Readers’ Choice: The Top 10 Most Shelved Books in January

There are two sides to every story, and FATES AND FURIES is perfect for fans of dramatic romances told from alternating perspectives. At the core of this expansive, layered novel, is a dazzling examination of a marriage over the course of 24 years.

Her life at a crossroads, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town, and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she’d realized. Her father is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid, and Ruth’s mother is lucidly erratic! As Ruth’s father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming all her grief.

In an unnamed country teetering on the brink of civil war, sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed meet and embark on a furtive love affair. The two decide to leave their homeland when unrest explodes in their city—forcing them into premature intimacy. EXIT WEST follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are.

JANESVILLE is an on-the-ground look at the titular Wisconsin town, and the fallout of its primary provider of jobs—a General Motors assembly plant—being shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Taking the reader into the lives of Janesville citizens as they try to lift themselves up in the face of economic upheaval, it is an honest, insightful, and important look at how the political affects the personal.

In this mesmerizing novel, you'll meet Anna Kerrigan, an indomitable and unforgettable heroine who becomes the first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard—the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations—and navigates a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men.

This riveting psychological thriller traces the unlikely and increasingly sinister friendship between two pregnant women who are also carrying secrets they must not divulge. THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS is a sexy psychological thriller that Stephen King calls “a book you won’t be able to put down, although you may occasionally want to hide your eyes.”

Read the full review of THE SECRET SHE KEEPS.

In this heart-pounding debut, a bookstore patron dies under tragic circumstances, bequeathing his meager—and utterly mysterious—possessions to his favorite bookseller. Things really become puzzling when she realizes her unexpected inheritance contains clues that could reveal the secret behind its owner’s death—and something from her own past as well.

Read the full review of MIDNIGHT AT THE BRIGHT IDEAS BOOKSTORE.

Bestselling author of SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN Lisa See writes a powerful story about a Chinese mother and her daughter who has been adopted by an American couple. See paints an unforgettable portrait of a little-known region in China and, as with all of her novels, delivers intricate relationships between women, with a special focus on the mother-daughter relationship.

Read the full review of THE TEA GIRL OF HUMMINGBIRD LANE.

Brimming with humor and a glittering cast of characters, A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW reaffirms Amor Towles as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction. This audiobook brings 1922 Moscow to life with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. Rostov has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room across the street from the Kremlin while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Read the full review of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW.