Adult

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time. Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold. The first in a compelling series.

San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective – but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help. The second entry in Rosen’s Evander Mills series, this dazzling historical mystery asks, “Once you have finally found a family, how far would you go to prove yourself to them?”

Spikes knows what’s it like to be an outsider. He certainly knew he didn’t fit the mold of a successful future tech entrepreneur. But he marshaled his resilience and ultimately set out to shatter that mold – along with the glass ceiling that came with it. Finding his footing in the tech world was an education in the complexities of being an outsider – but as Spikes came to see, rather than a hindrance, it afforded him a unique position of power.

A kindhearted widow with a small inheritance risks everything to open the only bookshop in a small seaside town. By daring to enlarge her neighbors’ lives, she learns only too late the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one!

A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village in this pleasant, timeless story.

At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives – each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. 

A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. In visceral poems embodying millennial angst, paragraph-long conversations overheard at her local coffeeshop, and unhinged Twitter rants, Lozada-Oliva reveals an eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story.

Winner of the Booker Prize, this darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her is terrifying.

I was devastated when Crichton, the author of two of my favorite books – Jurassic Park and The Great Train Robbery – passed away way too young. Writing under the pen name “John Lange,” Crichton presents the story of Peter Ross, and American radiologist invited to deliver a study in Spain and enjoy a Mediterranean vacation. But he wasn't planning on meeting Angela Locke, a dark-haired beauty with a big problem -- she's on the run from two warring gangs, each dead set on finding a mysterious artifact, and they'll kill anyone who stands in their way. It's a desperate fight for survival across the European continent as Peter and Angela race to uncover a centuries-old secret before they become its next victim.

A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man – set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s.

An epic adventure of a 44-year-old father who leaves his family for six months to walk 4,286 km across America on the Pacific Crest Trail. Following his intuition, Voors embarks on a life-changing hike – feeling alive, being afraid, pushing through pain, confronting emptiness and starting a passionate romance with the wilderness. What effect does it have on his marriage? His children? Himself? This travelogue takes us through the physical, mental and spiritual journey he experienced on this adventure.

Haunted house tale, steeped in Japanese folklore and full of devastating twists. A night of food, drinks and games quickly spirals into a nightmare as secrets get dragged out and relationships are tested for a group of thrill-seeking friends, brought back together to celebrate a wedding. This book terrified me.

With Halloween at the end of the month, I thought I should feature something morbid. In each of these twelve short stories, small events have huge consequences.

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather when a talking cat demands the teenager’s help in saving books with him. Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey.

A funny, gossipy and ultimately poignant novel about four Gen X teen friends turned 21st-century adults who awkwardly come back together to confront an influential teacher whose brutal remarks have haunted them all for years.