For the first time, and with surprising and revealing insights, Kamala Harris tells the story of one of the wildest and most consequential presidential campaigns in American history.

From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail, "the definitive history of the 2008 banking crisis," comes a spellbinding narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

A new biography of architect Albert Kahn.

An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the #1 bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

An Almost Impossible Thing follows six hitherto little-known women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.

American Aurora explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Hermetic, alchemical, and esoteric texts became crucial sources of religious meaning and perspective among radical Protestants during this period as they struggled to understand their changing climate and a cosmos that seemed to be declaring its own decline. In particular, American Aurora focuses on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensively misunderstood theologian who settled outside of Philadelphia from 1694 to 1707.

A prize-winning historian's fascinating and unfamiliar recasting of America's war of independence as a transformative international event. In this revelatory and enthralling book, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America's founding event.

The Anthony Bourdain Reader is a collection of his best and most fascinating writing, and touches on his many pursuits and passions, from restaurant life to family life to the "low life," from TV to travel through places like Vietnam, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai.

In As a Jew, Hurwitz documents her quest to take back her Jewish identity, how she stripped away the layers of antisemitic lies that made her recoil from her own birthright and unearthed the treasures of Jewish tradition. With antisemitism raging worldwide, Hurwitz's defiant account of reclaiming the Jewish story and learning to live as a Jew, without apology, has never been timelier or more necessary.

In candid, surprisingly funny vignettes spanning forty years of girlhood, marriage, and parenting, Jen lays bare the disorienting upheaval of midlife--the implosion of a marriage, the unraveling of religious and cultural systems, and the grief that accompanies change you didn't ask for. And, drawing on all her resources--from without and from within--Jen dares to question the systems beneath the whole house of cards, and to reckon with the myths, half-truths, and lies that brought her to this point.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

David Trent is an aspiring novelist hoping to make a name for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place where ambitious writers lurk around every corner. He lives in an apartment above a Very Famous Author named Silas Hale who, beneath his celebrated image, is . . . haughty and disdainful, definitely not of the mentor variety. Until young David wins a prestigious award for his new book. Silas is at last interested . . . and jealous. But soon the administrator of the award comes to David with alarming news, which forces the writer into a set of desperate choices. Then fate intervenes--and nothing can ever go back to normal

Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born--the alien abduction narrative. In Ilana Masad's Beings, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads.

An insanely competitive housing market. A buyer pushed to the breaking point. How far would you go for the American Dream? Eighteen months and eleven lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC, suburbs, thirty-seven-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian--and, in turn, fix their marriage, have a baby, and get their life started--Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it's publicly listed and the masses descend with all-cash offers in hand. With some (harmless!) stalking and a bit of (very light!) trespassing, she worms her way into the homeowners' lives.

What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

From New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes a page-turning drama that explores the beauty of female friendship; the relationship between money, power, and sex; and the very human desire to protect the ones we love most.

Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf. But their relief is short-lived. In a sickening turn of events, Gamache has realized that that plot, as horrific as it was, was just the beginning.

In her long-awaited memoir, celebrated author Margaret Atwood--creator of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments--turns her storytelling brilliance on her own life.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal.

As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again-the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

In The Breath of the Gods, Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, explains how wind plays a part in our everyday lives, from airplane or car travel to the "natural disasters" that are becoming more frequent and regular.

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past.

A Read with Jenna Pick

Award-winning crime novelist Abir Mukherjee returns to his brilliant mystery series set in late-1920s Calcutta, as Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee must reunite to solve a high profile murder and disappearance. In The Burning Ghats of Calcutta, where the dead are laid to rest, a man is found murdered, his throat cut from ear to ear. The body is that of a popular philanthropist and patron of the arts. A man, who was, by all accounts, beloved by all. So what could possibly be the motive for murder?

First in the series: A Rising Man

Calder-isms is a collection of fascinating, irreverent, and often profound quotations from the influential modern American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976), who is most famous for his invention of what his friend Marcel Duchamp dubbed the "mobile."

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes--a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

Capitalism has long been understood as a driving force behind the biggest political, economic, and social dislocations of our time. But in this sweeping, kaleidoscopic history of the economic system that has shaped our world, the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he examines global capitalism through the eyes of its critics.

It's deep winter. Time to light the fire, pull up a blanket and curl up with your cat. But is your feline friend playing innocent? What were they up to while you were out of sight? Slink through shadows in these classic cat-themed mystery tales from beloved crime authors Catherine Aird, Edmund Crispin, Patricia Highsmith and Ellis Peters. A Case of the Claws bring a thrilling winter chill to the festive season and asks: are these furry friends the guardians of our secrets or omens of misfortune?

