Hachette Library – Starred Reviews
★ Plant This, Not That
By: Elise Howard
Booklist- Starred Review
As it dawns on us that dwindling insect populations threaten the Earth’s entire ecosystem, we need reliable, relatable information that will activate a dramatic shift in our urban and suburban landscapes from largely non-native to native plantings. Howard rises to that challenge, first by
calling out popular non-native plants—like barberries, heavenly bamboo, peonies, forsythia, bamboo, and dozens more in the U.S.—for their invasiveness, lack of nutritional value to insects, vulnerability to disease or pest predation, and other drawbacks. The book’s power is in its
concision, clarity, and ease of use, e.g., the entry for (non-native) forsythia features a clear color image of the plant in bloom above a paragraph explaining its issues (invasive). One or more listings of alternative natives follow, each entry including botanical and common names, traits,
preferred growing conditions, a listing of states where the plant can be found, a clear color image, a thumbnail ecoregional U.S. map showing nationwide density of the plant, and a paragraph explaining why the native plant works better. A useful box listing “more native choices”
ends the entry. The listings are helpfully sectioned into foundation-garden plants, hedges, entrance garden and mixed border, hellstrip, ground covers, climbing and screening plants, and specimen trees. A deceptively useful and relevant title.
Workman: March 3rd, 2026; ISBN: 9781523525911 Paperback
★ Strangers in the Villa
By: Robyn Harding
Booklist- Starred Review
Moving from New York City to Cadaqués in Spain for a fresh start, Curtis and Sydney are still struggling. When a young couple find themselves stranded near their remote hillside home, Sydney is eager to let them stay until their van can be fixed, but something feels off to Curtis. With time, each of the four begins to slip, revealing dark secrets about themselves and their relationships. Soon the question becomes who in this group is most lethal and willing to kill. Readers looking for that nebulous feeling of dread, creeping and growing from one page to the next, will love everything that Harding’s latest, following The Haters (2024), has to offer. With varying levels of likability, none of the characters would be a great friend, but the end gives a satisfying feeling of justice done for each individual. The remote location and language barrier subtly intensify the sense of isolation over time without overshadowing the complicated interior processing each character is going through. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Sarah Pearse, and Heather Gudenkauf or anyone looking for an edge-of-the-seat story should be first in line for this novel.
Grand Central: March 3rd, 2026; ISBN: 9781538774007 Hardcover
★ American Han
By:Lisa Lee
Booklist- Starred Review
A long-simmering tragedy unfolds in the Kim family of California, from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
The title of Lee’s heartrending debut novel employs a Korean word that isn’t defined in the text. Most sources describe “han” as a collective feeling of sorrow, resentment, regret, and internalized anger stemming from the historical experience of suffering; the story of the Kims expresses this complex emotion in a number of ways. The novel opens in December 2001, when Jane Kim’s mother shows up unexpectedly at her apartment in San Francisco, announcing she’s planning to move into town from Jane’s childhood home in Napa. Jane is not happy to see her, explaining, “Our relationship had soured to the point where I’d become almost mute around her, a habit formed out of instinct and anger.” The elder Kims, who have recently split up after decades of incompatibility, arrived along with the wave of Koreans who came to the U.S. after the Immigration Act of 1965 removed restrictions on Asian arrivals; those optimistic times are now far in the past. Jane is in her last semester of law school, but plans to leave the state and apply for the bar somewhere else, seemingly to escape her parents. Later chapters revisit the childhood Jane shared with her brother, Kevin, both having had notable junior tennis careers, and track the unfolding of a serious crime Kevin committed in 2002, when he was a San Jose cop. Lee captures the culture of the Korean diaspora both with small details—a jar of kimchi buried in the yard for more than 10 years, dug up only when the house is sold—and with broader brush strokes. “We have a sense of loyalty, of obligation, as if we came into the world with it programmed in our DNA,” Jane observes. “Responsibility reaches beyond the filial, beyond members of our own families, encompassing an entire network of people with whom we share shame and grief and pride and a way of seeing something funny in the bleakest situations.” But it is at that last point that the author parts ways with the community. Lee’s refusal to find comedy in the Kims’ personalities and predicament is rare, and extremely effective.
Lee’s self-aware, relentlessly honest narrator feels absolutely real, and her story cuts deep.
