The books we’re spotlighting this month don’t exactly radiate escapist good vibes — but they do offer the opportunity to step into someone else’s life and get to know their view of our shared world.
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Genre fiction and female authors top U.S. libraries’ most-borrowed lists in 2025
All of the top 10 books borrowed through the public library app Libby were written by women. And Kristin Hannah’s The Women was the top checkout in many library systems around the country.
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Joan Didion leaves one more piece of writing to faithful fans
Didion’s book is an intimate chronicle of the author’s struggle to help her daughter, even if it meant digging into her own long-unexamined neuroses.
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After a tragic accident, a widow faces a lifetime of what-ifs
Live Fast won France’s top literary prize in 2022. Brigitte Giraud’s haunting book revisits the death of her husband in a motorcycle crash 20-odd years earlier.
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Tony Horwitz’s widow Geraldine Brooks writes a beautiful memoir of grief
Horwitz died suddenly in 2019 while on a book tour. In Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks grieves her husband — and also reflects on the life she might have lived had they not met.
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‘The First State of Being’ and ‘Chooch Helped’ win top children’s book awards
This year’s Caldecott medal went to a book about an older sister frustrated when her baby brother “helps.” The Newbery went to a middle-grade tale about a time traveler at the turn of the century.
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Kate McKinnon’s new middle-grade mystery is for all her fellow misfits
The SNL star says her new book is part of what she calls her “private mission to give a wink and a nod” to young people who might feel “different” — like she did — growing up.
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Growing up, he struggled to read. Then a young teacher saw his potential
Juleus Ghunta is a published children’s author and award-winning poet. But growing up, he could barely read. That was until a teacher saw his potential.
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New novel inspired by real-life stories of young Central American immigrants
A conversation with Susan Mills, author of On The Wings Of A Hummingbird, a novel about a girl named Petra growing up in a small Guatemalan village who eventually travels to the U.S. fleeing gang violence.