Cécé La Flamme, as she's known by her loyal Facebook friends, captures photographs of still bodies. Figures scorched and bruised, left to the rubble of the Cité of Divine Power. When she posts an image of a corpse, Cécé's followers skyrocket. "Nothing got more attention than a good corpse that was nice and warm or already rotting." Just beside visions of rot and neglect, she posts pictures of her toes, gullies crisscrossing the cité, and her own lips painted blue. With every image, Cécé seeks control and wants to create a frank, intimate record of the terror in her cité. Cécé's world begins and ends with the cité - a slum peopled by gangs, yelping kids, grandmothers, junkies, and preachers.

"A short, intense mystery novel that begins in gentle elegy and ends in diabolism and - murder. Three plots, three time-scales, three relationships are tightly woven into a single work, with three main voices, as in an opera by Monteverdi, who provides the sound-track. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris and then to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader's darkest intuitions."--Provided by publisher.

A comprehensive, first-of-its-kind book about Chicago's residential architecture and the stories that shaped it. This is an entertaining and precisely illustrated story of Chicago homes from the city's earliest days through the postwar era, revealing everything about what makes a home a Chicago home

Schwartz and Schuldenfrei argue that our choices should be informed by our individual 'constellation of virtues,' allowing for a far richer understanding of the decisions we make and helping us to live more integrated and purposeful lives.

An epic novel about the building of Stonehenge.

Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family's reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train. Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose's death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life.

Sequel: Evergreen 

Athenaeum Mystery Book Club - January 2026

The ninth book in the series behind Slow Horses, an Apple original series now streaming on Apple TV+. "Old spies grow ridiculous, River. Old spies aren't much better than clowns." Or so David Cartwright, the late retired head of MI5, used to tell his grandson. He forgot to add that old spies can be dangerous, too, especially if they've fallen on hard times-as River Cartwright is about to learn the hard way.

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.

A stunning celebration of contemporary gardens across the globe, created by the world's leading designers. This inspirational book features 300 extraordinary gardens created from the late 1990's to the present day.

Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.

Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.

One hundred years after the shipwreck of the Valbanera, known to history as the 'poor man's Titanic,' Mara Denis gets an assignment to report on the Canary Islands, where her ancestors lived before they moved to Cuba. Unexpectedly, she discovers that the grandmother her mother cherished was listed among the dead of the Valbanera, years before Mara's mother was even born. This fateful twist changes everything Mara thought she knew about her family and herself, and sends her on a quest to find the truth. If her great grandmother is a ghost, who is she and where did she come from?

On the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Pulitzer Prize finalist whose work is 'oral history at its finest' (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) delivers an epic narrative of the atomic bomb's creation and deployment, woven from the voices of hundreds of scientists, generals, soldiers, and civilians.

This dazzling, genre-defying collection from Jonathan Lethem features seven major stories published since his last collection, along with his best work spanning more than three decades.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Her short stories have appeared in various journals and magazines, many of them in The New Yorker. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala's powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India's middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background.

This lively, richly illustrated publication features works in a wide range of media by a diverse group of artists, including Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and many others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Art Museum, November 8, 2025

Containing chapters from classic writers on aeronautical history, such as R.M Ballantyne, Camille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle, and Benjamin Franklin, and with a generous helping of beautiful color illustrations and contextual notes, this is a fantastic read for ballooning aficionados and new-comers to the subject alike.

Stay tuned as the Athenaeum celebrates ballooning history in January 2026 as part of  52 Weeks of Firsts

Your home is your sanctuary -- a safe space that nurtures your emotional, physical, and mental well-being. In Elements of Timeless Style, Erin shares her decades of expertise to guide you in making thoughtful choices, big and small, that enhance your living space.

Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life's final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work-India, England, and America-and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father's death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.

London, 2012. The eyes of the world are on Britain as the country prepares to host the Olympic Games. But the glare of the spotlight makes London a target for some of the most dangerous people on earth. And the moment the bid is won, an international conspiracy is set in motion to unleash a devastating attack that will leave the world in chaos. One man stands between triumph and disaster--Commander William Warwick, heading up Scotland Yard's elite team.

In the tradition of The Yellow House and Half Broke Horses, a memoir of the Cuban diaspora that follows one family's exile from the island, through a lyrical exploration of memory, cultural mythology, and the history of Cuban-American relations.

Ethical Educational Leadership in Turbulent Times is an engaging, case-study-based text that assists leaders in their ethical decision-making processes during a time of turbulence and uncertainty.

Gift of Steven Jay Gross

The Humpty Dumpty Club is distraught when their powerhouse leader, Joan Hargrove, takes a bad fall down her stairs, knocking her out of commission. Now, as well as running errands and shepherding those less able to their doctors' appointments, they have to pick up the slack. Between navigating their own relationships and aging bodies and attending choir practice, these invisible yet indomitable women help where they can. They bake cookies, they care for pets, they pick up prescriptions, they sit vigil by the sick, and most of all, they show up for the people they've pledged to help.

