For as long as she can remember, Peppa Ryan has been guided by a benevolent voice in her head who she believes is Virginia Woolf. Though she’s an exceptionally bright twenty-year-old, she suffers from crippling low self-esteem and has barely left her parents’ ramshackle home in Queens, New York. Set at the turn of the millennium, Peppa defies her parent’s wishes and ventures out on her own to start a job at a Wall Street investment firm.

During a treacherous winter trek to the basecamp of Annapurna, one woman is forced to confront the events leading up to her best friend’s tragic death twenty years earlier as well as the nature of their friendship, the meaning of love, and the unexpected consequences of what is spoken—and what is not. When Livy receives a package containing the ashes of her best friend, she knows she must return to the place Mo loved best to honor her memory. Leaving her son and her estranged husband behind, Livy travels to Kathmandu and the mountain towns of Nepal, and to the past.

After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she'd never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island's summer residents, now back himself to sell his family's summer home.

The third of four children born to a middle-class Calcutta family, quiet Durga is surprisingly the first to leave the nest of her loving, overbearing family. She is not as charming as her older sister, Tia, as lighthearted as her brother, Arjun, or as clever as her younger sister, Parul. But when she arrives in Ireland to work at a tech company, she finds that for the first time ever she is free—to have fun, to stay out, to sample everything that life has to offer. Suddenly, Durga can be whoever she wants to be. And she wants it all. But freedom comes at a price.

In school, Milly Beckett and Nicole Raven were as close as sisters. Now, years later, a gulf separates them, and not just because of the different spheres they inhabit. Nicole is a global superstar with the world at her fingertips, but when scandal breaks, she turns to the only person she trusts. Fresh from a painful divorce and struggling to balance her work and raising her daughter alone, Milly is tempted to refuse her friend’s plea for help.

Leah Lockhart is proudly science-minded and woo-woo averse. But the life she’s carefully curated is knocked suddenly off course, first by a destabilizing case of vertigo, and then by an astrology reading that claims she’s living way out of line with what was written in her stars.

So, when she decides to train to swim the English Channel, she understands why no one believes she can do it. She doesn’t really believe she can either, but she’s determined to try. As she strides into the Channel with hours stretching ahead of her, Cordelia swims against every milestone in her life so far. Every failed relationship, every friendship let go, every exam failed, every tricky job she quit. A life lived never giving it her all. Until now.

Sandy thought she was making her greatest mistake yet when she got unexpectedly pregnant in her mid-thirties by a dating-app flop. Now, her baby Rosie is the love of her life, but trying to co-parent with her daughter’s dad, a wannabe rock star, is a challenge—and seems to be veering into catastrophe territory when Sandy finds out through social media that her daughter has a half-sibling Sandy doesn’t know anything about.

Identical triplets Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C Binderup were welcomed into the world as their mother was ushered out of it, leaving them nameless and in the care of their Gram, Isadora. Nineteen years later, the triplets work at their Gram’s crumbling golf course in Longshadow, Texas, where the ever-watchful eyes of the town observe them serving up glasses of ice-cold lemonade to golfers, swimming in the murky waters of the neighboring bayou, or slipping t-shirts off their sunburnt shoulders in hopes of attracting the kind of attention they are only beginning to understand.

Noelle Tom really shouldn’t have eaten those dumplings at the night market. But the old woman at the stall said they’d give her what she needed most, and what Noelle desperately needed after another long workweek was food. Except now she’s reliving the same Friday. Every morning her alarm goes off at 6:45, and the Wordle answer is always “happy.” Worst of all, any work she does at her job as an engineer? It’s erased when she wakes up. Monday might never come in this workaholic’s nightmare.

Sofie Wilde’s bestselling fantasy romance series has been breaking bestseller records and readers’ hearts for years. She’s primed to become a worldwide phenomenon as the tenth and final book is set to debut after the annual romance readers convention takes place in Chicago next week. As buzz continues to build toward the book’s release, Sofie is asked to headline the event for the first time, a career milestone. One she won’t let anyone take from her, especially “the next Sofie Wilde.”

Michael Woodbine was seven years old when a near-fatal fireworks accident scarred him and led to his placement in foster care. Now a college freshman, he is still trying to hide the effects of his trauma from his classmates, his adoptive family, and himself. When Michael signs up for a film class, he meets Robert Dunning, a teacher who wears his own scars unapologetically. Robert encourages Michael to make a documentary that explores body image and self-perception.

Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career to live out the rest of her life as a recluse. Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will, and her daughters expect to inherit their childhood home: Vivian’s grand, sprawling, Southern California garden estate. But due to a last-minute change to the will, the house is passed on to another family instead—one that has suddenly returned after decades of estrangement.

When Bunny Linden abandons her three children with her older sister, Jayne, in 1972, she knows Jayne will be the perfect mother. The mother Bunny, a teen runaway, could never be. As months turn into years without word, Jayne and her husband, Rodger, a rising journalism star, strive to give the children the opportunity to flourish and feel loved. When Jayne and Rodger finally have a child of their own, a seemingly stable home is built. But then, after nearly a decade, Bunny resurfaces and sets a chain of events in motion that detonates all their lives.

It started out as a party: six little girls gliding and giggling at the ice rink to celebrate Natalie’s daughter’s eighth birthday. But by Natalie’s next head count, it’s turned into a crime scene. Six children went onto the ice—and now there are just five. Nobody saw her niece, Elle, being taken. Nobody saw the person in a cartoon costume lure her quietly away. Traumatised by what happened on her watch, Natalie spends the next decade supporting her sister, Jo, as the years since Elle’s abduction tick by.