5339 books

The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore (2025)

**From the international bestselling author of The Pumpkin Spice Café and The Cinnamon Bun Book Store, comes the highly anticipated Dream Harbor romance for 2025!** A wedding in Dream Harbor can only mean one thing, everyone wants to get involved! With Jeanie and Logan set to tie the knot, and Kira desperate to hire out her newly renovated barn at the Christmas tree farm, everything seems to be going well. Annie has agreed to bake the cake, and Mac is responsible for, well… just being Mac. And as the whole of Dream Harbor comes together to celebrate the wedding of the year with the snow falling around them, can Annie and Mac put aside their dislike for each just long enough for the ‘I Do’s’ or is that one request too far… **The Gingerbread Bakery is a cozy romantic novel with an enemies to lovers dynamic, small-town setting and a HEA guaranteed!** Tropes: • enemies to lovers • found family • small town • forced proximity

The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah (2025)

**A merchant and a prince trapped in the crumbling realm of jinn must figure out how to save one world to return to their own in The Ashfire King, the second book in the Sandsea Trilogy.** **Neither here nor there, but long ago…** After fleeing a patricidal prince, legendary merchant Loulie al-Nazari and banished prince Mazen bin Malik find themselves in the realm of jinn. But instead of sanctuary, they find a world on the cusp of collapse. The jinn cities, long sheltered beneath the Sandsea by the magic of its kings, are sinking. Amid the turmoil, political alliances are forming, and rebellion is on the rise. When Loulie assists a dissenter—one of her bodyguard’s old comrades—she puts herself in the center of a centuries-old conflict. Trapped in a world that isn’t hers and wielding magic that belongs to a fallen king, Loulie must decide: Will she carry on someone else’s legacy or carve out her own? ([Source][1]) [1]: https://www.chelseaabdullah.com/books

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark (2025)

**June, 1975.** The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets. Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she's offered a job to ghostwrite her father's last book. What she doesn't know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it's not another horror novel he wants her to write. After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

Hot Wax by M. L. Rio (2025)

*Summer, 1989*: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father's forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills' wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning - one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come. The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father's sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil's beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she'd lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country - and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison (2025)

Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parents' messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped her of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house. After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, a sinister presence in the house manifests, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.

Lessons in Forgiving by Selina Mae (2025)

Paula Castillo is determined to get her life back on track. And after a long time on the metaphorical writing-bench, she thinks a profile on an upcoming HBU-soccer legend will at least roll plan »Restore Journalistic Reputation« into motion. The problem: Henry Pressley hasn’t only signed a million-dollar deal with an MLS club in the past year, he also broke up with Paula. Although she promises herself not to get caught up in the whirlwind of Henry that almost cost her everything already, one-on-one interviews and unexpected nights together force them to face their past. Between the pages, it becomes apparent that the broody soccer player still seems to have a soft spot for his lucky charm ...

The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab (2025)

**Good News: The worst has already happened.** **Bad News: Even worse is on the way.** This is a fictional theory, a rant, a manifesto, an engagement or disengagement with the times, a record; it is bearing witness, a dramatisation of actual events, a horror-scape, either a monologue or dialogue, a testament, travel guide, handbook, textbook, potential encyclopaedia; it is five mini-novels or else five post-novels, an epic, a drop in the ocean, an homage, a reference, one long secret handshake, an agreement, a wink; it is an explosion of form, tangential, discursive, a firming of the foundations, a lament, an absurdist comedy with realism that is as realistic as it gets; it is a spectrum, shades of black from the dark to the next shade up from white, a proliferation, a step back, a righting, a note to oneself, a line in the sand or a gust in the form of a structure-shaking gale; it is a dance (a two-footed, single-person linedance), an experiment, pure science, flicking the finger; it is, of course, backing away, crossing the street and avoiding eye contact; it is fantasy, humour, a romance without any leads, a defiance, a subdued rebellion, an anti-philosophical philosophy; it is pacifism that instigates a fight, a denouncement in the form of a laugh, an exploration, an adventure, a time lapse, a panorama, a conclusion; you may just have to read the theory because these are just alluding-to-the-theory words.

Return Engagement by Gary Brin (2025)

Death hovers over several individuals when a scorned woman makes good on threats made previously against her former lover and those close to him as events from the past threaten to change more than one life across several geographical locations while a deranged young man pursues his estranged brother with murder in mind. Note: This is a serialized novel. Books in this series must be read in order. Books 1 & 2 is the pilot for the series. Books 3-10 has a continuing storyline.

The Lamb by Lucy Rose (2025)

Young Margot lives in the woods with Mama. Margot only knows what Mama's taught her, and sometimes, Mama's cannibalistic urges get the better of her. Together, they take in lost hikers - "strays" as Mama calls them - and make meals of them. But one day, a beautiful, disrupting, and maybe just as dangerous woman enters their hideaway, giving way to what could be another fatal shift.

The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis (2025)

**Egypt, 1936:** When anthropology student Charlotte Cross is offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, she leaps at the opportunity. But after an unbearable tragedy strikes, Charlotte knows her future will never be the same. **New York City, 1978:** Eighteen-year-old Annie Jenkins is thrilled when she lands an opportunity to work for iconic former Vogue fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who’s in the midst of organizing the famous Met Gala, hosted at the museum and known across the city as the “party of the year.” Though Annie soon realizes she’ll have her work cut out for her, scrambling to meet Diana’s capricious demands and exacting standards. Meanwhile, Charlotte, now leading a quiet life as the associate curator of the Met’s celebrated Department of Egyptian Art, wants little to do with the upcoming gala. She’s consumed with her research on Hathorkare—a rare female pharaoh dismissed by most other Egyptologists as unimportant. That is, until the night of the gala. When one of the Egyptian art collection’s most valuable artifacts goes missing . . . and there are signs Hathorkare’s legendary curse might be reawakening. As Annie and Charlotte team up to search for the missing antiquity, a desperate hunch leads the unlikely duo to one place Charlotte swore she’d never return: Egypt. But if they’re to have any hope of finding the artifact, Charlotte will need to confront the demons of her past—which may mean leading them both directly into danger.

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (2025)

Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and when one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before. The truth is that the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—but they’ve always had plenty to say about them and, as the rotating perspectives of five of the villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Belief in witchcraft is waning but an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.

The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff (2025)

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall. When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time. Told from three intimate points of view, ***The Bright Years*** is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.