Algonquin: March 9th, 2026; ISBN: 9781643757254 Hardcover
★ Judge Stone
By:James Patterson and Viola Davis
Booklist- Starred Review
This legal thriller from superstar duo and first-time collaborators, author and EGOT–winning actor Davis and Patterson, first gentleman of best-selling novels, demands attention from its opening pages and never lets go. In contemporary Alabama, in the fictional, Black-majority small town of
Union Springs, Dr. Bria Gaines has a secret midnight assignation: provide an abortion for terrified 13-year-old Nova. When complications from the procedure arise, the hospital alerts the police, and Dr. Gaines finds herself on trial in the court of Judge Mary Stone, a local elected official known for her no-nonsense, straightforward impartiality. Overnight, Judge Stone’s usually sleepy little jurisdiction gets blown up (literally) to a national stage, with locals in conflict with outside agitators, right-to-lifers, abortion-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, political schemers, ruthless media, and even the Klan. The action rolls along at breakneck speed and features archetypal characters (witty and wise, kind and true, rotten-to-the-core, entitled smartypants just begging to be brought down a peg or two). Family secrets emerge, demons are exposed, and as expected from two master storytellers, it’s all wonderfully satisfying and tied together by some very effective plot twists
Little Brown: March 9th, 2026; ISBN: 9780316579834 Hardcover
★ Second Chance Duet
By:Ana Holguin
Booklist- Starred Review
Celia Garcia has spent the last decade trying to break into the world of movie music, but so far all her jobs have involved creating advertising jingles and the like. Now a career-making opportunity to compose the score for a famous Hollywood director’s first television series is
within her grasp. There is just one problem: Celia must work with a partner on the project. Ordinarily, Celia wouldn’t hesitate before agreeing to this stipulation, except the person Celia will be partnering with is none other than Oliver Barlowe. When they were both students at Juilliard,
Oliver was a perpetual thorn in her side. Now if Celia wants the job, she will have to figure out some way to spend the next couple of months working closely with Oliver without going crazy. Holguin (Up Close & Personal, 2025) doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to composing a compelling enemies-to-lovers love story that is both flirtatiously sweet and seriously sexy in equal measures. With its perfectly matched protagonists and a fascinating plot that delves into the intriguing world of music composition, this will be a hit with romance readers.
Forever: March 10th, 2026; ISBN: 9781538756904 Paperback
★ Adult Braces
By:Lindy West
Publishers Weekly– Starred Review
West (Shit, Actually) blends her signature sharp wit with endearing vulnerability in this luminous memoir of a cross-country road trip she took to rebuild herself and her marriage. Spurred by her love of the Beach Boys song “Kokomo,” West rented a van to drive from Seattle to Key West after learning that her husband, Aham, had another partner and wanted a polyamorous marriage. In between humorous missives from RV campgrounds (“I am self-actualized now! I’m not flirting with a city slicker who tried to light a campfire with just a log and a match!”), West writes candidly about her struggles with being a public face for the body positivity movement while sometimes “feel[ing] bad in my body.” With unblinking resolve, she also autopsies the effects of masking her feelings of inadequacy with humor and a suffocating dependency on her husband: “I want to be desirable, but I do not know how to be desired.” A defecating otter and a seven-year old in a Trump hat also make appearances, bumping up against indictments of comedy’s mistreatment of women and the bruising effects of skinny-worship. The result is a madcap, rewarding journey that demystifies the unsexy work of self-actualization.
Kirkus– Starred Review
When in doubt, hit the road.
The author of a memoir (Shrill, 2016) and two essay collections (The Witches Are Coming, 2019, and Shit, Actually, 2020), West tackles big subjects here. The first to arrive are the consequences of polyamory, an unusual arrangement proposed by her husband and now coming home to roost in the form of a second partner—and more besides. Beset by spiraling self-esteem, to say nothing of having to wear the corrective dental apparatus of the title, West has a gift for making metaphors of her situation: “Our teeth are floating, each loose and alone in tissue,” she writes, and alas, so are we, too, capable of being pushed together “if we’re willing to move through the pain of it.” A second issue is that West is “fat”—her word—in a society that worships slenderness, revealing that “here’s the truth: Sometimes I feel bad in my body.” For all that, West manages to extract humor in the many odd moments she finds herself in while taking a restorative drive from Seattle to Key West, Florida, and back again: She lampoons the stereotype of her Washington home as being half granola types and half “agitating to become part of Idaho so they can legally shoot the mayor if he tries to enforce seat belt laws.” She goofs on the fundamentalists who travel to a creationist destination in Nebraska: “Do the locals go to the Boneyard Creation Museum again and again to bask in the pleasure of knowing that Jesus might have cured a diplodocus of leprosy?” And, memorably, she writes that a campground bathhouse “looked like a serial killer’s toy box.” Amid the humor, though, are moments of great insight, many clearly born of keeping a careful eye out while passing through “this ludicrously large country,” others born of heartache, as when she sighs, “Lust is too much like hunger, and I am not allowed to be hungry.”
Grand Central: March 10th, 2026; ISBN: 9780306831836 Hardcover
★Mothers and Other Strangers
By:Corey Ann Haydu
Booklist- Starred Review
Haydu makes her adult debut in this reflection on motherhood and friendship. Sydney and Mae have been best friends since they were little, living in the New York City suburb of Somersette. Their mothers, Joni and Beth Ann, became best friends as well, and their two families created a
special bond—until everything fell apart. Joni died on the girls’ graduation day, and no one has been the same since. Now, Sydney and Mae are both living in the city but no longer speak. They run into each other one day and find out they are both pregnant, although Sydney is married, and
Mae is going to be a single mother. Sydney’s goal is to recruit Mae into her multilevel marketing company, LillyLou, while Mae is simply looking for a friend. Haydu holds back the devastating secrets that caused the rifts between both Mae and Sydney and their mothers, building suspense. She uses an omniscient point of view to great effect, sliding in and out of the
characters’ perspectives to give a full picture of the story and its flashbacks. Despite their secrets, the characters aren’t afraid to speak the truth, even when it is bitter and messy.
Publishers Weekly– Starred Review
Haydu’s wonderful adult debut (after the middle grade fantasy One Jar of Magic) explores the interwoven lives of two families. After free-spirited Joni Dyer moves from Manhattan to suburban Sommersette, Mass., with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, Mae, she becomes best friends with neighbor Beth Ann Sullivan, a more conventional woman whose own daughter, Sydney, is also three. As the girls grow up, only Sydney is aware of the affair between her father, Barrett, and Joni, which ends in tragedy when Joni dies from a bee sting the night of Mae’s high school graduation. The girls keep in touch until their early 20s, when Mae finds out about the affair and ends their friendship. By the time they’re in their 30s both are pregnant and living in New York City. Sydney is married and has joined her mother at a midlevel marketing company that sells pashminas, while Mae, an artist, is single and living off the sale of a painting depicting her and Sydney as girls, which she made shortly after their rupture. Mae and Sydney eventually reconnect after Sydney reaches out via email, and they sift through their parents’ failed relationships and their own. Haydu expertly seeds the narrative with clues about the consequences of Joni and Barrett’s affair and stacks the plot with surprises. It’s a beautiful tale of complicated friendships.
Little, Brown: March 31st, 2026; ISBN: 9780316597470 Hardcover
★The Wanderers
By:Daniela Gerson
Booklist- Starred Review
Gerson’s Wanderers opens with a meet cute and a slow, budding romance that reveals an improbable connection: Gerson and her new love Talia’s grandparents lived across the street from each other in a small Polish town called Zamość. The coincidence continues when she and Talia discover that both of their families survived the Nazi invasion of Poland by toiling with other Polish Jews in a labor camp in Soviet Siberia. Gerson knits together anecdotes recreated from family interviews and documents with stories of her own investigative trips to Uzbekistan, Poland, Israel, and war-torn Ukraine to follow in both families’ footsteps. This nonlinear and sweeping story relays horrors inflicted by Nazis, Polish bystanders, and Russians juxtaposed with moving depictions of people defying authority to help, both in the early twentieth century and in the present as Gerson works to unearth nuggets of information to help her, Talia, and, someday,
their twins, better understand how their families handled the trauma of multiple displacements. Her impassioned tale spans decades, continents, languages, and coping mechanisms, and it provides a significant voice to a lesser known experience of Polish Jews. Gerson doesn’t shy away from the hard realities their families faced and the legacy and consequences that remain for current and future generations worldwide.
Grand Central: March 31st, 2026; ISBN: 9780306834301 Hardcover
★Treat Them as Buffalo
By:Blair Palmer Yoxall
Booklist- Starred Review
Yoxall’s stunning debut novel is a western told from an Indigenous perspective. During the 1885 North-West Resistance, the Métis community of Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Saskatchewan, is rocked by the disappearance of a growing number of Métis boys, including Nikosis Erikson’s cousin, Guillaume. When the town police prove unwilling to help, 12-year-old Niko, his mother, and his aunt join members of the Pussy Posse, led by notorious local rancher Kate McCannon. They are determined to take matters into their own hands and find the missing boys. As they get closer to the truth, however, Niko discovers that the disappearances are closely connected to a violent chapter in his own family history. In lyrical prose, Indigenous Voices Award-nominated poet and writer Yoxall, himself a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, vividly renders a young Indigenous boy’s coming of age. Fans of unconventional westerns like The Sisters Brothers 2011) by Patrick deWitt and Outlawed (2021) by Anna North will appreciate Yoxall’s subversion of western tropes, while fans of Indigenous literary fiction from Stephen Graham Jones, Jessica Johns, and Tommy Orange will celebrate the arrival of a powerful new voice.
