Brother Deo Gratias: St Felix of Cantalice by Lady Amabel Kerr

About the book: St Felix of Cantalice was a Capuchin Franciscan in the 16th century. Placed among great personages such as St Philip Neri, St Charles Borromeo, and others, St Felix lived a life of poverty and fidelity to the rule of St Francis. 

Born in 1515, he lived as a farm worker until he was 28, when he became a Capuchin. He not only begged alms, but gladly distributed them to the poor. It was said that his alms sack was as bottomless as his heart. He walked bare-foot through the streets of Rome, and his response to anyone that gave him alms was "Deo Gratias," or "Thank God." Thus he earned his name. St Felix also became known as a great healer.

Amabel Kerr (author of the Life of Cardinal Baronius and other books) writes a deep, spiritual account of the holy Capuchin which moves the reader toward the love of God page by page.

You will discover:

- St Felix's deep prayer life and love of Christ and His Virgin Mother;

- St Felix's continual service to the poor, though owning nothing himself;

- How the saint reminded Church dignitaries and the wealthy of their obligations to Christ and the Church;

- The deep interior life of the saint.

Originally published as A Son of St Francis: St Felix of Cantalice (1900), the book is retitled Brother Deo Gratias: St Felix of Cantalice (2019) by Mediatrix Press and is a must have for anyone that loves Franciscan spirituality as well as history.

About the author: Lady Amabel Frederica Henrietta Kerr (1846-1906) was a British aristocrat and writer of religious literature, biographies, children's literature, and novels. She was also a translator from German to English, and a magazine editor. She was described in the University of Ottawa Review as "a rare example of strenuous devotion to the service of God and His Church, rendered all the more forcible by reason of the obscurity in which she endeavored to shroud her work". 

Kerr was the author of a number of books, among them: Unravelled Convictions, being the reasons for her conversion; Before Our Lord Came, an Old Testament history for little children; A Mixed Marriage, a novel; Life of Joan of Arc, and Life of Blessed Sebastian Valfre. She died in October 1906 (Source: Wikipedia).

Maria Sanctissima by The Very Reverend James Keller

About the book: Ave Maria! 

Maria Sanctissima is an inspiring book filled with 150 short stories of spiritual and temporal favours granted by Our Lady that serve to increase one's love for, devotion to, and confidence in the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Maria Sanctissma (2015) is a reprint of the 1899 edition.

About the author: Father Keller was born 27 June 1900 in Oakland, California. He studied in public schools and for seven years at St Patrick’s Seminary, and joined Maryknoll in September 1921. His last year of theology was spent at Catholic University as a deacon where he obtained the MA (1924-25). He was a member of the Maryknoll Class of 1925 but was ordained separately on 15 August 1925 by Archbishop Hanna of San Francisco. He was the first Maryknoll priest from the West Coast. Instead of being sent overseas as he would have preferred, Father Keller spent the next 20 years in promotion work in California, the Midwest, and New York, acquainting people in the US with the work of Maryknoll. He stressed that his hearers could be “Christophers”, Christ-bearers, in their own lives by showing personal responsibility based on their faith, in all areas of public and private life. By 1945, the “Christopher idea” led him to launch what has become a world-wide movement, “The Christophers”.

The Christophers was the great enthusiasm of the last three decades of Father Keller’s life, and he retained his interest to the end, insofar as he was able in the final difficult years. He launched Christopher News Notes, radio and television programs and a daily newspaper column, to bring the message of constructive individual action to the widest audience possible. His book, “You Can Change the World”, published in 1948, was a best seller both in hardbound and paperback editions. Because of declining health, Father Keller was forced to retire as Director of The Christophers in 1969; Father Richard Armstrong, MM, succeeded him as Director. 

In 1973, Father Keller wrote: “Putting up with the weaknesses of old age is a novelty for me. But it is a good way to get ready for heaven.” Father Keller continued, however, his daily work at the Christopher offices in Manhattan just as long as he was able. In January 1976, Father Keller received the Benemerenti Medal from Pope Paul VI, in recognition of his service, during 50 years as a priest, to The Christophers and to the Maryknoll Fathers.

