Our Hardback Choices
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realises two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
Why we chose it: Yesteryear is one of 2026’s buzziest releases, and the noise and hype around it is SO worth it, in our opinion. This gripping novel is a satirical exploration of the trad wife phenomenon, exploring faith, fame, and motherhood. It’s darkly funny, mind-bending, and will have you glued to the pages.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
Why we chose it: Tayari Jones, one of our all-time favourites, is back with an absolute banger. This thought-provoking, emotionally charged novel features a cast of incredibly strong female characters and is set against the backdrop of Jim Crow-era racism in the 1950s. Jones is the master of her craft at writing complex, unforgettable characters with so much emotional intelligence.
Minbak by Ela Lee
A sweeping story of three generations of women who cross continents and decades to find truth, forgiveness and compassion.
Incheon, 1985. A nameless baby is born in a minbak in South Korea and vanishes nine days later.
London, 2008. When tragedy strikes, Hana faces ruin. She is forced to move her family – her teenage daughter Ada and ailing mother Youngja – into a single room with her, converting the rest of their home into a minbak, in a painful echo of her past life.
In the confined space of their shared room, there is nowhere to hide. As the past collides with the present, all three women are forced to face not only their family’s dark history, but that of an entire country.
Why we chose it: We were blown away by Minbak and Ela Lee’s writing. This multi-generational story left a lasting impact on us. It shines a light on the South Korean adoption industry in the 1980s and explores mother–daughter relationships, identity, memory, and grief. A real triumph!
Our Paperback Selections
The Death of Us by Abigail Dean
Isabel and Edward meet as teenagers.
When she tells him she loves him, it feels like the bravest thing she’s ever done.
But years later, a stranger walks into their home and tears their world apart.
This is where their story really begins.
Why we chose it: The Death of Us pulled us in from the very first chapter. The novel explores how a brutal home invasion impacts a marriage, examining love, trauma, and the ways these experiences reshape our lives and identities. This is a heavy one, but it makes for an extremely powerful, moving read.
Please note: this book includes significant trigger warnings for sexual assault, suicide, and violence.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa(translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder)
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.
And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
Why we chose it: This is a quiet yet poignant novel that explores unconventional family, memory, and the magic in the ordinary. Beautifully written and understated, it’s a story that will stay with you long after the final page. Plus, our edition is from the gorgeous Vintage Classics Japanese Series.
City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim
A once-famous ballerina faces a final choice - to return to the world of Russian dance that nearly broke her, or to walk away forever in this incandescent novel of redemption and love
On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past.
She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall.
One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours.
Painting a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics, and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope. Mysterious and alluring, passionate and virtuosic, Juhea Kim’s second novel is an affecting meditation on love, forgiveness, and the making of an artist in a turbulent world.
Why we chose it: We were completely captivated by this intense novel set in the high-stakes world of ballet. Rich and immersive, it explores ambition and how much we’re willing to sacrifice in order to succeed, with a messy female character at its centre.