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A powerful story of redemption, grief, love, and perseverance. Colton Gentry has hit rock bottom. His best friend dies in a mass shooting, his rising country music career implodes (as does his marriage), and he is an alcoholic. After completing a stint in rehab, he returns to his childhood home in small town Kentucky to figure out what comes next. 

Nick Cutter’s latest novel delivers some truly unsettling body horror. Set over a single, tension-filled day, the story follows Margaret, a teenage girl uncovering harrowing truths about her missing friend Charity.  Her day leads to devastating revelations with far-reaching consequences and connections to millionaire tech pioneer, Rudyard Crate, whose childhood flashbacks are wild and horrifying.

Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory (2023) is a hauntingly beautiful masterpiece of historical fiction that lingers in your soul long after the final page. Set against the backdrop of a racially segregated South in 1930s Florida, the novel is both a riveting exploration of systemic injustice and a hallucinatory journey into the supernatural.

The Favorites (2025) by Layne Fargo is a loose reimagining of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, set in the world of competitive ice dancing.

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

Upon a Starlit Tide (2025) is a mesmerizing historical fantasy/dark fairy tale. In 1700s coastal France the protagonist, Luce, rescues a handsome sailor from certain death in the fickle sea. Confusingly she feels drawn to both him and to her loyal friend Samuel, an English smuggler.

Tiwa and Said have despised each other for years - since Said went off to his fancy boarding school and became too good for their town and her, and least that's how Tiwa tells it. But before that, they were best friends and with their families both being part of the tight knit Muslim community in their town they had spent countless events and holidays together. This year Said is back early from boarding school because his (and Tiwa's) favorite librarian, Ms. Barnes, has passed away. This gets him in town early enough to celebrate Eid, which Tiwa's family is hosting this year.

The Mars House (2024), by Natasha Pulley, begins on a future Earth devastated by climate change. After flooding leaves London uninhabitable, ballet dancer January is forced to relocate to the only place that’s still accepting refugees—Tharsis, a colony on Mars which has developed a genderless society.

WPL's Fiction Book Group chose Nikki Erlick's debut novel, The Measure (2022), to be the first book up for discussion in 2025. In light of the pressure many feel to begin each new year with personal resolutions, the story felt particularly timely in January. That said, I think The Measure is the kind of novel that makes for great conversations in any season.

If you enjoy a story with an emotional punch to the gut ending, then Seven Days of Us (2017) by Francesca Hornak might be for you! I picked this older book up because of the Christmastime setting and the interesting premise of a family in quarantine together, in a pre-COVID world.

Imagine this, if you will, you and thirteen other contestants have been chosen to take part in a week-long game of 'Hide and Seek' in an abandoned amusement park ala Mr. Beast-style. Each day there are two participants that are taken out, the game is active from Dawn until Dusk, and every night you sleep alongside your fellow contestants forging alliances and creating rivalries. The sole winner earns $50,000, AND the game might even become televised so you have the potential to be an internet celeb just by playing. 

Set in London and Cairo from 2010-2011, These Impossible Things (2022) follows childhood friends Malak, Kees, and Jenna after a fight fractures their connection on the eve of college graduation. With alternating points of view, a moving story unfolds.