Christopher radio and television programs now reach a weekly audience of over 5 million, and Christopher News Notes have over a million readers around the world. Father Keller lived to see the Christopher motto carried to the farthest ends of the earth: “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” The title of his autobiography (1963) is To Light A Candle.

Father Keller’s life and work these last decades were very much linked with New York City and the Archdiocese of New York. Father James G Keller died in New York on 7 February 1977.

Unreasonable Women by Justine van der Leun

About the book: Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival (2026) is a groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the stories of three unforgettable women

When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun began researching the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see women being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, years-long investigation into how survivors are targeted for prosecution, leading her to collect more than a thousand personal accounts from women’s prisons across America.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive: 

1) Tanisha is a spirited Michigan mother determined to help authorities solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. 

2) Jema is a softhearted Missouri factory worker struggling to keep her family together while navigating a dangerous relationship. 

3) TC is a bold Californian trying to escape generations of trauma and a toxic family environment. In each case, the women's childhood abuse was replicated in adulthood—until they were forced to make an impossible choice.

A work of literary reportage that reads like a crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in US prisons. It is the story of women and violence in America, a wake-up call about a broken system, and the moving narrative of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.

Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival will be on sale on 2 June 2026.

About the author: Justine van der Leun is a journalist, the author of several books, including We Are Not Such Things, and the host of the podcast Believe Her. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, among others. She lives in New York.

Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives Of A Serial Fraudster by Alan Bradley

About the book: Unmasking Samantha Cookes (21 May 2026) is the chilling true story of a master manipulator who spent more than a decade reinventing herself across the UK and Ireland with an arsenal of false identities. 

Once known to millions as ‘Carrie Jade Williams’, she slipped seamlessly from au pair and nanny to therapist, psychologist, terminally ill author and online ‘sickfluencer’. 

Each persona carefully crafted. 

Each lie more audacious than the last. 

And each one designed to gain trust - and exploit it.

What started with the tragic death of a baby soon became a trail of fraud, deception and shattered lives. Every reinvention brought new victims, until her most audacious lie, a fabricated terminal illness, triggered a TikTok reckoning.

Drawing on exclusive evidence and firsthand accounts, Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives of a Serial Fraudster pulls back the curtain on a mastermind of deception hiding in plain sight, and reveals just how easily trust can be weaponised, with an unsettling question at its core: how well do we really know the people we trust with our children?

Unmasking Samantha Cookes: The Many Lives Of A Serial Fraudster will be released on 21 May 2026.

About the author: Alan Bradley is an award-winning Irish director, actor and writer working across documentary, television drama and ads. He won the Young Director Award for Documentary at Cannes 2024 and is the youngest director to hold a prime-time RTÉ One documentary slot. Named a Broadcast Hotshot 2025, he has directed critically acclaimed films including Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost, Anorexia: My Family and Me and the hit RTÉ/BBC series Bad Nanny.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

About the book: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 on 19 May 2026, Taiwan Travelogue (2024) is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power.

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman - who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name - is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook.

Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It is only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the ‘something’ is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award. 

Taiwan Travelogue (2024) unearths lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. 

Taiwan Travelogue is translated from the Mandarin by Lin King. It is the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the International Booker Prize, as well as the first by a Taiwanese author. The award, which is presented in the United Kingdom, comes with £50,000, about US$67,000, split equally between author and translator.

About the author: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism

Taiwan Travelogue, her first book to be translated into English, won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. It has been published or is forthcoming in numerous languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek.

About the translator: Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. King received the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature for her translation of Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize; she has also been awarded the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize from the Asia Society and the 2025 First Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association. King speaks English, Mandarin and Japanese. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in One Story, Boston Review, Joyland, and Best Debut Short Stories. Her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming in 2027.