"Eric and Carl live in Dorset in a small white cottage under the shadow of a big cliff. Eric sells old records and antiques. Carl cooks, cleans and crochets. Nearing 70, Eric is a lifelong accumulator of obscure objects whose easygoing, chaotic approach to life masks some of the unaddressed sadness of his past. The significantly younger Carl is an old soul who has a sophisticated emotional intelligence and likes swimming, mid-century female novelists, fibre arts and Dolly Parton. If you passed them on a walk, you may not pay them much attention. Most likely you would see Carl's long floppy ears, tail and fur and mistake him for a dog. The story of Eric and Carl's friendship spans 21 years: a constant anchor in a changing world."--Publisher.

First--a Baltimore coffee shop. A seat in the corner, facing the door. Black coffee, two refills, no messing around. A minor interruption from two of the customers, but nothing he can't deal with swiftly. As he leaves, a young guy brushes against him in the doorway. Instinctively Reacher checks the pocket holding his cash and passport. There's no problem. Nothing is missing. Second--a store to buy a coat. Nothing fancy. Something he can ditch when he heads to warmer climates. Large enough to fit a man the size of a bank vault. As he pulls out his cash, he finds something new in his pocket. A handwritten note. A desperate plea for help. Third--wherever this bend in the road takes him. Impressed by the guy's technique and intrigued by the message, Reacher makes it his mission to find out more ...

An in-depth investigation into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires.

This book seeks to recreate Fifth Avenue as it grew, flourished and failed. Over 200 archive photographs help tell the story of Fifth Avenue’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture and society.

The life and work of an unconventional architect.

Financial Times: Best Books of 2025: Architecture and Design

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate and New York Times bestselling author of I Am Malala, shares the most private journey of her young life--a story of friendship and first love, of mental illness and self-discovery, and of trying to stay true to yourself when everyone wants to tell you who you are.

The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. When the Inter-Continental Hotel opened in central Kabul in 1969, it reflected the hopes of Afghanistan: a glistening white edifice that embodied the country's dreams of becoming an affluent, modern power. Five decades later, the Inter-Continental is a dilapidated, shrapnel-damaged shell. It has endured civil wars, terrorist attacks, the US occupation, and the rise, fall, and rise of the Taliban. But its decaying grandeur still hints at ordinary Afghans' hopes of stability and prosperity.

Recounts the voyage of an eighteenth-century French aeronaut by hot air balloon from Philadelphia to Woodbury, New Jersey, in 1793. (Youth title)

The fascinating journey of one of the art world's great midcentury power couples The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore how Fiske and Marie Kimball, together and in their own respective ways, shaped the experience and understanding of art and architecture in the twentieth century.

Editor Marie Frank is a former Athenaeum employee.

From Booker Prize finalist and “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.

Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize

Neil Shea blends natural history, anthropology, and travel writing to explore how the beauty, chaos, and power of change in the far north are reflected in the lives of people and animals.

In The Gales of November, acclaimed journalist John U. Bacon delivers the definitive account of this haunting maritime disaster and the era that produced it. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with families, friends, and shipmates of the lost men, Bacon explores how the Fitzgerald came to symbolize the power and promise of America's postwar industrial might--and how its loss marked the end of a booming age of Great Lakes shipping.

November 2001: Chloe Harlow wakes up late, with hazy memories of the party the night before but no recollection of how she got back to her Brooklyn apartment. Ever since the terrifying and catastrophic terrorist attack, it seems she has been on a collision course with destruction. When she finally arrives at the exclusive Upper East Side art gallery where she works, she is immediately called into her boss's office. A pair of NYPD detectives greet her, also very curious to know how her evening ended ... because the host of the party, a rising painter and the gallery's newest artist, is dead.

Pushing beyond the conventions of literary biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a bold, innovative examination of the nature of legacy and memory itself, in which Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing and reveals new depths to the storied relationship that made it possible.

 Grave Dealings explores the social, cultural, practical, and legal aspects of body snatching in America’s first capital city and relates it to the continuing ethical struggles that surround the treatment of human remains to this day

Kate Hamilton and her husband, Detective Inspector Tom Mallory, have settled into married life in Long Barston. When archaeologists excavating the ruins of a nearby plague village discover the miraculously preserved body of a fourteenth-century woman, Kate and her colleague, Ivor Tweedy, are asked to appraise the grave goods, including a valuable pearl. When tests reveal the woman was pregnant and murdered, the owner of the estate on which the body was found, an amateur historian, asks Kate to identify her and, if possible, her killer.

First in the Kate Hamilton series: A Dream of Death

Tim Carpenter--lead investigator of the FBI Art Crime team--uncovers over 40,000 artifacts and remains from around the world that had been stolen by a Midwestern graverobber

Vienna, 1893. A gravedigger at the city's famous Central Cemetery, Augustin Rothmayer is a highly educated oddball who finds solace among the dead and in drafting the manuscript of the first almanac of his profession. But his fragile peace is disturbed when young inspector Leopold von Herzfeldt, an ambitious transfer from Graz, arrives in desperate need of an expert in death. And no one knows the subject better than Augustin Rothmayer. A superstitious killer is on the loose.

