"Summer camp drama, class tensions and earth-shattering secrets form the crux of New York Times bestselling author Liz Moore’s enthralling fifth novel: 'The God of the Woods.'

It’s August 1975, and 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar has vanished from Camp Emerson. To make matters worse, Barbara is the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp, and her older brother Bear went missing from their house just up the hill exactly 14 years ago. He was never found.

In the span of nearly 500 pages, the search for Barbara ensues, and we come to understand how this event, Bear’s disappearance, the Van Laar family, and the history of the surrounding Adirondack community are all intertwined. 'The God of the Woods' spans 20-plus years and is told from the perspective of a slew of people, including Barbara's camp counselor, Mrs. Van Laar, an intrepid detective and an on-the-run serial killer.

The page count and the number of characters might seem daunting initially, but each moving part is undoubtedly integral to the bigger picture. Moore is deft in how she weaves this thrilling tale of adolescence, privilege, protection and betrayal."

— Chosen by Alexandra Niforos, operations associate

In Miranda July's "All Fours," we meet an unnamed narrator about to embark on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York City. The narrator is a 45-year-old woman who easily falls into hyper-internalized fantasies about her life, her past and her casual encounters.

She’s a mother and a wife, but rootless in both of these roles, as well as an artist who, though relatively well-known, is dissatisfied and anxious about her work. She is emboldened to make her cross-country trek after her husband convinces her to take several weeks away to hopefully reignite a variety of passions, including her interest in her own life.

She was meant to be an artist on the fringe, meant to escape the trappings of traditional marriage in America and the gender roles of motherhood, but instead, she only finds herself wondering if she can take a trip for that long, away from her motherly and wifely responsibilities.

Rather than making it all the way to New York, our protagonist ends up in a motel in Monrovia, only 30 minutes into her drive. In this small town, she has a passing conversation with a local man whom she becomes obsessed with, and the two begin an affair. July's transcendental novel touches on transitional phases of womanhood, autonomy and motherhood in a way that's all at once funny, biting and impossible to look away from.

— Chosen by Mary Perkins, front page editor

The Irish international bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” has a style of prose you either get or don’t. But Rooney’s books are without a doubt a masterclass in writing about modern intimacy and social issues.

Her latest venture “Intermezzo” is the story of two adult brothers navigating the death of their father, their own personal relationships, their professions and the messy state of their family.

Prior to the death of the family’s patriarch, the brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek haven’t seen one another in 10 years. Peter is a progressive lawyer who lives in Dublin while Ivan, a recent college grad and one-time child chess prodigy, is now a beleaguered freelance data analyst.

The brothers are horrendous at communication, which easily explains why both also have complicated love lives. Peter is torn between two women — a college student and a former partner — and Ivan inexplicably falls for a much older woman who works at an arts center.

Peter is the more emotionally written of the two brothers, and is more undone by his father’s death, whereas Ivan’s perspective is analytical, methodical and even emotionally distant. Highly characteristic of Rooney’s capacity to heighten the personal conflict between her characters to such a degree that nothing else matters, “Intermezzo” offers a beautiful insight into adult relationships, grief, love and family dynamics.

— Featured in the HuffPost Books newsletter

Known for their bestselling novel “You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty,” Akwaeke Emezi’s latest book takes readers through myriad complicated relationships in the elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. Told through multiple points of view, we meet Aima and Kalu, a young, affluent couple who have just had a messy breakup.

They met in Houston but came to Lagos, where Kalu’s family business is headquartered. Their love affair is toxic at times, complex at others, and they both struggle with the people they feel they’re becoming in Nigeria versus who they were when they met in Texas.

When they finally end the relationship, Aima threatens to leave for London. Kalu, heartbroken, begins to unravel and agrees to attend a sex party thrown by his close friend, Ahmed. But it’s at the party that Kalu discovers an even seedier and more brutal side of the city’s corrupt underworld.

Emezi’s ambitious stories are vibrant, lush and fueled by deeply emotional plots, and in “Little Rot,” we see just how far their characters will go to not only save themselves but also each other.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

A New York Times bestseller and a shortlist for the National Book Award, "Martyr!" tells the fictional tale of Cyrus Shams, a freshly orphaned young man who, following the death of his immigrant parents, finds meaning in famed martyrs of the past, be they artists, poets or anyone in between.

His newfound obsession leads him on a journey of appreciation for his Iranian heritage and to also discover a familial secret.

— Chosen by Anna Ta, audience editor

A wickedly sharp and darkly entertaining ride, Álvaro Enrigue’s “You Dreamed of Empires” is bursting with a motley crew of priests, conquistadors and princesses. It’s a wildly imaginative and funny historical fiction in Enrigue’s imagining of the Aztec conquest as he turns the tale into an almost hallucinatory narrative in an alternate timeline.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan, with his captains, troops, horses and two translators, Friar Aguilar and Malinalli, as well as an enslaved Nahua princess. It's later that day when Cortés will meet the emperor Moctezuma, setting in motion one of history’s bloodiest chapters.

