This was such a fun read with great characters and unexpected suspense along the way! Highly recommend to anyone who appreciates Pride and Prejudice, but is looking for a creative take on a modern love story.
Most Ardently Yours by Freya Sampson, (List Price: $18.99, Sourcebooks Landmark, 9781464264764, July 2026)
Reviewed by Kelly, WordsWorth Books in Little Rock, Arkansas
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Most Ardently Yours was SO MUCH FUN! This novel was like a reverse Lost in Austen where the female main character brings Mr. Darcy into the modern world! Zoe is done with men and with writing. But she has her beloved romance novels and her best friend, so she’s set. Until she somehow reads Mr. Darcy out of Pride and Prejudice, and now he’s sleeping on her couch. But how does she get him back? And does she want to? This story was a delight to read and a real page turner. Definitely a must for Austen fans!
Most Ardently Yours by Freya Sampson, (List Price: $18.99, Sourcebooks Landmark, 9781464264764, July 2026)
Reviewed by Jennifer, Bookmiser in Marietta, GA
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I was grinning and obsessed from the beginning. Love, love, loveeeed it, most ardently.
Most Ardently Yours by Freya Sampson, (List Price: $18.99, Sourcebooks Landmark, 9781464264764, July 2026)
Reviewed by liz, Columbus Bound Book Shop in Columbus, Georgia
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“Agnes Lives! is a 24 hour novel. I had all of these feelings in 2018, 2020, that I was trying to find an outlet for. So I started creating this character in snatches of daily life. What would it be like for this character to go shopping, or try to buy a gun in Chinatown, and so on. And as I started to write this, I discovered more and more of her, and I thought the 24 hour time period would add a propulsive clock to the piece.”
― Hallie Elizabeth Newton, InterviewBooks Are Magic with David Lipsky
What booksellers are saying about Agnes Lives!
About Hallie Elizabeth Newton
Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi. A recipient of NYU’s Goldwater Fellowship, she won first prize for fiction in Columbia Journal’s 2020 Winter Contest. Agnes Lives! is her debut novel. She lives in New York.
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Agnes is like a piece of glass that our patriarchal, image-obsessed society has trampled all over. She’s fractured. The beauty industry has her by the throat, she indulges the toxic behaviors of the men in her life, and Instagram is the safe haven where she tries to bury her head in the sand only to be assaulted with a constant influx of information on how to better herself aesthetically. Like someone who walks into oncoming traffic, she places herself directly in the path of the male gaze, spends her days in service to it, walks a tightrope to stay in its sightline, and gets repeatedly run over in the hopes of being seen. Thus, her maddening and manic spiral as she searches for someone to kill her, to set her free from this Plato’s Cave of warped womanhood refracted through the Conjunctiva of the male gaze. In a chaotic whirlwind of stream of consciousness prose, we follow Agnes through what she hopes will be the last day in her life. Agnes Lives! is a smart commentary on toxic femininity, on being an aging woman, on the ways women feel pressured to sacrifice their bodies at the altars of men, on all the toxic little crimes men commit against women and women commit against themselves. It’s full of killer lines and insights about our culture, and the characterization is precise and blazing. This novel is as enraging as it is insightful. So if you like chaotic, weird girl Lit. Fic. with an unhinged woman on an equally unhinged mission, then take a big bite, this one’s worth the calories.
Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, (List Price: $26.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639738564, June 2026)
Reviewed by Savannah, The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, NC
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A blistering manifesto of a book that crams so much into its pages; a kind of reverse American Psycho telling the story of one woman downtrodden by mid-2010’s rat race existence in New York. As wild, unexpected, and original as a hypnotic Instagram spiral, it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.
Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, (List Price: $26.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639738564, June 2026)
Reviewed by Doron Klemer, Octavia Books in New Orleans, LA
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Kuang never misses, and this insanely bingeable story was quickly added to my favorites. Kuang expertly depicts the specific brand of grief that arises from an unexpected loss of a family member that you wish you were closer to. Read this book if you want to be inspired to pick up your language studies again.
Taipei Story by R. F. Kuang, (List Price: $32, William Morrow, 9780063583597, August 2026)
Reviewed by Em, Bookmiser in Marietta, GA
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“I’ve always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map. I think it is a real human instinct to do it. It actually – as humans, it predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what’s now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home – their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it. And it’s just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am. This is where I am. But of course, you fast-forward a – say, a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire. And from that point on, it’s impossible to disentangle the urge to map from the urge to possess, the – from colonialism.”
