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2026

Oct: The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

An existential journey across the Sahara by an American couple. Blends alienation, colonial critique, and the vast indifference of nature.

Nov: Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer (Dec watch movie)

A nonfiction account of Christopher McCandless, who abandoned modern life to live in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer examines freedom, idealism, and the risks of rejecting society.

2027

January — The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Harrison Shepherd grows up between Mexico and the United States and eventually becomes a secretary for Frida Kahlo and a confidant of Leon Trotsky in 1930s Mexico. Years later, his connection to revolutionary politics draws him into the hysteria of McCarthy-era America, making the novel a meditation on history, politics, identity, and the unreliable ways stories are recorded.

February — Yesteryear by Caro Clair Butke

A satirical psychological thriller about a high-profile "tradwife" social media influencer who seemingly wakes up in 1855 and is forced to live the brutal pioneer existence she romanticizes online.

March — The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer

Journalist Joshua Hammer tells the true story of Abdel Kader Haidara and the librarians, scholars, and ordinary citizens who worked to save thousands of ancient manuscripts from destruction during the Islamist occupation of Timbuktu. The book combines history, adventure, and cultural preservation as the manuscripts are secretly moved through increasingly dangerous territory to safety.

April — The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

In 1975, Barbara Van Laar, a teenage camper at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, disappears, reopening the mystery of her brother Bear, who vanished from the same wealthy family's estate fourteen years earlier. Told through multiple perspectives and time periods, the novel gradually exposes the secrets, class tensions, and family dysfunction surrounding the Van Laars.

May — I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Jennette McCurdy recounts growing up as a child actor under the intense control of her mother, whose ambitions for her daughter shape nearly every aspect of her childhood and adolescence. With dark humor and candor, she describes her struggles with eating disorders, Hollywood, grief, and ultimately leaving acting behind to build an identity independent of her mother.

June — Land by Maggie O'Farrell

In 1865 Ireland, Tomás and his ten-year-old son Liam are working as mapmakers on the remote Atlantic coast when a mysterious encounter changes the course of their lives. Set against the aftermath of the Great Hunger, the novel explores family, land, memory, colonialism, folklore, and survival as the characters try to make sense of what has been lost and what endures.

July — American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

After a cartel massacre kills most of her family, Acapulco bookseller Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca flee north, joining other migrants traveling through Mexico toward the United States. Their dangerous journey on buses, freight trains, and through the desert becomes a story about survival, displacement, motherhood, and the human relationships formed along the migrant trail.

August — As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

After Addie Bundren dies, her impoverished family undertakes a difficult journey across rural Mississippi to fulfill her final wish to be buried in her hometown. Told through the shifting perspectives of the family members and others they encounter, the novel explores grief, family loyalty, resentment, isolation, and the strange ways people understand death.

September — Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro

Set in the fictional Mexican town of Ixtepec during the aftermath of the Revolution and the Cristero War, the novel is narrated by the town itself through its collective memory. Blending political violence, family drama, romance, and magical realism, Garro disrupts conventional ideas of time as the town remembers events that seem to happen simultaneously, repeatedly, or outside ordinary chronology.

October — Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

In a near-future California devastated by climate change, poverty, violence, and social collapse, fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina escapes her destroyed community and begins traveling north with a small group of survivors. Along the way, she develops Earthseed, a new belief system centered on humanity's ability to shape change, while searching for a place where a different kind of community might be possible.

November — Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (Dec watch movie)

In nineteenth-century China, Lily and Snow Flower become laotong—lifelong female companions—and communicate secretly through nu shu, a women's written language, as they endure footbinding, arranged marriages, motherhood, and the restrictions placed on women. Their friendship survives years of hardship but is eventually fractured by a devastating misunderstanding, which Lily only fully understands decades later.