The post-vacation glow lasted approximately five minutes. Long enough to cycle back to the office, sun-kissed and optimistic and carrying donuts for the team, before walking in to find Myles Salinger sitting in her boss’s chair. He is her workplace nemesis. He usually lives five hundred miles away, which has been one of the more functional arrangements of her professional life. Now he is here, in her face, throwing his considerable weight around and making demands that are driving everyone—but especially her—to the edge of their patience. He is not getting any of the donuts. 🍩

The enemies-to-lovers setup in Strictly Business is built on a foundation that Carrie Elks handles with the warmth and comic timing that has made her one of contemporary romance’s most reliably entertaining writers: two professionals who have been circling each other at a distance for two years, suddenly forced into the kind of proximity that makes maintaining mutual contempt considerably more difficult than it looked in theory. The fact that she is carrying a secret he absolutely cannot find out about adds the specific romantic-comedy pressure that keeps the tension at a consistent simmer. 😬

The Salinger Brothers series opener delivers the swoony, feel-good enemies-to-lovers experience that the subgenre promises at its best—banter that crackles, emotional stakes that build slowly and then all at once, and a heroine whose confidence and humor make her impossible not to root for even when her situation is verging on disaster. Elks understands that the best office romances work because the setting removes all the easy exits and forces characters to actually deal with each other. 💛

What makes this irresistible: Carrie Elks launches The Salinger Brothers with a feel-good enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy that delivers exactly what it promises—a workplace nemesis, a secret that complicates everything, and chemistry that makes professionalism feel like the least important thing in the room. 🌟

Fonzaso, Italy, between two wars. Nina Argenta is the daughter of a strong-willed midwife and a woman determined not to follow the path that rural Italian life has laid out for her. When her brother emigrates to America, she makes a promise to her mother: she will never leave. It is a promise that will define the next two decades of her life, because the man she loves—childhood friend Pietro Pante—keeps having to go. 🌙

Their passion ignites during one of Pietro’s brief returns, just as Mussolini’s fascist regime is tightening its grip on every aspect of Italian life. Pietro leaves again for work in the coal mines of America. Nina stays, bound by her promise and her family, watching the political landscape around her darken steadily into something that cannot be managed or waited out. As fascism consolidates its hold and Hitler’s forces begin terrorizing the region, the distance between Nina and Pietro becomes the least of the threats she is navigating. 💔

Jennifer Anton draws on a true story to ground this novel in the specific texture of what everyday life looked like in northern Italy as the country slid toward and through the Second World War—the particular combination of resilience, compromise, fear, and endurance that defined the experience of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The women at the center of the narrative carry the emotional and practical weight of survival with the kind of quiet determination that historical fiction, at its best, honors without sentimentalizing. 🕊️

What makes this unforgettable: Jennifer Anton delivers an epic historical novel inspired by a true story—two decades of love tested by fascism, war, a promise, and an ocean, told through the resilience of one extraordinary Italian woman who refused to be defined by what history had planned for her. 🌟

Every morning Florrie Appleton cycles along the promenade of her seaside hometown, breathes the salt air, watches the surfers in the bay, and counts herself lucky. She has a cottage overlooking the sea, friends she can rely on, and the job she always wanted at her favorite bookshop. It is a small life and a perfect one, right up until tragedy threatens to take it away entirely. 📚

To save the bookshop from closing, Florrie finds herself working alongside the elderly owner’s grandson, Ed Hartes—who is handsome in a way that produces the inconvenient butterfly effect she absolutely does not have time for, and who is clearly keeping something from her. Florrie has been through heartbreak before. Her instincts, which she has learned to trust, are telling her to be careful. The only romance she currently has energy for exists safely within the pages of the novels she sells. Ed is not making the caution easy to maintain. 💛

Eliza J Scott writes the kind of British seaside fiction that makes readers want to immediately book a cottage somewhere with a view of the water and a good independent bookshop within cycling distance. The Micklewick Bay setting is rendered with the warmth and specificity that gives the Micklewick Bay series its particular charm—a community that feels genuinely inhabited, a heroine whose happiness in her small life reads as genuine rather than resignation, and a slow-burn romantic complication that develops with the patience the genre rewards. ⛵