Algonquin: May 5th, 2026; ISBN: 9781643756806 Paperback
★What’s Going Right
By:Paul Cont
Booklist- Starred Review
The health of the mind is finally getting its due. Conti, a high-profile psychiatrist, wants to help people figure out the answers to two fundamental questions: “Who are you?” and “Who could you be?” At age 20, Conti’s younger brother killed himself with his father’s pistol. Conti blamed himself until he eventually found a skilled therapist; now he observes that the default way of approaching mental health skews toward the negative. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders runs to 1,120 pages. He prefers to focus on what’s going right, so people feel empowered, joyful, and fulfilled. Conti promotes self-reflection and compassionate curiosity. In one case, he helps a patient who identified himself solely as an alcoholic see that he was blaming himself and feeling shame for not defending his mom from his abusive father. Instead of
seeing themselves as failures, people can write a “life narrative” that looks at hard-won lessons and triumphs. Conti poses other guiding questions: “What delights you?” “What’s going right in your life?” “When were you last awed by someone or something?” People can learn how to steer
themselves where they wish to go. Conti teaches important lessons about love, generosity, relationships, community, hope, kindness, mentorship, and securing a happy, meaningful life.
Balance: May 5th, 2026; ISBN: 9781538776049 Hardcover
★The Last Contract of Isako
By:Fonda Lee
Booklist- Starred Review
Following her division’s defeat in an intracompany war that resulted in her delivering 200 termination notices, atier Isthmus Isako, a combination of advisor and sometime-assassin, finds herself suddenly reassigned to the director of the opposing division after watching her boss resign. On the planet Aquilo, a colony long since disconnected from Earth, resigning means stepping outside the airshield—with a severance payout going to the surviving kithfamily members. Isako’s subsequent offer to resign is stalled by one final contract: prevent her deceased boss’ rival from ascending to the Board of Directors by any means possible. This
contract leads Isako on an adventure involving a former partner turned ronin, a former apprentice working for an unconventional director, assassination attempts, and planet-altering secrets, shattering Isako’s idealized view of both their civilization and her role as atier. Lee’s (Untethered Sky, 2023) layered world building and surprising twists in this unusual dystopian setting will keep readers on edge as Isako moves from her years-long, work-obsessed isolation to reconnecting with family and friends prior to her (planned) demise. This standalone samurai sf stands out.
Orbit: May 5th, 2026; ISBN: 9780316568654 Hardcover
★Ironwood
By:Michael Connelly
Booklist- Starred Review
“Small island, big crime,” says Detective Sergeant Stilwell about his turf on Catalina, just a short ferry ride from L.A. All the characters and dynamics introduced in Connelly’s first Catalina novel, Nightshade (2025), are in full swing here as a cluster of crimes erupts, and Stil persists in disobeying orders to follow his hunches. A new deputy is killed and another badly injured when a drug-deal stakeout goes catastrophically wrong. Barred from investigating and told to clean up the station’s overflowing lost and found, Stil gets curious about an abandoned backpack and finds himself involved with a cold case overseen by LAPD Detective Renée Ballard, a character from one of Connelly’s previous series. Stil’s tenacity, keen instincts, dread, tenderheartedness, and pragmatism—he knows just how to deal with a scheming vintner and a kid who graffitied the island’s landmarks—make for an entertaining and admirable hero, while Catalina, with its colorful history, “fragile ecosystems,” and busy harbor, overseen by Tash, Stil’s lover, is an evermore intriguing setting. Connelly is at his most polished and incisive here, with crackling dialogue, complex investigations, tricky relationships, escalating suspense, and dogged and inspired sleuthing by a principled, rule-breaking hero. The satisfying ending promises more enthralling episodes on the horizon.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Connelly fans will be avidly seeking the second in his Catalina series.
Little, Brown: May 19th, 2026; ISBN: 9780316595384 Hardcover
★A Kiss of Crimson Ash
By:Michael Connelly
Booklist- Starred Review
Taara lives in the Samjayan empire. She’s a sheltered princess of Abhaya who has recently become queen due to her mother’s sudden, mysterious illness. Garjan, the handsome prince of neighboring Nandapore, is on his way to marry Taara, although this is not a match made of love
but of strategy. Garjan leaves behind his true love, Bhediya, a beautiful courtesan with a secret magic, and his friend Roland, a thief with an uncanny ability to disappear. Within the empire, dark forces are at work as powerful men plot to take magic meant for the gods. Unbeknownst to them, it will be up to these four to prevent the destruction of the world as they know it. Varghese’s debut, the first in a proposed medieval Indian-inspired romantasy trilogy, is an enthralling, heart-racing tale full of magic, mystery, romance, and spicy scenes that will make readers’ toes curl.
Interwoven in the atmospheric world building are themes such as racism and misogyny, balanced with themes of finding oneself and queer love. An absolute must-read for any romantasy fan.
Orbit: May 26th, 2026; ISBN: 9780316591843 Paperback
