Abraham Verghese — Cutting for Stone Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

Nicola Yoon – The Sun Is Also a Star Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story. Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us. The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?

J. J. McAvoy – Sugar Baby Beautiful When twenty-four-year-old Felicity Harper is dragged to a sugar party, an event where wealthy men and women seek “companionship,” she never expects this one simple decision to drastically change her whole life. Her past is nothing but broken dreams and heartache. Her present is detached and dull. And her future? Well, before meeting Theodore Darcy, the famed film director, writer, producer and CEO of Darcy Entertainment, she would have expected more of the same. Love is just a fantasy and she wants no part of it—even if she can’t deny the undeniable attraction between the two of them. So their arrangement is simple: sex with no strings attached. But as their intimacy becomes more powerful, so do Felicity’s demons. Can Theo really shoulder her past and his own? And could Felicity even let him?

Penelope Ward — The Day He Came Back It was the summer of my life. I’d met the guy of my dreams. Unfortunately, he was the son of my uppity employer—and very much off-limits. But Gavin was a rebel. He knew his mother would disown him if she found out about us; in his eyes, we just had to be careful. He never treated me as his mother did—like hired help. Instead, Gavin put me on a pedestal and loved me harder than I’d ever been loved in my life. What a summer it was. Until it all ended—badly. I was never supposed to see Gavin again. That didn’t stop me from thinking about him every day for ten years. I knew little about his life now, just that he was an entrepreneur living an ocean away. When a twist of fate had me working again in the very place our love affair started a decade earlier, I knew it was only a matter of time before I might see him again. But I wasn’t prepared. What if he hated me? What if he loved someone else now? I wasn’t prepared for all the unknowns. And most of all, I wasn’t prepared for today to be the day he came back.

Christina Lauren — The Unhoneymooners Olive is always unlucky: in her career, in love, in…well, everything. Her identical twin sister Ami, on the other hand, is probably the luckiest person in the world. Her meet-cute with her fiancé is something out of a romantic comedy (gag) and she’s managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a series of Internet contests (double gag). Worst of all, she’s forcing Olive to spend the day with her sworn enemy, Ethan, who just happens to be the best man. Olive braces herself to get through 24 hours of wedding hell before she can return to her comfortable, unlucky life. But when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning from eating bad shellfish, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. And now there’s an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii up for grabs. Putting their mutual hatred aside for the sake of a free vacation, Olive and Ethan head for paradise, determined to avoid each other at all costs. But when Olive runs into her future boss, the little white lie she tells him is suddenly at risk to become a whole lot bigger. She and Ethan now have to pretend to be loving newlyweds, and her luck seems worse than ever. But the weird thing is that she doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, she feels kind of... lucky.

Kelly Harms — The Overdue Life of Amy Byler An Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestseller. “A laugh-out-loud funny, pitch-perfect novel that will have readers rooting for this unlikely, relatable, and totally lovable heroine, The Overdue Life of Amy Byler is the ultimate escape—and will leave moms everywhere questioning whether it isn’t time for a #momspringa of their own.” —New York Journal of Books Overworked and underappreciated, single mom Amy Byler needs a break. So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes rural Pennsylvania for New York City. Usually grounded and mild mannered, Amy finally lets her hair down in the city that never sleeps. She discovers a life filled with culture, sophistication, and—with a little encouragement from her friends—a few blind dates. When one man in particular makes quick work of Amy’s heart, she risks losing herself completely in the unexpected escape, and as the summer comes to an end, Amy realizes too late that she must make an impossible decision: stay in this exciting new chapter of her life, or return to the life she left behind. But before she can choose, a crisis forces the two worlds together, and Amy must stare down a future where she could lose both sides of herself, and every dream she’s ever nurtured, in the beat of a heart.

Greg F. Gifune — Children of Chaos IIn a torrential downpour, Phil, Jamie and Martin—three teenage boys—encounter a strange and enigmatic man covered in horrible scars who will change their lives, their destinies and the very fate of their souls forever. When their encounter mistakenly leads to murder, they realize this eerie stranger may not have been a man at all, but something much more… Thirty years later the boys—now men—lead tormented lives filled with horrifying memories of the scarred man and what they did all those years ago in the rain. Phil is a struggling writer, divorced, with a daughter and a mounting drinking problem. Jamie is a defrocked priest with depraved secrets and horrible addictions, and Martin, a madman who thinks himself a god, has vanished into a desolate desert region of Mexico and established a feared and violent blood cult. When Martin’s dying mother hires Phil to find her son and bring him home, Phil embarks on a perilous journey that will take him from the seedy streets of Tijuana, to a dangerous and allegedly haunted stretch of desert Mexican road known as The Corridor of Demons. At the end of the road, in an old and previously abandoned church, Martin and his followers wait in the Hell-on-Earth they’ve created deep in the desert. There will be only one chance for redemption, one chance for salvation, and one chance to stop the rise of an antichrist’s bloody quest for demonic power. From the void, came chaos. These are its children.

Diane Setterfield — Once Upon a River On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quite dark indeed. Those who dwell on the river bank apply all their ingenuity to solving the puzzle of the girl who died and lived again, yet as the days pass the mystery only deepens. The child herself is mute and unable to answer the essential questions: Who is she? Where did she come from? And to whom does she belong? But answers proliferate nonetheless. Three families are keen to claim her. A wealthy young mother knows the girl is her kidnapped daughter, missing for two years. A farming family reeling from the discovery of their son’s secret liaison, stand ready to welcome their granddaughter. The parson’s housekeeper, humble and isolated, sees in the child the image of her younger sister. But the return of a lost child is not without complications and no matter how heartbreaking the past losses, no matter how precious the child herself, this girl cannot be everyone’s. Each family has mysteries of its own, and many secrets must be revealed before the girl’s identity can be known. Once Upon a River is a glorious tapestry of a book that combines folklore and science, magic and myth. Suspenseful, romantic, and richly atmospheric, the beginning of this novel will sweep you away on a powerful current of storytelling, transporting you through worlds both real and imagined, to the triumphant conclusion whDiane Setterfield — Once Upon a River

Max Porter — Lanny There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth. Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

Albert Camus — The Stranger The day his mother dies, Meursault notices that it is very hot on the bus that is taking him from Algiers to the retirement home where his mother lived; so hot that he falls asleep. Later, while waiting for the wake to begin, the harsh electric lights in the room make him extremely uncomfortable, so he gratefully accepts the coffee the caretaker offers him and smokes a cigarette. The same burning sun that so oppresses him during the funeral walk will once again blind the calm, reserved Meursault as he walks along a deserted beach a few days later―leading him to commit an irreparable act.