Rating: 5/5

The Family Man (True Crime) by James Lasdun

About the book: What drives a loving family man with everything to lose to become a killer?

The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (2026) is an immersive account of a seemingly loving father’s transformation into a "family annihilator."

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife and younger son at Moselle, their home in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. By then, the story had become headline news across the country, with its revelations of corruption in high places, massive fraud, opioid abuse, fake suicides, suspicious accidents, and the generational recklessness of the wealthy legal dynasty at its center. 

Having covered the case for The New Yorker, where his article became the magazine’s most read story of the year, the acclaimed novelist James Lasdun brings his long-standing interest in the darker drives of the human psyche to an investigation into the serial embezzlements, fatal boat crash, and other events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle. 

“Justice may have been served,” Lasdun writes in the preface to The Family Man, "but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up."

Having traveled extensively in the Lowcountry, Lasdun draws on original interviews (including with Murdaugh’s notorious "Cousin Eddie"), transcripts of phone calls Murdaugh made from prison, the literature of criminal psychology, and the murder trial itself. 

Deeply researched, sharply written, and with the page-turning intensity of a Southern gothic novel, The Family Man constructs a masterful portrait of Murdaugh and the mind-boggling crimes that wreaked havoc on his community.

About the author: James Lasdun was born in London and lives in Brooklyn. His novels, memoir, poetry, and short story collections have won many awards, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications.

Saint John Berchmans: The Story Of The Saint Of Innocence by James J Daly SJ

About the book: "This little book (1921, 2015) is an attempt at a study and interpretation of a lovable young saint, Saint John Berchmans (1599-1621), a Belgian Jesuit scholastic, who is recommended as a patron of altar servers, Jesuit scholastics, and students, and helper in solving the difficult problem of maintaining agreeable and efficient relations without cooling in faith and reverence, of making the love of God the dominant motive of conduct without sacrificing any of the courtesies or failing in human sympathies. 

I have depended for most of the facts in my sketch upon the excellent and exhaustive biography of the Saint by the Rev Francis Goldie, SJ. The English Jesuit drew a large part of his material from official processes and enquiries, and from the contemporary The Life of Blessed John Berchmans, of the Society of Jesus (1866) by Father Cepari, SJ, the Saint's superior and confessor. 

As far as facts go, I can, to use a quaint phrase, be tracked in their snow. In the interpretation of facts, I have sometimes allowed myself latitude. In the following brief sketch of the life of Saint John Berchmans, there will not be room for an elaborate description of the rich historical setting which Europe, and especially the Brabant and the Rome of that time afforded. To tell the truth, there is not much call for it. 

The interest of John's life lay in its contact with the big affairs of another world than this. The Saint touched human life, not at its points of earthly splendour and importance, but at its less obtrusive and less impressive surfaces of homely and domestic rounds of routine. 

Like most of us, he was forced by circumstances into a pack-horse gait. His days, like ours, were much of a kind, singularly beggarly in their opportunities for spectacular heroism. And yet, he achieved heroism. With the scanty materials supplied by the stern realism of an ordinary every-day life, he succeeded in kindling a splendour which has burnt its way brightly through the mists of time, and, after three centuries, remains a fixed and steady glow in the night that has fallen upon the deeds of by-gone generations." 

- James Jeremiah Daly, SJ (author)

St John Berchmans was declared Blessed in 1865, and canonized in 1888. Statues frequently depict him with hands clasped, holding his crucifix, his book of rules, and his Rosary.

About the author: The Reverend James Jeremiah Daly (1872-1953), professor emeritus of English at the University of Detroit and the author of several religious works, died Monday in Mount Carmel Hospital, Detroit. His age was 81. Professor Daly had been a Jesuit for sixty-three years and a teacher for fifty-six years, the last twenty-two of them at the University of Detroit. 