― Maggie O’Farrell, NPR Fresh Air
What booksellers are saying about Land
About Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.
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Chaotic and relentless in the best way possible, Agnes Lives! Follows the internal dialogue of Agnes for 24 hours as she seeks a candidate to kill her. This has the pacing of Uncut Gems (the 2019 Safdie Bros. film) combined with the psychological intrigue of an insatiable inner monologue, like in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. Agnes Lives! explores themes of self-worth and self-indulgence in a pitiless world that demands women be everything to everyone at all times, highlighting the push and pull of embracing or rejecting those demands. Said demands push Agnes to the absolute extremes. This is a literary thriller that all strange book lovers are going to devour. I loved it!
Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton, (List Price: $26.99, Bloomsbury Publishing, 9781639738564, June 2026)
Reviewed by Jenny, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC
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“I think that we certainly talk about pregnancy and motherhood and reproductive freedoms. These are conversations that we are having, but within pretty narrow parameters. And what I liked about this idea was the opportunity to talk about some of those issues from a different lens than usual — not least because so many people’s minds are already made up about so many of these ideas, and that means that we can’t really have a conversation. But if we change the lens, if we change the approach, if we change the givens and the parameters that we go in with, then we get to have a conversation.
There’s the whole point of novels.”
― Laurie Frankel, Texas Standard
What booksellers are saying about Enormous Wings
About Laurie Frankel
Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of the novels Family Family, One Two Three, Goodbye for Now, The Atlas of Love, and the Reese’s Book Club Pick This Is How It Always Is. Frankel lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie. She makes good soup.
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Ooooh, yes. The premise grabbed me immediately, the cover is perfection, and the story is engrossing, if a wee bit unfulfilling at the end. College student Savannah is reeling (well, spiraling) after a friendship breakup and has retreated to an isolated cabin to drink away her woes. It’s not going particularly well, given her OCD and other mental health challenges. One morning, she wakes up next to a corpse in the woods. Awkward. There’s a journal next to the corpse, which recounts the harrowing set of circumstances that led to the young woman’s death. Instead of reporting the body, Savannah…bonds with it? For lack of a better phrasing. She starts reading the journal and visiting the corpse, and before long, she has formed an emotional attachment with the ghost of the dead hiker. If it sounds trippy, it is. It’s wild and unhinged and occasionally messy and gory. And I’m here for the mess. We also get to read along in the hiker’s journal. Her name is Ava, and watching her story unfold keeps you on the edge of your seat, even as you know where the story ends. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but not so much that it detracts from the thrill of the story to that point. Great themes of mental health, toxic friendship, and how we heal.
Decomposition Book by Sara van Os, (List Price: $30, Hanover Square Press, 9781335001894, May 2026)
Reviewed by Kate, Plaid Elephant Books in Danville, KY
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A multi-generational story of mothers, daughters, and the heavy weight of expectation: those we think are placed upon us, and those we place on ourselves. What do you do when it is too much to carry alone?
The Library of Flowers by L.C. Chu, (List Price: $18.99, Sourcebooks Landmark, 9781728275710, May 2026)
Reviewed by Morgan Holub, E. Shaver Bookseller in Savannah, GA
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Equal parts tender and hot. like being wrapped in a warm midwestern hug and everyone’s cheeks are wet with tears. Love, love, loved!
Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell, (List Price: $32, William Morrow, 9780063380264, April 2026)
Reviewed by Shelby, Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, LA
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When Cherry and her husband Tom—now rich, famous, and the star of a media circus—decide to call it quits, she is left with a spectacularly sticky situation involving too much wine, takeout, and a dog that isn’t hers. Adding insult to injury? Tom left behind a globally recognized caricature of her.But this is where the fun starts! Cherry is deciding to take back her story, one hilarious, step at a time. This is a sweet, messy novel on the impossible rarity of finding true love and the exhilarating, soul-crushing difficulty of making that sh*t work.
Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell, (List Price: $32, William Morrow, 9780063380264, April 2026)
Reviewed by Kimberly, Square Books in Oxford, MS
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When I first read this novel, it was as if scales fell from my eyes. As Hurston writes, I began to see life “like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and Doom in the branches.” Get it. Read it. Period.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, (List Price: $27.99, Amistad, 9780063068537, January 2021)
Reviewed by Jim, Righton Books in St Simons Island, GA
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