Cortés is a codependent mess, and Moctezuma is drug-addled and volatile. The conquistador's arrival into the city is a clumsy affair, but the Aztecs greet Cortés and his Spanish consorts with a ceremonial welcome orchestrated by the pertinacious princess Atotoxtli, who happens to be the sister and wife of Moctezuma (her husband is presently on a hallucinogenic trip for spiritual guidance at that particular moment).

The Aztecs are curious about the Spanish horses, King Charles I and Catholicism, whereas Cortés and crew are becoming increasingly nervous about the labyrinth within the Aztec palace decorated with thousands of human skulls and are beginning to wonder if they'll ever get out alive.

— Chosen by Ta

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is perhaps best known as the author of The New York Times bestselling “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” and her recent 2024 release is as wickedly ensnaring.

This dark family drama is set in a suburban utopia and tells the story of an American Jewish family’s history throughout multiple generations from the past into their chaotic and surreal present. There are evil eyes, psychics, pharmaceuticals, rifts over inheritance, political banter and plenty of family secrets.

One of the patriarchs of the Fletcher family, Carl, is kidnapped and taken for a week in 1980. The kidnapping happened right in front of his home, and his family believes it’s because of his wealth that he was targeted. When Carl is eventually returned home, everyone pretends to continue with their lives as normal, secure in their moneyed bubble of suburbia, only to find that several decades later, the kidnapping event wasn’t as easy to forget as everyone pretended.

Carl never overcame the trauma, Ruth, his wife, was equally broken, and their three children have grown up to be varying degrees of walking dysfunction.

— Chosen by Tessa Flores, HuffPost Books editor

“Between the World and Me" author Ta-Nehisi Coates brings his most recent work, “The Message,” a text that takes readers on a journey through historical and present conflicts and oppressions in order to better understand and define experiences of racism.

Written as a sort of pilgrimage and structured into three essays that build upon one another, Coates details his travels to Dakar to a “mythical kingdom in his mind,” per the publisher, and beyond.

From these initial travels, the reader is taken across the world exploring Coates' feelings on issues like book banning, historical racism, oppressive policy, racism in America and so much more. He also traveled to Palestine, where he saw for himself a country greatly suffering from nationalist narratives.

— Chosen by Flores and featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Timothy Snyder may be one of the world’s most preeminent historians and political writers with a particular expertise on Eastern Europe and on the Second World War.

In a book trailer to his newly released book “On Freedom,” he explains that in the past, he’s written history books about the “worst things” that can happen to a nation, but he also writes texts on how we can keep them from happening again.

The book is both a political and philosophical examination of what freedom is and how to maintain it by attempting to explain that freedom doesn’t just mean a simplified absence of state power or control, but also freedom to thrive and to live in a world with an optimism toward the future.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Developed from an essay that "Braiding Sweetgrass" author Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in 2022 and utilizing her Indigenous knowledge as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, “The Serviceberry” follows her ideas on “gift economy,” Indigenous trading methods, ancient forms of exchange, and how circular economies could be enacted into economic policies to create one of abundance for all.

Like in her previous work, readers are treated to Kimmerer’s exploration and wisdom surrounding language, specifically how etymology can link back to our relationships with the world that sustains us and binds us to nature.

She wants us to view our resources as gifts and gain a sense of gratitude in the harvest of them, finding metaphor in the serviceberry, an abundant cluster of multicolored berries that she collects in the opening of the book and a type of berry enjoyed by a variety of birds.

Most importantly, “The Serviceberry” aims to explain the concept of reciprocity, that discoidal system which, according to Kimmerer and her publisher, would allow for an economy that’s no longer “rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources” if applied to mainstream society today.

As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

— Chosen by Flores and featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Researching for her television role as Dr. Jean Milburn in Netflix’s “Sex Education,” actor Gillian Anderson read Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking 1970s anthology, “My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies.”

The collection, which features anonymous stories from hundreds of women describing their intimate desires, inspired more than just Anderson’s on screen character, but also a book of her own.

"Want" is meant to be a 21st century version of Friday’s anthology, and a modernized collection of anonymous tales and fantasies from women of today. Like Friday, Anderson encouraged women to submit anonymously using an online portal called "Dear Gillian," which brought in thousands of responses.

Using this assemblage of titillating replies, Anderson ventured to discern the shifts and consistencies in female desire over the past several decades and incite open discussions about women's sexuality.

The result is a candid and voyeuristic, but also therapeutic read that's capable of destigmatizing fantasies in a world that for far too long has been dominated by the male gaze.