In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great failures: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.

Exploring the beauty, hope, and humor that can be found even in moments of deep loneliness and devastation, Grady Chambers' Great Disasters moves between memories of high school and early adulthood to consider friendship, first love, patriotism, protest, addiction, and more.

Third places,' or 'great good places,' are all those spots where people gather, put aside the concerns of home and work (our first and second places), and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation. Third places are the heart of a community's social vitality, and have long been central to grassroots democracy. Author Ray Oldenburg is renowned for coining the term 'third place.' In this book, he portrays, probes, and promotes these great good places: coffee houses, cafés, bookstores, hair salons, bars, bistros, and more, both past and present - and offers a vision for their revitalization.

Examining the evolution of the Greater Philadelphia region from its origins to the present, this volume- drawn from the online Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia-helps readers visualize the many interconnections across this region, whether natural, man-made, or cultural.

Also available:

Greater Philadelphia and the Nation

Greater Philadelphia and the World 

This book explores the phenomenon of "greatness" culture and what Americans really mean when they talk about it. It is for both general readers and scholars interested in American history, cultural history, and celebrity studies

To celebrate America's 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a ... deep dive into the creation of one of history's most powerful sentences: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and blight, Ma, her two year old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma's husband in the home he has been building for them in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited passports and visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma's purse, with all the treasured documents within it, has been stolen. A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma and her family, their struggle to emigrate to America, and their devastation in the wake of the theft that changes their fate to one of implacable tragedy; and Boomba, the thief, whose hunger and desperation to care for his family drive him to commit a crime whose consequences he cannot fathom.

Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

Esquire: The 27 Best Books of 2025 (So Far)

When an anonymous letter is delivered to the Clarendon English Dictionary, it puzzles the team of lexicographers working there. It soon becomes clear that this is not the usual eccentric enquiry. The letter hints at secrets, lies, and a particular year. For Martha Thornhill, the new Senior Editor, the date can mean only one thing: the summer her brilliant, beautiful older sister Charlie went missing.

Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025
Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

On Easter weekend, a guest at a luxury ski lodge in Åre is stabbed to death in her plush suite. She's Charlotte Wretlind, a property developer who planned to restore a nearby mountain hotel to its long-gone glory days. It was not a random attack. It was an act of pure aggression leveled against a woman with plenty of enemies. As the murder spreads panic among tourists and Åre residents alike, Detective Inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog face a shady staff, a dogged press, and multiple suspects.

First in the series: Hidden in Snow

A reappraising history of the remarkable women who Pablo Picasso shared his life with - whose individual stories and influence on the artist have been overlooked until now. Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women shared Pablo Picasso's life and were instrumental in his career, yet they have long been dismissed as simply passive models or muses.

In this posthumous collection of thought-provoking essays--many never published before--Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author David McCullough affirms the value of history, how we can be guided by its lessons, and the enduring legacy of American ideals.

The tense and emotional saga of a young woman's survival in the lawlessness of post-World War II France, by the New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc series.

"In 2123, the world is dying--and Antarctica's last remaining glaciers are the final source of fresh water. Controlled by the all-powerful StarCross Corporation, Spigot--the continent's largest water extraction facility--feeds a desperate planet. But off this continent's frigid shore lies a secret that could change everything. -- Provided by publisher.

A Thursday Murder Club Mystery

Series starter: The Thursday Murder Club

In this follow-up to the critically-acclaimed The Laughter-winner of the Washington State Book Award-a middle-aged woman starts a firestorm when she holds a contest, based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections

As a hurricane rages outside her remote cabin, Casey discovers a blood-covered girl hiding near her kitchen. The girl refuses to speak or drop her knife, and as the storm worsens, Casey uncovers a chilling secret. With danger mounting, Casey must unravel the truth--before the girl silences her for good.

It's Me They Follow is a meta-romance about love in the time of mass upheaval and uncertainty. It follows The Shopkeeper, a bookseller and reluctant matchmaker. Helping others find love through books comes easily for The Shopkeeper, except when it comes to finding someone for herself.

Jeannine A. Cook is the founder and owner of Harriett’s Bookshop in Philadelphia.

As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.

Part of our lounge display celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen.

Beautiful fashion plates from Regency magazine La Belle Assemblée are combined with much-loved passages from Jane Austen's novels and juvenilia and woven together with commentary from leading Oxford academic Professor Ros Ballaster.

The Athenaeum has: v. 13-30(1816-1824) and n.s. v. 1-15(1825-1832) of La Belle Assemblée. Please make an appointment if you wish to see them.