What makes this charming: Eliza J Scott launches the Micklewick Bay series with a heartwarming seaside romance—a beloved bookshop in danger of closing, a bookseller who has learned to protect her heart, and a handsome stranger with a secret who is making that protection feel like a significant amount of work. 🌟

She was sent to St. Mary’s reform school to learn discipline. What the school actually taught her was how dangerous wanting the wrong person could be. He is cold, arrogant, and untouchable—everything she tells herself she hates, repeated to herself often enough to almost be convincing. He is also the principal’s son, the one person she cannot escape, and the man she has been falling for in silence since the moment she arrived. 💌

The letters she writes to him—never meant to be sent, addressed to “Darling Arrow”—are where she is honest in ways she cannot afford to be in person. Cold. Arrogant. Untouchable. Also the one thing I can’t escape. The epistolary format gives the novel its particular emotional texture: a romance conducted almost entirely in the space between what the characters will admit to each other and what they will only admit to themselves, with the letters serving as the gap-closers. Some desires refuse to stay hidden. Some mistakes change everything. 🔥

Saffron A. Kent writes dark, emotionally intense new adult romance with the specific appeal of forbidden attraction rendered in prose that takes the feeling seriously rather than treating it as an obstacle to be efficiently overcome. The sister’s fiancé complication—he belongs to someone she loves before he belongs to her—adds a layer of moral weight that gives the eventual surrender its particular gravity. The St. Mary’s Rebels series establishes its world and its emotional register in this first installment with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what kind of story she is telling. 💔

What makes this compelling: Saffron A. Kent delivers a forbidden dark romance of genuine emotional intensity—a reform school, an epistolary confession never meant to be sent, and a desire for the principal’s son who is also her sister’s fiancé that refuses to behave itself no matter how many good reasons exist for it to do so. 🌟

England, 1553. Edward VI is dying and the realm is fracturing along religious lines that have been sharpening for decades. Catholic and Protestant factions are maneuvering for control of the crown, each convinced that the future of England—and their own survival—depends on who sits on the throne next. In the middle of this, Princess Elizabeth is in mortal danger from people who would rather see her dead than crowned. 👑

Richard Fitzwarren is not an obvious choice for the mission of keeping her alive. A disgraced nobleman, hardened soldier, and mercenary, he carries his own past like a wound—driven by personal revenge as much as any sense of duty. But he is skilled, he is ruthless when necessary, and he understands a court governed by suspicion and betrayal well enough to navigate it. His task is to keep Elizabeth alive long enough for history to run in her favor. His problem is that trusted allies may be traitors, and friends in this England all wear masks. ⚔️

Sam Burnell builds the Richard Fitzwarren series on the specific Tudor moment when the outcome of the Protestant Reformation in England was still genuinely uncertain—when faith was a political declaration that could mean the gallows, and when the wrong loyalty at the wrong moment could destroy everything. The spy thriller framework gives the historical material its momentum, and Richard’s morally complicated interiority gives the novel its texture. This is Tudor England rendered with the grit and political intelligence that the period actually demands. 🏰

What makes this gripping: Sam Burnell launches the Richard Fitzwarren Tudor Historical series with a spy thriller of genuine period authenticity—a disgraced mercenary tasked with keeping Elizabeth alive in a court where faith is treason and every ally is a potential betrayer. 🌟

Rowe Prince stumbles into a charity gala claiming to be Sterling Chase—the reclusive billionaire who supposedly founded the company our narrator has spent years building. He is gorgeous. He is unintentionally hilarious. He is, by all available evidence, the hottest, sunshiniest person to have ever told such a transparently absurd lie in Manhattan. The narrator’s immediate response is the only reasonable one: set out to prove he is a liar. 💫

The problem is that Rowe’s ridiculous falsehoods turn out to be surprisingly enchanting. The heart of gold underneath the borrowed tuxedo is doing something to a jaded businessman who had largely stopped believing in sincerity as a real quality that actual people possessed. The heat between them when Rowe ends up in his bed is also not something that can be dismissed as coincidental charm. And then it turns out that Rowe’s lies are concealing a secret that threatens the company directly—which means the choice is no longer simply whether to trust him, but whether what they have is worth the risk of what it might cost. 💛

