kim Jong Il and the devastation of a famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
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For All the Tea in China
by Sarah Rose
Rose's remarkable account follows the journey of Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, who was deployed by the British East India Company to steal China's tea secrets in 1848. This thrilling narrative combines history, geography, and old-fashioned adventure.
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The Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich
An incredibly ambitious and assured first novel from an explosively original new voice.
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The Visiting Suit
by Xiaoda Xiao
The Visiting Suit is a powerful addition to classic gulag literature, furthering Xiaoda Xiao's budding reputation as a Chinese Solzhenitsyn.
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The People who Watched Her Pass by
by Scott Bradfield
Salome Jensen is three years old when she is taken from her home by the man who fixes the hot water heater. As she drifts through launderettes and other people's homes, she develops a perspective of the world and an understanding of people which is more meaningful than the most erudite observer could muster. The People Who Watch Her Pass By is both rich with humour and startlingly incisive. A poignant new contribution to the body of literature of a well-respected prose craftsman.