Among his literary works were “Life of St John Berchmans," "A Christian Ascetic," "The Road to Peace," "The Jesuit in Focus" and a volume of verse, “Boscobel and Other Rimes." He was literary editor of America from 1909 to 1911, assistant editor of The Queen's Work from 1920 to 1924 and literary editor of Thought from 1924 to 1939. In addition, he wrote book reviews for The New York Times. Born in Chicago, he studied at St Ignatius College and entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1890. He was ordained at St Louis in 1905 and took his Master of Arts degree at St Louis University in the next year. In one of his books, he discussed the spirit of the Society of Jesus as revealed in its constitution, rules and spiritual exercises.

The Two FBIs by Nicole Parker

About the book: Two of Nicole Parker’s colleagues were murdered while executing a search warrant on a dangerous suspect with no SWAT support. Meanwhile, the FBI sent SWAT for those charged with 2 January 2021 (United States Capitol attack) misdemeanours.

Special Agent Parker witnessed an internal war between what she refers to as the two FBIs - “FBI 1” and “FBI 2.” While FBI 1 was comprised of honest, unbiased employees dedicated to keeping all Americans safe, FBI 2 used their law enforcement power to push their personal political and social agendas. Lowering hiring standards, unequally enforcing laws, and aggressively going after perceived political or social enemies became commonplace, and it seemed unstoppable.

Through the lens of her life story, Parker chronicles the takeover of the bureau. The Two FBIs tells how Parker left her job in finance to serve her country. Her faith carried her through as she stared evil in the face on a daily basis while investigating the most heinous crimes.

Over time, FBI 2 seemed to be winning the battles, but Parker was adamant it would not win the war. After over a dozen years of service, she chose to leave the Bureau. FBI 1 warriors believe drastic changes and accountability are necessary in order to return the FBI to its greatness and restore the trust of the American people.

Filled with electrifying stories of violent crime takedowns and heart-wrenchingly tragic investigations, as well as shocking revelations about the administrative state shackling patriotic heroes, The Two FBIs: The Bravery and Betrayal I Saw in My Time at the Bureau (2025) by a former FBI Special Agent will provide you with a new appreciation for what it takes to keep Americans secure - and how real the efforts are to cripple the brave souls who preserve our security.

About the author: Nicole Parker is a contributor for Fox News Media who provides law enforcement analysis. She joined the FBI as a Special Agent in 2010 serving in FBI’s Miami Field Office through 2022. Initially, she specialized in investigating white collar financial crimes then focused on violent crimes including: active shooters; crimes on the high-seas; bank robberies; murders for hire; suspicious deaths; sexual assaults; extortions; and more. Notably, Parker was the only woman on the FBI’s top-ranked Violent Crime Fugitive Task Force and received three Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer Awards from the US Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida and the Medal of Excellence from the FBI Director.

Without Consent by Sarah Weinman

About the book: From Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita, comes an eye-opening story about the first major spousal rape trial in America and urgent questions about women’s rights that would reverberate for decades.

In December 1978, Greta Rideout bravely testified that her husband, John, whom she still lived with, had raped her. She was the first woman in United States history to do this, at a time when the idea of “marital rape” seemed ludicrous to many Americans and was a crime in only four states. 

After a quick and conservative trial acquitted John Rideout and a defense lawyer lambasted that rape was perhaps "the risk of being married," Greta was ridiculed and scorned from public life, while John went on to be a repeat offender. Thrust into the national spotlight, Greta and her story would become a national sensation, a symbol of a country’s unrelenting and targeted hate toward women and a court system designed to fail them at every turn.

A now little-remembered trial deserving of close, wide, and lasting attention, Sarah Weinman turns her signature intelligence and journalistic rigour to the enduring impact of this case. Oregon v Rideout directly inspired feminist activists, who fought state by state for marital rape laws, a battle that was not won in all fifty until as recently as 1993. 

Mixing archival research and new reporting involving Greta, other women victimized by John in later years, as well as the activists battling the courts in parallel, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle To Make Spousal Rape a Crime (2025) embodies vociferous debates about gender, sexuality, and power, while highlighting the damaging and inherent misogyny of American culture then and still now.

