Readers’ Choice: The Top 25 Most Shelved Books of the Year!

Brilliantly written, disarmingly funny, and deeply moving, this exquisite memoir by a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 37 is a gentle reminder how to live and love every day.

Read the full review of THE BRIGHT HOUR.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. Smart, warm, uplifting, this is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine who realizes the only way to survive is to open your heart.

To the delight of their husbands and children, Liv and Nora are taking their families on a holiday cruise. While the adults relax, the four children—ages six to 11—enjoy the nonstop buffet and their newfound independence. But on an excursion ashore in Central America, a series of minor misfortunes and miscalculations erodes the safety they had experienced aboard the ship, when one minute the children are there, and the next they’re gone.

The Spring Girls—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—are a force of nature on the New Orleans military base where they live. As different as they are, with their father on tour in Iraq and their mother hiding something, their fears are very much the same. Struggling to build lives they can be proud of and that will lift them out of their humble station in life, one year will determine all that their futures can become. This modern-day retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN is perfect for book clubs.

Just days after mathematician and family patriarch Isaac Severy dies of an apparent suicide, his adopted granddaughter Hazel, owner of a struggling Seattle bookstore, receives a letter from him by mail. In it, Isaac alludes to a secretive organization that is after his final bombshell equation, and he charges Hazel with safely delivering it to a trusted colleague. But first, she must find where the equation is hidden.

Liane Moriarty’s novel about female triplets is the perfect read for fans of This Is Us. Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, like Kate, Kevin, and Randall, share an unbreakable bond despite their differences and the directions their lives take. The novels follow the ups, downs, and fantastic frustrations of being a trio through their 33rd year with lots of laughter and tears.

Jacqueline Woodson’s acclaimed novel ANOTHER BROOKLYN heartbreakingly illuminates the promise and peril of growing up. Running into a long-ago friend sets into motion memories from the 1970s for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t.

With starry Texas nights, red candy suckers, Dolly Parton songs, and a wildly unforgettable heroine—Dumplin' is guaranteed to steal your heart. Willowdean, called "Dumplin'" by her former beauty queen mom, has always been at home in her own skin. But when she takes a job at a local fast-food joint and enters into a relationship with a hot former jock, Willowdean starts doubting herself—and her looks. So she sets out to take back her confidence by entering the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant to show the world that she deserves to be up there as much as any skinny girl does.

In this Gatsbyesque novel, JJ returns home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build a huge mansion and woo his high school sweetheart. But the ostentatious wealth that JJ has attained forces everyone to consider the cards they’ve been dealt, what more they want and deserve, and how they might go about getting it.

In her most vulnerable and candid book yet, Roxane Gay explores what it means to be overweight in a world that doesn't accept unruly bodies. She uses her own emotional and psychological struggles to explore our shared anxieties and to examine how a devastating act of physical violence forever altered her life.

Before Faith Frank and THE FEMALE PERSUASION, Meg Wolitzer created Joan Castleman and THE WIFE—a short but powerful novel about marriage, ambition, and success. The novel begins with Joan, sitting on a plane next to her novelist husband, deciding that the time has come to leave him. What follows is a gripping and sweeping story of their relationship, choices, sacrifices, and breaking point. With powerhouse Glenn Close in the leading role of Joan, the film adaptation is sure to be intense and a conversation starter.

Truly fun to read, this unique and unusual novel asks: What would you do if you knew the day you would die? This Jewish American family saga is about four siblings whose lives are changed by a fortune-teller and whose fates are intertwined forever more. Magic, logic, and emotion figure into a story that covers several decades and allows readers to know a fictional family as well, or perhaps better, than they know their own.

A lively, sexy, and thought-provoking novel, EROTIC STORIES FOR PUNJABI WIDOWS is the tale of a young woman who teaches a creative writing course for Sikh widows at a community college. But the class doesn't go as planned when one of Nikki's students shares a book of sexy stories, setting off a wave of unexpected events. Reese Witherspoon picked this novel for her book club and so should you.

A charming, irresistible debut set in London during World War II, DEAR MRS. BIRD is the story of plucky Emmy Lake, who dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent but fumbles her way into a job as an assistant to a ferocious advice columnist instead. Her boss is very clear—any letters containing Unpleasantness must go straight to the trash bin—but Emmy is unable to resist responding.

THE INCENDIARIES is a brilliant, utterly captivating novel about a glamorous young woman, who secretly blames herself for her mother’s death, and the young man who falls in love with her. When Phoebe is vulnerable, she is drawn into a religious group and extremist cult, while Will struggles to confront the beliefs he’s tried to escape and the obsession consuming the person he loves.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK is the haunting true account of the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California during the 70s and 80s. And there's more—it's also the story of the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case, which was just recently solved in April 2018.

Ayobami Adebayo brings polygamy to the forefront in her debut novel STAY WITH ME. As Yejide and her husband struggle to conceive years into their marriage, the addition of a new (and more fertile) wife threatens to tear their once peaceful life apart. To save their relationship, Yejide must get pregnant and must go to extreme lengths to do so. STAY WITH ME paints an astonishing portrait of marriage, motherhood, and sacrifice.

Jessica Knoll returns with a new novel about two sisters who join the cast of a reality TV series along with three other hyper-successful women. But no one ever expected the season to end in murder…A blisteringly paced thriller, THE FAVORITE SISTER explores the invisible barriers that prevent women from rising up the ranks in today's America and offers a scathing take on the relentless pressure to stay young, relevant, and salable.

Longlisted for the National Book Award, Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s stunning collection of short stories examines the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body.

In Iain Reid’s psychological thriller FOE, a couple’s quiet, isolated life is upended when a man in a suit visits them at their secluded home. The strange man informs them that the husband has been randomly selected to participate in the OuterMore program which will take him very far away—and that's only the start of the strange events that unravel this couple's marriage.

Rediscover Gothic Victorian literature in this witty and mesmerizing novel following Mary Jekyll as she searches for the truth about her mysterious father—and stumbles upon strange, monstrous women—vividly depicted in fresh and evocative prose in this unputdownable thriller.

From the late journalist David Carr, this is a revelatory memoir of his years as an addict, chronicling his journey from crackhouse regular to columnist for The New York Times.

Set in 1960s London, FUNNY GIRL is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingénue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters.

Take an entertaining trip into the science of life in space. The brilliant and hilarious science writer Mary Roach paints an intricate portrait of how things actually work when human beings go into space, from the mundane—attending to basic human needs such as air and water—to the luxuries of beer and privacy.

Imagine being the wife of a founding father, in on the ground floor where history is being made, with progress, innovation, policies, and declarations. ELIZA HAMILTON by Tilar Mazzeo gives us the inside look at Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the strong woman who sealed her own place in history beside Alexander Hamilton, with fascinating anecdotes about growing up in the prominent Schuyler family of New York.