Lucy Lennox writes MM romance with the wit and emotional warmth that has given her a devoted readership across a long career, and Prince of Lies showcases the specific strengths that distinguish her work: a hero who is funny without being a caricature, a love interest whose jaded exterior is cracking in real time, and a plot that delivers genuine stakes alongside the romance rather than treating them as competing concerns. The Billionaire Brotherhood series launches with a premise that sets up the larger world while delivering a complete and satisfying story. ❤️

What makes this irresistible: Lucy Lennox delivers a MM romance of exceptional warmth and comic charm—a sunshine liar in a borrowed tuxedo, a jaded billionaire who was not expecting to feel anything, and a secret that forces the question of whether falling hard for someone is worth the risk of losing everything else. 🌟

By eighteen, Blair Braverman had left California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a glacier tour guide in Alaska. The driving impulse behind all of it was a project she had set herself: become a tough girl, a young woman who confronts danger without apology, who belongs in landscapes that most people only visit. The North was both the setting and the test—a place that would either confirm or destroy the identity she was trying to build. 🌨️

What she found was more complicated than a simple proving ground. She was often terrified—of losing control of her dog team, of polar bears, of getting lost on the tundra. Above all she feared that the other, seemingly gutsier people around her were genuinely cut out for frontier life in a way she was not. The memoir doesn’t resolve this fear so much as document what she did with it: drove her dogs through whiteout blizzards, survived being buried alive in an ice cave, escaped crooked police, and kept returning to a North that hooked her despite everything it demanded. ❄️

The personal landscape is as demanding as the physical one. Braverman navigates a grievous relationship with a fellow musher and the complex expectations placed on a young woman in a world defined by male toughness—the gap between the tough-girl identity she was constructing and the vulnerability she couldn’t entirely suppress. Blair Braverman writes with lyrical precision and unflinching honesty about what it costs to make a place your own when the place is actively trying to stop you. 🐕

What makes this compelling: Blair Braverman’s debut memoir is a luminous portrait of self-reliance in extraordinary conditions—a young woman who moved to the arctic to become fearless and discovered that courage and fear have always been the same thing. 🌟

Sean Rogan is waiting in prison for a pardon that was supposed to come through as the fighting wound down. Instead of a pardon, he gets a daring breakout—orchestrated by his old IRA commander, Colum O’More, who needs him on the outside. The organization is in trouble, financially depleted, and a large cash infusion is required to get it back in fighting form. The job O’More has lined up looks straightforward enough: hijack a shipment of paper money marked for destruction and bring it home. 💰

Nothing about it is straightforward. The IRA Rogan knew—the one built on shared conviction and genuine loyalty—no longer exists in recognizable form. The men he is working with are not patriots but treacherous thugs, motivated by greed rather than ideology, and when the job goes sideways the distinction becomes catastrophic. What Rogan discovers is that the organization has been hollowed out from the inside, and that the men he was supposed to trust have already decided that loyalty is an obstacle rather than an obligation. 🔫

Jack Higgins—author of The Eagle Has Landed, one of the bestselling thrillers in the history of the genre—brings the same propulsive plotting and morally complicated protagonists to this early IRA thriller that made his Sean Dillon novels international sensations. The combination of action momentum and genuine political texture gives The Violent Enemy the weight that distinguishes Higgins from purely escapist thriller writers—Rogan’s disillusionment with what the cause has become is as central to the novel as the heist itself. ⚡

What makes this gripping: Jack Higgins delivers a taut IRA thriller with the moral complexity and action momentum that defined his career—a man who breaks out of prison for a cause and discovers the cause has already broken faith with everything he believed in. 🌟

Roger Ebert awarded two stars or more to the vast majority of the 150-plus films he reviewed each year. The reviews collected in this volume are from the other end of the scale—more than 200 of his most scathing assessments of films that earned one star or less from the only film critic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. As it turns out, Ebert’s negative reviews are considerably more entertaining than most positive reviews by anyone else, combining genuine critical intelligence with a controlled fury that produces some of the funniest and most precise sentences in the history of film writing. 🎬