— Chosen by Emily Southard-Bond, HuffPost Books contributor

Samantha Harvey's 2024 Booker Prize-winning "Orbital" is a beautiful elegy of sorts broken into vignettes, with each one featuring a day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts traveling through space for one last space mission.

The final space mission is being dismantled, and the six final voyagers hail from countries all over the world and are eager to travel thousands of miles away from their homes for this final adventure. And with the crew separated by identity and culture, they are together in more ways than imaginable.

We see the routine an astronaut lives through — the dehydrated meals and daily exercise to keep their muscles from freezing up with atrophy in a gravity-free space. But most importantly, readers also catch slivers of their lives at home in reflections of interactions.

Written in mesmerizing and hymnal-like prose that feels akin to a meditative experience, "Orbital" manages to take on large themes like politics and globalism, environmental and human compassion and connection.

— Chosen by Southard-Bond

Jeff VanderMeer wasn’t finished ruminating over the depths of his “Southern Reach" trilogy and is ready to draw fans back into the eerie, bureaucratic tangle of Area X.

Published almost a decade after the last in the series, “Absolution” is the fourth story in his beloved sci-fi series that’s a sort of prequel to the earlier books. Presented in three sections, each story delves into new expeditions, the first of which focuses on Old Jim and his investigation into the early voyages of the dangerous Forgotten Coast.

The focus shifts onto the foul-mouthed Lowry, an investigator who’s not only investigating the region but also the disappearances of several of his colleagues.

Filled with plot twists and “profound new surprises,” according to the book’s publisher, “Absolution” is a psychedelic, and a surreal horror blend of “The X-Files,” “Twin Peaks” and “True Detective.”

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

A mixture of heist-y adventure and sci-fi with a touch of Indiana Jones, Yume Kitasei’s “The Stardust Grail” is a banger of a follow-up to her debut novel, “The Deep Sky."

Maya Hoshimoto used to live an exciting life before becoming an anthropology grad student. She was a talented thief with a specialty in stealing looted artifacts and returning them to the alien civilizations where they belong. But while earthbound, her galaxy vigilante escapades have come to an end — that is, until her best friend from another solar system, Auncle (an intelligent octopus-like creature), offers Maya one last gig.

What Auncle wants retrieved is a powerful object that might be able to save an entire species. But its whereabouts are murky, and Maya won’t be the only one hunting for it. Jumping through the universe and meeting all manner of lifeforms along the way, Maya must be able to make impossible choices, like deciding who is worth the effort to save.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Bestselling author and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Adrian Tchaikovsky returns with a sci-fi epic, brimming with adventure and gripping political intrigue.

On a futuristic planet called Kiln, an authoritarian and brutal Mandate maintains a prison colony. It’s there that Professor Arton Daghdev, a xeno-ecologist and political dissident, is sent. As an academic, Arton has always been curious about alien life forms. He just wasn’t planning on studying them while imprisoned and under such dire conditions.

Once Arton is brought to Kiln, he uncovers a secret the Mandate would like to stay hidden — that the prisoners and their captives are not the first intelligent life forms to live there. The remains of a past civilization, a volatile ecosystem and the severe conditions of the prison labor camps are just a few of the dangers Arton must survive.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Engrossing and impossible to put down, this queer sci-fi novel from Natasha Pulley has rightfully been touted as one of Amazon's Best Books of 2024, with high praise from LitHub, New Scientist, Book Riot, Gizmodo and more.

January Stirling is a dancer at the Royal Ballet in London when rising waters flood the city and much of the population becomes climate refugees. Stirling makes the drastic choice to save his life by making his way onto the spaceship Tharsis, which is headed to a terraformed colony on Mars.

The native-barn beings on Mars see Stirling and the other “Earthmongers” as potential threats. They soon become second-class citizens when a politician named Aubrey Gale insists Earthstrongers withstand a dangerous “naturalization process.”

As the threats against the humans continue to mount, Stirling discovers that there’s more to Aubrey than the political face they present, and while growing closer to them, Stirling discovers additional enemies, a complicated love triangle and even various de-extinct Arctic animals.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Set in a not-so-distant future in London, a civil servant is offered a handsome salary for her role in a newly created government agency.

She’s assigned to work in a time-traveling ministry that gathers what they call “expats” throughout history (both alive and not so alive) to determine whether or not time travel is physically achievable and what potential risks it poses.

The civil servant’s role is to be a sort of guide or “bridge” for time travelers, and she’s tasked with none other than the expat Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian polar explorer who is said to have perished in 1845 during an Arctic expedition. But the very alive Commander is presently pulled into modern living with his assigned “bridge,” — a woman who is not married, lives alone and even uses things like Spotify.