A woman on a journey through Europe is drawn to the grave sites of her literary idols. As she moves from city to city and lover to lover, she is drawn to the site of Cesare Pavese's suicide, and her journey transmutes passion for literature into a desire for meaning.

Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile ("The American Man Age Ten") to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji. Not only does Orlean's account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it's also an essential and practical guide to embracing any creative path.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

It's been several years since Detective Jimmy Perez left Shetland. He has settled into his new home in Orkney, the group of islands, off the northern coast of Scotland,with his partner Willow Reeve and their growing family. One stormy winter night, his oldest and closest friend, Archie Stout, goes missing. Ever the detective, Perez catches a boat to the island of Westray, where Archie worked as a farmer and lived with his wife and children.

A posthumous collection of newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces, offering a fresh perspective on the ... literary mind of Harper Lee

Budapest, autumn 1943. After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary. All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded.

On New Year's Eve, 1932, Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool travel to the Greek island of Lamperos to celebrate the holiday with a small group of residents living in a crumbling house. During a game of New Year's resolutions, one guest writes a disturbing message predicting a death before the year's end.

"This collection from one of the great pre-war writers, himself a member of Europe's Jewish diaspora, highlights the precarious position that Jewish people have occupied throughout millennia, in stories that move across centuries and nations but show the unchanging pressure of outsider status."-- Provided by publisher.

Written with her television co-star Marie Iida, in Letter from Japan, Marie reflects on the myriad questions she received about her inspirations by examining the Japanese customs that she grew up with -- minute details of tea ceremonies, the art of taking care of gardens, and the power of passing seasons -- with her trademark gentle wisdom.

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world.

Behold, the story of Sophie Blanchard, an extraordinary woman who is largely forgotten despite her claim to being the very first female pilot in history. In eighteenth-century France, "balloonomania" has fiercely gripped the nation, but all of the pioneering aeronauts are men. The job of breaking that barrier falls to a most unlikely figure: a shy girl from a seaside village who is entirely devoted to her dream of flight. (Youth title)

Stay tuned as the Athenaeum celebrates ballooning history in January 2026 as part of  52 Weeks of Firsts

This book demonstrates the ecological and social impact of park systems and highlights the diverse challenges that communities face when implementing such projects. At the same time, it encourages a reevaluation of civic design as an intergenerational practice of urban design.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long-distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the American taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can't resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship.

Elizabeth McCracken, author of bestselling novels, National Book Award long-listed story collections, and a highly praised memoir, has been teaching for more than thirty-five years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. "Writing is a long game," she notes. "What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-forgiveness: every life needs both."

One snowy morning, after arguing with her husband, Miquel's mother walks out from their home high up in the Pyrenees and does not return. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father cast out by the people of the town, Miquel and his father are left to fend for themselves. Together they will be forced to battle the elements, and their resentment of each other, through the long winter.

Lost Synagogues of Europe recreates in vivid color paintings and chronicles the life stories of seventy-seven majestic- and destroyed-synagogues built from the early 1600s to 1930 and spanning sixteen countries, helping to revive a thriving European Jewish culture and heritage.

A global survey of 250 of the most creative women practicing interior design from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.

From 1849 to the early 1980s, fewer than one hundred highly educated, white, European and American men created what became today's US federal historic preservation policy. Jeremy C. Wells argues that the orthodox historic preservation doctrine that this lineage formulated has too long dominated federal policy and watered down the richness of laypeople's relationships to their own heritage.

Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.

Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.--From the Publisher

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025

During World War II, French artist Henri Matisse and his family remained in Nazi-occupied France despite the dangers of war. Matisse at War examines this period of the artist's life, highlighting his and his family's connections to the French Resistance and the significant artworks he created during this time.

"Following a bold cast of characters across decades, and set against the changing social and sexual mores from the 1970s onward, Mercy is Silber's most ambitious and expansive novel yet, proving once again how we are all connected in mysterious and often unknown ways"-- Provided by publisher.

This two-volume publication examines in depth the work of Samuel Yellin (1884-1940), a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who became the single most important ironworker in America. Excellent new photographs bring to life many extraordinary objects. Thanks to unlimited access to the Samuel Yellin Metalworkers archives, a wealth of archival material--photographs, drawings, and business records--is published here for the first time.

2 volumes (xv, 528 pages; xv, 615 pages)

A perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity.

Lev AC Rosen delivers a new and captivating 1950s mystery in this dazzling, award-winning series. Private Investigator Evander 'Andy' Mills' next case takes him out of his comfort zone in San Francisco -- and much to his dismay, back home to Los Angeles. After a secretive queer rights organization called the Mattachine Society enlists Andy to find some missing members, he must dodge not only motorcycle gangs and mysterious forces, but his own mother, too.