About the author: Sarah Weinman is the author of three books: Without Consent, published on November 11, 2025; Scoundrel, named a Best Book of 2022 by Time, Esquire, CBC, and NPR; and The Real Lolita, named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture, and winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award in Nonfiction. She also edited Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning; Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Nonfiction/Critical Work; Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America); and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin).

Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review. A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her work has also appeared most recently in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Esquire, New York, and Vanity Fair, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman also writes (albeit more sporadically) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between.

She lives in New York City.

Bonfire Of The Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

About the book: Based on interviews with more than 150 inside sources, bestselling political journalist Gabriel Sherman reveals the inside story of the Murdoch family war in his latest work, Bonfire of the Murdochs (2026). 

When Rupert Murdoch first considered who should inherit his media colossus, controlling FOX News, The Washington Post and tabloids on three continents, he believed that pitting his children against each other would produce the most capable heir. That gamble would tear apart one of the world’s most powerful families and trigger a multi-billion dollar reckoning in a succession battle of betrayal, lawsuits, and revenge.

Rupert’s eventual decision to rip up the secret trust controlling his empire and anoint his conservative firstborn son Lachlan as successor set him on a catastrophic collision course with his three more liberal children. 

What price would Rupert pay to secure his legacy? For the aging patriarch, this would be his final and most personal deal.

Bonfire of the Murdochs is a richly textured narrative of a family feud that explodes in a climactic courtroom showdown, with Murdoch’s children weaponizing his own secrets against him. It is a tragedy Shakespeare would have appreciated, where getting everything you want costs everything you love.

About the author: Gabriel Sherman is an award-winning journalist and screenwriter. He has been covering the Murdochs since 2008. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Loudest Voice in the Room about the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. He is the screenwriter of the twice Oscar-nominated film The Apprentice and has covered national politics for New York magazine and Vanity Fair. He lives in London with his wife, son, and daughter plus their dog and cat.

Sarah Jane by James Sallis

About the book: Sarah Jane (2019) is a spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. 

Her life takes an unexpected turn when she finds herself named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of her predecessor - and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends.

In the tradition of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss and Ivy Pochoda's Wonder Valley, this kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail - a virtuoso work by a master of both the noir and the tender aspects of human nature.

About the author: Over the past sixty-plus years, while "mostly wandering about the house," James Sallis has published eighteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, poems and essays, three books of musicology, reams of criticism, a classic biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. Onetime editor of the London-based magazine New Worlds, Jim worked for many years as a reviewer for periodicals including the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post; served for three years as books columnist for the Boston Globe; and maintained a books column at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He has taught at Phoenix College, Otis College, and the Piper Center and performed on multiple instruments with his band Three-Legged Dog, as sideman for other musicians, or solo. His novels include Drive, from which Nic Refn's award-winning film derived, the six Lew Griffin novels, Death Will Have Your Eyes, and The Killer Is Dying. Jim has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.

Born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1944, Jim spent his childhood on the banks of the Mississippi River along with his older brother John, a philosopher who was neck and neck with Jim as to published books. Just outside his bedroom window was a drive-in playing music all night: Jimmy Reed, Ferlin Husky, Arthur Alexander. Days he listened to Sonny Boy Williamson on The King Biscuit Hour on KFFA radio, over which he would later read some of his first stories. Jim played French horn in the school band and has written an essay about his band director, Robert Cinq-Mars, a vastly important influence. At home, his turntable regularly spun Mozart, Telemann, Mahler and Tchaikovsky.

As a child I began telling stories daily to classmates and, at home, filled page after page with plots, conversations, beginnings I could never continue, never go on with. More and more, with age, my life seems to exist to be turned into these quiet pages, into literature. People I have loved are put to rest in one or another novel or story; relationships are sorted out in poems, then abandoned, or the other way around; the deepest, most engaging and damaging moments of my life become notes, then pages and, finally, books.