Graham is baffled by the new time period, but he is an explorer at heart, so he quickly adapts to his latest adventure. In the process, the pair go from co-workers and roommates to falling deeply in love, which is precisely what a time-traveler and a “bridge” should not do.

— Chosen by Southard-Bond and featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Allison Espach’s “The Wedding People" isn’t just about a wedding. It's about a woman at rock bottom, her deep depression and the unexpected friendship that pulls herself and a young bride to a happier place.

English professor Phoebe Stone has always wanted to have a holiday at a posh Newport oceanfront hotel, and now she is, except it isn't for the romantic vacation she had hoped — she’s going there to end it all after catching her husband having an affair.

Phoebe has chosen the painkillers that belonged to her cat as her way out, but when she arrives at the hotel she realizes she’s inadvertently crashed a lavish wedding.

When Phoebe meets the bride-to-be, Lila, Lila decides that having a woman kill herself would ruin her expertly planned nuptials so, instead, invites Phoebe to join in the festivities. And when a chance dropout occurs, Phoebe is even more invested in the wedding than Lila planned.

A darkly humorous comedy of errors, "The Wedding People" breaks free from traditional romance book tropes, yet at its essence distills the heartwarming importance of female friendships.

— Chosen by Lydia O' Connor, senior breaking news reporter

"There’s nothing like a wedding to bring people together in unexpected ways — especially for Phoebe, who has booked a room at a beautiful coastal inn with plans to spend one decadent night there before she kills herself, only to find the rest of the hotel occupied with a wedding party. And Phoebe’s plans do not align with bride-to-be Lila’s vision of her perfect weekend. What unfolds is a refreshingly sharp and funny examination of loss, love and wrestling with the expectations we have for our lives. This book is the rare lush escape that avoids falling into predictability; the characters feel full and real, and offer genuine moments of insight and warmth amidst their quirky circumstances. (If you liked this one, I also highly recommend Espach's 'Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance.')" — Chosen by Jillian Capewell, senior editor

Enid is a 26-year-old woman obsessed with space. She can tell you details about black holes, how flashes of the sun can help predict solar flares and her favorite planet.

But what she’s not comfortable sharing is personal and intimate moments, which isn’t surprising given Enid’s rocky childhood and her overwhelming fear that she might be a mess of a human being.

Enid is struggling to understand how her past experiences have affected her present love life because her relationships never seem to last past a few dates. But as a devout lover of true crime and her career as an information architect at the Space Agency, research is something that Enid is very good at and so, she begins to crack the case of her crime-scene-of a love life — all while attempting to connect with her estranged half-sisters who are from the family her dad left her mother to start when Enid was only a kid.

“Interesting Facts about Space” is intense, surprising and a neurotic tale for the hopeless romantic in us all that deals with mental illness, bullying, dysfunctional family relationships, queer love and acceptance.

— Chosen by Ta

Chloe Gong's second book in her bestselling “Flesh and False Gods” trilogy is a Shakespearean-meets-dystopian fantasy series that was Gong’s first foray into adult fiction.

The first book, “Immortal Longings,” was brimming with high action, punchy fast dialogue and morally gray characters with political machinations.

Inspired by Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Vilest Things” keeps up with former princess Calla Tuoleimi, shortly after she wins the deadly games of San-Er where Calla bested “body jumpers,” assassins, and even her own heart in order to finish what she started: topple the monarchy and put her cousin August Shenzhi on the throne.

Except, it’s not just August who is presently residing in August’s body, it’s also Anton Makusa, the final competitor Calla faced and still loves. Calla thought she killed Anton, but he’s not that easy to get rid of, and she will have to remain in the palace until he relinquishes August’s body —- but while she waits, other royal sleepers awaken with their own plans for the kingdom.

— Featured in HuffPost Books newsletter

Author Ali Hazelwood, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, is best known for her nerdcore romance series “The Love Hypothesis,” but in February, she published “Bride,” her first foray into the “romantasy” genre.

The novel follows the vampire Misery Lark, who had been traded as a hostage in a human-vampire treaty in order to keep the peace between the two species. Being raised within the human territories as a vampire from a very high-ranking family meant that Misery never quite fit in with either group.

But when her fellow foster sister and the one human she does care for goes missing, she willingly becomes a part of a new exchange, between the werewolves and vampires. Misery suspects her best friend is in the were territory, and agrees to marry the alpha of the werewolf pack in order to infiltrate what she believes to be enemy lands. What she isn’t banking on is that the Prime Werewolf, whom she meets on their wedding day, is actually a strikingly handsome, kind and intelligent man.

“I devoured this book in two days. This is the first book by Ali Hazelwood I’ve read, but won’t be the last. It’s sexy, funny and quirky in a way only a scientist and romance author can deliver. Hazelwood’s experiment into paranormal romance is a success!”

— Chosen by Southard-Bond