First in the series: Lavender House

Fifty-two that's all the time Mona has left to learn about beauty. Every Wednesday, Mona's grandfather picks her up after school and takes her to see a great work of art. Just one. A different masterpiece every Wednesday for a year. Fifty-two weeks of consummate beauty. Fifty-two weeks of visits to the museum before Mona loses her sight forever.

translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.-- From the Publisher

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025

This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner László Krasznahorkai-perhaps his most serene and poetic work-describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way.

Krasznahorkai is the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature

An expert in memory must uncover the truth about her family's wartime past in this dazzling psychological thriller from the #1 international bestselling author of Anna O. Olivia Finn is a memory expert at Charing Cross Hospital in London. One night, she receives an urgent call from the police at the Hotel Lutetia on Paris's famous Left Bank. Olivia's French grandmother, Josephine Benoit, has appeared at the Lutetia in a distressed state claiming she once committed a murder in the hotel at the end of the Second World War. Traveling to Paris, Olivia finds her grandmother confused. But Josephine insists it is a recovered memory from the past. More disturbingly, hotel records show that a woman did die in that room of the Lutetia in 1945. Could her story really be true?

The halls are decked, the mistletoe hung, snow falling gently outside the window - and in the shadows, evil waits for darkness to fall. So draw up a chair, throw another log on the fire, and allow ten of history's greatest crime writers to surprise, delight and chill you to the bone with classic winter mysteries full of twists, turns, and treachery.

Verity Beresford is worried about her husband. Oliver didn't come home last night, so of course Verity goes straight to Judith Potts, Marlow's resident amateur sleuth, for help. Oliver, founder of the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society, had rented The Marlow Belle, a private pleasure cruiser, to host an exclusive party for the society, but no one remembers seeing him disembark. And when Oliver's body washes up on the Thames with two bullet holes in him, it's time for the Marlow Murder Club to leap into action.

Want to start at the beginning of the series? Look for The Marlow Murder Club

Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season

One winter evening, bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing. There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective Helgi to crack the case before its leaked to the press. As Helgi interviews the people closest to her-a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge-he realizes that Elín's life wasn't what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than the fiction she wrote. As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of the writer's very unexpected life.

In the nineteenth century, Manhattan's streets were so choked with pedestrians, horses, vehicles, and vendors that a trip from City Hall to Central Park could take hours. Alfred Beach had the perfect solution: build a giant pneumatic tube underneath Broadway from the Battery to Harlem.

A stargazer's guide.

As private investigators go, Callie Munro is tougher than most. She’s had to be. Abandoned as a baby and raised by a succession of strangers, she knows a thing or two about surviving… …but she never expected to find herself hunting a serial killer. After uncovering a string of missing women, women no one seems to care, about Callie refuses to look away.

The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.

Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human--not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

National Book Award Winner

Annie Ernaux's profound investigation into the life of her mysterious older sister, who died at six, two years before Annie was born.

A deeply personal and eye-opening memoir from journalist Beth Macy, exploring how her once-thriving Ohio hometown unraveled over four decades. Blending family history, reporting, and social insight, Macy traces the loss of community, the rise of anger and division, and the human cost of economic and cultural decline in small-town America.

With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak"-- Provided by publisher.

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025
The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you've been told you can't, and how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

Kamran Esfahani, a dentist living out a dreary existence in Stockholm, agrees to spy for the Mossad after he's recruited by Arik Glitzman, the chief of a clandestine unit tasked with running targeted assassinations and sabotage inside Iran. At Glitzman's direction, Kam returns to his native Tehran and opens a dental practice there, using it as a cover for the Israeli intelligence agency.

Chino de la Cruz and Paco Rojas seem well-mannered, at least for Chicanos, to the white cops that pull them over for littering on the long drive from California to Trinity, Texas. So well-mannered, in fact, that Captain Frank McKellan lets them off with a warning and recommends them a job at Stanzik Farms, the largest independent melon grower in the area. But Chino and Paco didn't drive all this way for work.

A leading figure in the New Perennial planting movement, garden and landscape designer Piet Oudolf emphasizes plant structure as the most important aspect of a successful garden, along with form, texture and colour. He uses perennials almost exclusively to create lasting, ecologically sound panoramas that relate to the greater landscape and the shifting seasons. This book features twenty-three of Oudolf's public and private gardens, along with detailed plans to provide inspiration and insight for small personal gardens and for the design of large-scale public landscapes.--From book flap.

Step into a Piet Oudolf garden and you are transported into a dreamlike meadowscape, filled with perennials, seasonal color, and texture. Made in close collaboration with Oudolf, this book showcases gardens throughout his career and across the globe from New York's acclaimed High Line to the newly planted Vitra Campus in Germany.

Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.

Hetletvedt explores contextual approaches to existing buildings in disinvested communities as an alternative to demolition, explains why these buildings matter, and what communities and professionals can make of them, together.

Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York's Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain--and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.

