| | | |  | | | | The Compound by Aisling Rawle | | | | This binge-able debut from Irish author Aisling Rawle, "The Compound," is perfectly fitting for our modern obsession with reality TV. Lily is a typical 20-something who is among the 19 other contestants on a hit reality TV show taking place on a remote desert compound. Throughout their isolated time filming, Lily and her fellow competitors must complete a variety of challenges to win communal essentials like food and furniture, as well as more opulent prizes like designer cosmetics and champagne, and whoever manages to stay in the Compound the longest wins the game. But as anyone familiar with the producer-driven dramas that are at the heart of every successful competition reality show knows, intense dynamics and desperation quickly develop among the contestants, and cameras are capturing every juicy bit of it. Tensions reach a dangerous pinnacle when producers advance the stakes to a threatening degree, and Lily is forced to ask whether she's actually playing the game or simply surviving it. — Chosen by editorial operations coordinator, Alexandra Niforos, and managing editor for breaking news, Mollie Reilly | | | |
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 | | | | The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri | | | | There’s so much life lived within the pages of this familial epic, heavily inspired by the author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s own life, his fascination with curses and his struggle with racial identity as a person caught between two cultures. Told through the perspective of Jonas, a half-Tunisian, half-Swedish boy, we follow the lives of the Mikkola sisters, three very different girls who are also half-Tunisian and half-Swedish. Since childhood, their eccentric single mother has convinced the sisters that a curse plagues their family, forcing them to live a paranoid existence as they bounce from one run-down Swedish apartment to another, their mother shilling expensive carpets of questionable authenticity. And when the Mikkolas end up in the same neighborhood as Jonas, thus begins a long and intricate unraveling behind the reason he feels an inexplicable connection to Ina, Anastasia, and especially, the beautiful Evelyn. Told in six parts across three decades, Jonas details Ina’s first meeting with her soon-to-be husband at a turn-of-the-millennium New Year's rave, Anastasia’s life-changing identity quest to Tunisia, Evelyn’s disappearance to New York City, and all the mysterious ways in which his own life intersects. “The Sisters” — already outfitted with numerous and well-deserved accolades from its longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal to its place as one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2025 — is a work that explores what it feels like when you don’t belong anywhere and calls into question whether life’s true curse is one that’s generational. — Chosen by HuffPost Books editor, Tessa Flores, and featured in HuffPost Books | | | |
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 | | | | Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy | | | | In this Reese's Book Club Pick, a woman washes up on a small island near Antarctica. As she's nursed back to health by the very isolated Dominic Salt and his three children, it soon becomes a very real possibility that Dominic and this mysterious woman could start a life together, except it turns out neither one of them is telling the truth about who they are or why they're there. Part romance, part mystery and part thriller, "Wild Dark Shore" is full of "breath-taking twists," according to the publisher. — Chosen by senior national editor, Ani Vrabel, and director of communications, Lizzie Grams | | | |
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 | | | | Culpability by Bruce Holsinger | | | | Bruce Holsinger’s “Culpability” has garnered almost too many accolades to name since its release in early July. In this timely thriller that deals with the murky ethics surrounding artificial intelligence, the Cassidy-Shaws’ self-driving family van collides head-on with another car. And although each member of the Cassidy-Shaw family was preoccupied in their various car seats at the moment of the crash, a routine police investigation may reveal otherwise. Now, the Cassidy-Shaws must contend with the morally gray circumstances surrounding AI, the car accident, and the secrets that each family member harbors — secrets that have the potential to implicate them in the crash. To complicate matters further, the family’s matriarch, Lorelei, is a key player in the field of artificial intelligence and her curious past with a tech mogul, Daniel Monet, comes into play. Holsinger’s novel may be a suspenseful work of fiction, but it highlights very real-life conversations about the risks posed by AI and its growing influence on every facet of human life. — Chosen by executive editor, Kate Palmer | | | |
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 | | | | The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones | | | | “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” is an embedded narrative. A story within a story. A bloody, sprawling American Gothic that spans a century and follows the astonishing life of a Blackfeet turned vampire. A middle-aged professor, Etsy Beaucarne, finds a century-old diary of her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne, a former Lutheran minister who writes fantastical and gruesome tales about the West, and his meetings with a Blackfeet named Good Stab. Good Stab tells Arthur he cannot die and that he thirsts for blood. The shocked Etsy Beaucarne senses that she’s stumbled upon something truly original and historically wild, and decides to capitalize on Good Stab’s story to use his suffering to her own advantage and possibly obtain a coveted tenure spot within her university. Storylines merge at one point, and Etsy begins to see just how intertwined her fate truly is with Good Stab’s tale. In Stephen Graham Jones’ harrowing novel, we’re pulled through multiple narratives and periods of history, with a deep clarity and understanding of each of his characters. But most importantly, Jones wields his research in a way that never flinches from the shameful and horrific offenses made against Indigenous peoples, like the Marias Massacre, America’s broken promises propped up by the claims of “manifest destiny,” the slaughtering of buffalo, and the cultural repression and erasure that Good Stab and his people experienced. — Chosen by senior reporter, Sanjana Karanth | | | |
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 | | | | What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown | | | | In Janelle Brown’s (“Pretty Things”) latest novel, “What Kind of Paradise,” we meet a young girl living in isolation with her brilliant father, a man who has tunnelled so deeply into the philosophical ideals that he uses to construct his own utopia. Telling his young daughter, Jane, that her mother died when she was too young to remember, he raises her in the woods of Montana without electricity, but rather, on an abundance of books by 19th-century philosophers. They have an almost idyllic life at first, where they grow their own food and respect the wildlife around them, but once Jane becomes a teenager, she begins to push back on everything her father has told her about the outside world, insisting she experience it for herself. Jane eventually finds herself in the tech-heavy and loud bubble of San Francisco searching for answers. Brown constructs her novel to move with a controlled urgency, instilling the reader with the foreknowledge that Jane will push back against her father at some point, but we don’t know when, or how much of her world has been crafted and how heavy the disillusionment will hit her, until it does. — Chosen by Vrabel | | | |
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 | | | | Greenwich by Kate Broad | | | | “Greenwich” is Kate Broad’s exquisitely written and propulsive debut novel that begins in the late ‘90s in a world of excessive wealth and privilege. When Rachel Fiske is almost 18, she decides to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle’s home in the very white and affluent Greenwich, Connecticut. As much as she would like to seamlessly fit into her aunt’s world of glamour and affluence, she doesn’t. Rachel is an outsider, an awkward and naive teen grappling to understand the world around her, a world where more than just money divides. Her only friend, she hopes, is the recent college grad Claudia, who is working as the family’s live-in au pair to her younger cousin, Sabine. Claudia is a Black, brilliant and sophisticated artist who is kind to Rachel, and Rachel deeply wants to develop a connection with her. Rachel, who has struggled with her own identity and self-awareness for most of her life, desires to feel seen. So when the clever Claudia befriends her, she finally begins to feel a little more at ease in a home she knows is not entirely what it seems. But privilege protects privilege, and when a tragedy falls on the family, Rachel selfishly decides where her loyalties lie. — Chosen by Vrabel | | | |
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