—from the essay "Standing by Death"

What is left for us, here

among our families, books and friends,

but to go on as we must.

There will be no more Tolstoys.

There's only the chance to do

what remains:

Find beauty, try to understand, survive.

—from "To a Russian Friend"

James Sallis died on 27 January 2026 at the age of 81 in Phoenix, Arizona after a long illness.

Rating: 5/5

Days of Feasting and Rejoicing by David Bergen

About the book: In this brilliant existential portrayal of identity, David Bergen introduces Esther Maile, an expat American living in Thailand in a house rented by the richer, more popular Christine. While on holiday in Bali, Christine is caught by an ocean wave and drowns. Esther rushes to save her, but in the chaos that ensues, the police arrive and confuse Esther for Christine.

For someone who would prefer to be anyone but herself, this is the perfect solution - no matter the consequences. When a local Thai police captain, Net Wantok, begins to investigate Christine’s death and seeks out Esther, he is caught between his curiosity - she is charming, evasive, and flirtatious - and the awareness that people around Esther are disappearing. Sensing danger, Esther acts out of fear and pulls the one person who loves her into her perilous world.

Bergen’s mesmerizing psychological drama - Days of Feasting and Rejoicing (2025) - hums with expatriate gossip, sexual tension, unexpected violence, a passion for food, and a woman who, seemingly unhindered by questions of truth or morality, hints at the darkness in all of us.

About the author: Praised by the Montreal Gazette as “one of Canada’s best writers” and by The Globe and Mail as “brilliant and utterly convincing,” David Bergen is the bestselling author of twelve novels and two collections of short fiction. In book after book, he is a writer “operating at the highest level of his craft.”

Among his most acclaimed works are The Time in Between, a national bestseller; The Age of Hope, a finalist for Canada Reads; and Out of Mind, a follow up to The Matter with Morris. He has won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year five times, and his writing has also been shortlisted for Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize. In 2018, Bergen was presented with the Writer’s Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life. He lives in Winnipeg.

Rating: 5/5

Torched: How A City Was Left To Burn, And The Olympic Rush To Rebuild LA by Jonathan Vigliotti

About the book: Torched (2026) is CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti’s searing firsthand account of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the failures that fueled the catastrophe, and the high-stakes battle over how the city will rebuild ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games.

In Torched, Vigliotti brings readers inside the inferno that devastated Los Angeles, weaving on-the-ground reporting with the deeper story of how a century of unchecked development and political mismanagement set the stage for disaster. With clarity and verve, he recounts the chaos of the fire, the flawed emergency response, and the human stories of survival and loss in the city he loves.

But this is more than a chronicle of destruction. Vigliotti unravels this catastrophe by placing it within the larger history of Los Angeles, a city that has in many ways been defined by its attraction to reinvention and deference to those who “move fast and break things” - an impulse that now puts it at risk of a short-sighted post-fire rebuild in the run-up to the 2028 Olympic Games. A future that might maximize profits but could potentially do too little to prevent similar disasters in the future or address the rampant inequities this blaze brought to global attention.

Urgent, unflinching, and deeply reported, Torched (2026) captures Los Angeles at a turning point - and reveals why its choices matter for us all.

About the author: Jonathan Vigliotti is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award–winning CBS News national correspondent whose work has appeared on numerous platforms including CBS Sunday Morning, Face the Nation, 48 Hours, and more. His reporting has taken him to more than forty countries and territories across six continents. Follow him on X @JonVigliotti. He is the author of Torched and Before It’s Gone.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

About the book: For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus!

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she has been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but would not dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022) is an instant New York Times and international bestseller, a Good Housekeeping and Glamour Best Books of 2022, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick, has earned over 60,000 5-star reviews and sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide! It is now a major Netflix film.

About the author: Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Shelby Van Pelt lives in the suburbs of Chicago with her family. She was awarded the 2023 McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel Prize and $3000 by the Writer's Center for Remarkably Bright Creatures.

Rating: 5/5