Following his "resurrection walk" and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty. Representing the victim's family, Mickey's case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board the ship to Portland, Maine; her mother is murdered by anti-Semites in Portland. Dr. Larch knows it won't be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; in fact, he won't find any family who'll adopt her. When Esther is fourteen, soon to be a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic New England family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren't Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism. Esther's gratitude for the Winslows is unending; even as she retraces her roots back to Vienna, she never stops loving and protecting the Winslows.

Queer people have always existed. In an era when this basic truth faces undue scrutiny, here is a dazzling work of restorative history that reveals the hard-won lives of those who dared to break the mold in the 'long eighteenth-century.' At once an illuminating romp through the historical archive and an evocative new chapter in our shared history, Dr. Anthony Delaney's Queer Enlightenments uncovers the remarkable queer people of that complex, sometimes paradoxical time.

A woman is found murdered in her Reykjavík home, her apartment ransacked. On her desk lies a note with retired detective Konrad's phone number. Days earlier, she had begged him to find the child she gave up nearly fifty years ago. But Konrad, reluctant to reopen old wounds, turned her away. Now, haunted by guilt, he vows to uncover the truth--for her and for himself.

First in the Detective Konrad series: The Darkness Knows

Two Indian American siblings are drawn into the dark allure of a beauty-tech company. Kashmira uses a product that can alter her appearance to escape her grief, while her brother Nikhil joins the company hoping to make a difference. But when the product's harmful effects surface, both must face painful truths about beauty, identity, and the cost of perfection.

After a stay in a psychiatric facility for depression, New York architect Tate Donovan heads to Cape Cod to design his best friend's summer home and start over. Still haunted by his sister Sylvia's death--and her unsettling claim that their family can see spirits--Tate tries to ground himself in logic and work. But everything changes when he meets Wren, a captivating young woman whose warmth and mystery draw him in instantly. As their connection deepens, Tate begins to sense that something dark lies beneath Wren's seemingly perfect small-town life.

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available--sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing?

Julia Esdaile is hired to restore the historic gardens at Havenworth Manor -- the grounds of which are now an abandoned snarl of bramble and weeds -- to their original splendor. For the enigmatic lady of the manor, ninety-three-year-old Margaret Clarke, the reason for the restoration is the deeply private story of a promise made a lifetime ago, and a vow to keep it before she dies.

London-based design studio Retrouvius has carved a unique and important niche in the interior design and architecture spheres by blending architectural salvage with innovative design.

Fifty years after revealing the secrets of Odessa, an underground organization of former Nazis angling to regain power, Peter Miller is a retired legend in the journalism community. He's spent the last decade caring for his grandson Georg after the death of his son and daughter-in-law in a tragic car accident. Always suspecting that his own long list of enemies might have been behind his son's death, Peter pulled back from his career to keep Georg safe. But he could do nothing to stop the young man from following in his footsteps--Georg's reputation and renown for fearless journalism growing fast in a digital world. But Georg Miller is not the only aspect of Peter's past that has thrived.

First in the series: The Odessa File

At twenty-four, Betsy Cornwell runs away to Ireland. Leaving behind a painful past and chasing her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist, she finds a fresh start on the misty shores of the Aran Islands. Amid the beauty of the Irish countryside, her life takes on the glow of a fairy tale when she meets a charming horse trainer and elopes to Gretna Green. Five years later, her happy ending has twisted into a nightmare and Betsy finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage, isolated and afraid with a newborn baby. On her son's first birthday, she runs away, turning to the women around her--her local domestic violence group, a trusted family friend, and an online Smith College alumnae network--for help she'd never known she could ask for.

Paul was reading a newspaper. Catherine was reading a novel. So begins Room on the Sea, André Aciman's scorching and elegiac love-story about a middle-aged man and woman who meet in the bullpen of jury selection and spend a sultry summer's week trespassing ever further into each other's hearts.

In this mesmerizing and profound novel, the arc of a woman's life in a devout, insular community challenges our deepest assumptions about what infuses life with meaning.

At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting... Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She's raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare.

Set in an isolated hamlet, Satantango unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance

Krasznahorkai is the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia-this city of hospitals-who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition.

Robert Langdon, esteemed professor of symbology, travels to Prague to attend a groundbreaking lecture by Katherine Solomon--a prominent noetic scientist with whom he has recently begun a relationship. Katherine is on the verge of publishing an explosive book that contains startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief. But a brutal murder catapults the trip into chaos, and Katherine suddenly disappears along with her manuscript. Langdon finds himself targeted by a powerful organization and hunted by a chilling assailant sprung from Prague's most ancient mythology.

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

The thrilling latest in "queen of crime" (CrimeReads) Val McDermid's masterful detective series, Silent Bones finds DCI Karen Pirie and her team investigating the murder of a journalist paved under a motorway--but was it his work or his private life that put him there?

First in the series: The Distant Echo 

It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.

A family saga about the lives of three sisters and a narrator named Jonas, spanning three decades and three continents

Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction

Publishers Weekly: 10 Best Books of 2025

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something, Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think.