The targets include Armageddon, which he described as an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, and the human desire to be entertained. The Beverly Hillbillies, which he called the dumbest half-hour sitcom imaginable stretched to ninety-three minutes by being made even more thin and shallow. And Police Academy, which he suggested was so bad that every group of friends should draw straws to send one person to watch it so the rest would have a permanent reference point for what bad actually looks like. 💀

The centerpiece is his review of the 1994 film North, which produced one of the most celebrated passages in film criticism: a review in which Ebert deployed the word “hated” with escalating intensity across five consecutive sentences, each one somehow worse than the last. What makes the collection essential is not just the venom but the precision—Ebert’s negative reviews are analytical documents disguised as comic performances, and the films they dissect are better understood for having been through them. 🏆

What makes this essential: Roger Ebert’s collection of one-star-and-under reviews is a masterclass in negative criticism—more than 200 films dismantled with surgical wit by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who understood that great reviewing requires the same rigor whether the film deserves two stars or none. 🌟

Jonny Bowden is a nutritionist with a specific mission: debunk the myths, save the reputations of foods that have been wrongly maligned, and deliver the actual research rather than the popular narrative that has calcified around it. The revised edition of this nutrition reference takes on the conventional wisdom about saturated fat and heart disease, full-fat dairy and diabetes risk, grass-fed meat, and the significant difference between farmed and wild salmon—and in each case, what the research actually shows diverges substantially from what most people have been told. 🥗

The book covers 150 foods with the kind of specificity that makes it genuinely useful rather than generically encouraging—not just “eat vegetables” but what each food actually contains, what the research says about its health effects, and what the reasonable evidence-based case for including it in your diet looks like. Real food—whole food with minimal processing—is the through line: the argument that food in its least processed form contains a virtual pharmacy of nutrients, phytochemicals, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and anti-inflammatories that support health in ways that no supplement adequately replicates. 🌿

More than a dozen well-known nutrition experts contribute their own top ten healthiest foods lists, which provides the kind of expert diversity that prevents any single perspective from dominating—useful both for readers who want consensus and for those who want to understand where genuine disagreement exists. Bowden writes with the directness of someone who has decided that clarity serves readers better than diplomatic hedging on questions where the evidence is actually reasonably clear. 💡

What makes this essential: Jonny Bowden delivers a nutrition reference built on what the research actually shows rather than what conventional wisdom has decided—150 foods, no spin, no agenda, and a systematic dismantling of the dietary myths that have been costing people their health for decades. 🌟

March 1865. The War Between the States is winding toward its conclusion, and twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has managed to avoid military service through a combination of slight stature, a youthful appearance, and what the novel tactfully describes as an utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. A barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas ends the evasion—Simon finds himself conscripted into the Confederate Army in its final weeks, a development he manages to survive by getting himself assigned to a regimental band. His fiddle, at least, has always been reliable. 🎻

On the eve of the Confederate surrender, Simon plays for officers and families from both sides of the conflict. In the crowd is Doris Mary Dillon—an Irish indentured girl serving as governess to a Union colonel’s daughter—and Simon, who is not generally a man given to impractical decisions, immediately decides that she is someone he cannot stop thinking about. The war ends. Doris goes with the colonel’s family to complete her three remaining years of service. Simon goes off to seek fame and fortune as a traveling musician across Texas. 💛

Paulette Jiles—whose News of the World was a finalist for the National Book Award and a major film—brings the same lyrical prose and deep historical grounding to Simon the Fiddler that has made her one of the most celebrated writers of American frontier fiction. The novel is both a love story and a portrait of Texas in the immediate aftermath of the war, when the old order has collapsed and no one is quite certain what comes next—an uncertainty that gives Simon’s wandering a particular kind of freedom and his vow a particular kind of urgency. 🌅

What makes this resonant: Paulette Jiles delivers historical literary fiction of exceptional beauty—a Confederate fiddler, an Irish governess, and a vow made at the end of a war that turns out to be the beginning of everything that matters. 🌟