How the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens transcended scandal to enrich their times.

200+ Recipes to Savor: Enjoy a variety of comforting soups, stews, chowders, and bakery-quality breads.

The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things That Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin.

Seven strangers receive a mysterious note that billionaire Logan Quick is leaving them his vast fortune. All they need to do is accept the enclosed Token and wait for his death. None of them know why they've been chosen, but all seven desperately need the money and the chance of a fresh start. When the group are forced to embark on a dangerous sea crossing, they discover they are connected by a dark secret from their past. As confusion turns to fear and trust to betrayal, the question is no longer who will claim the money - it's who will make it off the boat alive...

In a rocky cove at Hakata Bay, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Standing on the cold beach, the police see nothing to investigate: The flush of the couple's cheeks and the empty juice bottle speak clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, senior detective Torigai Jutaro and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn comes a heart-stopping thriller about a man who returns to a life of espionage to save the woman he loves and the City of Light.

The trendy rural town of Griffin has become a popular destination for weekenders and the city's second homeowners, but now a congressional race in this swing district is highlighting tensions between life-long residents and new arrivals. The campaign pits local pub owner and town supervisor Chip Riley against the wealthy young carpetbagger Paul Banks, challenging the social and political loyalties of their families and friends with lasting repercussions.

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews -- all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer -- surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory.

Time: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025

When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn't be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.

Winner of the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction

The young detectives think Alan Auhl is washed up, but that doesn't faze him. He does things his own way--and gets results. He still lives with his ex-wife, off and on, in a big house full of random boarders and hard-luck stories. And he's still a cop, even though he retired from Homicide some years ago. He works cold cases now.

Athenaeum Mystery Book Club - February 2026

Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. 1899. As the new century approaches, English hack-writer Evelyn Dolman marries Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American plutocrat. But in the midst of a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, Evelyn's plans of a substantial inheritance are thrown into doubt. As the unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice at Palazzo Dioscuri--the ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo--a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences exacerbate Evelyn's already frayed nerves: is it just the sea mist blanketing the floating city or is he losing his mind?

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

The Wayfinder is a novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu'i Tonga Empire. At its heart is Korero, a young girl chosen to save her people from the brink of starvation. Her quest takes her from her remote island home on a daring seafaring journey across a vast ocean empire built on power, consumption, and bloodshed.

We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest, colonialism, and religious tyranny, as well as of the treatment of women and indigenous people.

Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature 

From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife's birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, 'A Corona for Vivien'. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

Inspired by a shocking true story, this haunting debut novel of love, brotherhood, resilience, and redemption set in Pakistan calls to mind the modern classics The Kite Runner and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. On the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, a large yellow moon hung low in the sky when the men came with dogs and guns and cricket bats. In front of his family's small hut on the edge of a looming brick kiln, Lalloo's brother was murdered. Unable to escape the memory of that horrible night, Lalloo's parents and sisters remain trapped, the kiln chimney churning black smoke into the sky as the family slave, brick by brick, to pay off their debts. To rescue them, Lalloo must free himself from his past and carve out his own destiny.

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just...walk away.

Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Apparently, her husband left her a small fortune, and no one knows about it. Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn't commit: murder. Simon knows he's innocent. But he also knows the circumstantial evidence is against him, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. To save himself, he must find the real killer...

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood--overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences--swoops in and stays.

Longlisted for 2025 National Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

In Winston and the Windsors, Andrew Morton, one of the world's best-known biographers and a leading authority on celebrity, presents a meticulously researched joint biography of Winston Churchill and the House of Windsor. Throughout the course of his career and life, Churchill's connection to the Windsors fluctuated wildly. At times, he was the royal family's trusted confidant. At others, he was their leading antagonist.

An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

In The Woman Dies, renowned author Aoko Matsuda approaches often-thorny subjects such as sexism, prejudice, the normalizing effect of violence against women on screen, or the aesthetics associated with technology, with an inventiveness and quirky humor that keep these stories on the thrilling cusp between seriousness and levity.

The future of cities is female... As cities around the world face mounting crises - climate change, traffic congestion and growing inequity - the need for bold, people-first solutions has never been greater. Enter the women leading the charge. In Women Changing Cities, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett highlight the groundbreaking work of female mayors, planners, advocates, and policymakers in reshaping urban spaces for the better.

Finding the time to appreciate the bounty of our world can be tricky amid the demands of work, family and scrolling our phones. Happily, E. Foley and B. Coates have curated A Year of Living Curiously, a book of daily shots of knowledge that will lift your spirits and expand your mind in a flash. In 365 joyfully random, utterly fascinating entries, you'll learn what the Japanese mean by 'kuchisabishii' and how the Victorians communicate through flowers; you'll start to get quantum computing and discover the secret history of the bobble hat.

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.