Category Archives: 2024 Releases

My Summer Darlings by May Cobb

Jen Hansen, Kittie Spears, and Cynthia Nichols have been friends since childhood. They are now approaching forty and their lives have changed, but their insular East Texas town has not. They stay sane by drinking wine in the afternoons, dishing about other women in the neighbourhood, and bonding over the heartache of their own encroaching middle age and raising ungrateful teens. Then Will Harding comes to town, moving into one of the neighbourhood’s grandest homes. Mysterious and charming, he seems like the answer to each woman’s prayers. He’s a… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Adult-minor relationship & paedophilia
  • Divorce recounted
  • Infidelity
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Physical assault
  • Kidnapping & captivity

The Final Six by Alexandra Monir

When Leo, an Italian championship swimmer, and Naomi, a science genius from California, are two of the twenty-four teens drafted into the International Space Training Camp, their lives are forever altered. After erratic climate change has made Earth a dangerous place to live, the fate of the population rests on the shoulders of the final six who will be scouting a new planet. Intense training, global scrutiny, and cutthroat opponents are only a few of the hurdles the contestants must endure in this competition. For Leo, the prospect of traveling to Europa-Jupiter’s moon-to… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Attempted suicide
  • Death of a relative recounted

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. From a woman who lives in a house with all of her ex-boyfriends, to a toxic friendship built around a drug that makes you invisible, to an ancient ritual that might heal you of anything if you bury yourself alive, these and other scenarios reveal that the outlandish and the everyday are shockingly, deceptively, heartbreakingly similar.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Domestic abuse

Future Feeling by Joss Lake

The year is 20__, and Penfield R. Henderson is in a rut. When he’s not walking dogs for cash or responding to booty calls from his B-list celebrity hookup, he’s holed up in his dingy Bushwick apartment obsessing over holograms of Aiden Chase, a fellow trans man and influencer documenting his much smoother transition into picture-perfect masculinity on the Gram. After an IRL encounter with Aiden leaves Pen feeling especially resentful, Pen enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to put their respective talents to use in hexing Aiden. Together, they gain access to Aiden’s social media account and post a picture… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Transphobia, misgendering & deadnaming

Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun

A long time ago, Logan Maletis and Rosemary Hale used to be friends. They spent their childhood summers running through the woods, rebelling against their conservative small town, and dreaming of escaping. But then an incident the summer before high school turned them into bitter rivals. After graduation, they went ten years without speaking. Now in their thirties, Logan and Rosemary find they aren’t quite living the lives of adventure they imagined for themselves. Still in their small town and working as teachers at their alma mater, they’re both stuck in old patterns. Uptight Rosemary chooses security and stability over all else… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Lesbophobia
  • Parental abandonment recounted
  • Alcoholism (protagonist) & mentions of parent with alcoholism
  • Panic attacks
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Terminal cancer discussed (secondary character)

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun

One year ago, recent Portland transplant Ellie Oliver had her dream job in animation and a Christmas Eve meet-cute with a woman at a bookstore that led her to fall in love over the course of a single night. But after a betrayal the next morning and the loss of her job soon after, she finds herself adrift, alone, and desperate for money. Finding work at a local coffee shop, she’s just getting through the days—until Andrew, the shop’s landlord, proposes a shocking, drunken plan: a marriage of convenience that will give him his recent inheritance and alleviate Ellie’s financial woes and isolation. They make a plan to spend the holidays… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia, biphobia & transphobia
  • Familial estrangement & emotional parental abuse
  • Infidelity (secondary character)
  • Divorce
  • Anxiety & panic attacks (protagonist)
  • Emesis
  • Alcohol consumption

Spell Bound by F.T. Lukens

Edison Rooker isn’t sure what to expect when he enters the office of Antonia Hex, the powerful sorceress who runs a call center for magical emergencies. He doesn’t have much experience with hexes or curses. Heck, he doesn’t even have magic. But he does have a plan—to regain the access to the magical world he lost when his grandmother passed. Antonia is…intimidating, but she gives him a job and a new name—Rook—both of which he’s happy to accept. Now all Rook has to do is keep his Spell Binder, an illegal magical detection device, hidden from the Magical Consortium. And… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety

Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin

Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favourite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Infidelity recounted
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Anxiety & panic attacks including nightmare & peladophobia
  • Parent with depression
  • Self-harm & attempted suicide of a parent recounted

Context : The protagonist’s high school boyfriend cheated on his girlfriend with her. She also did not realise some of her previous lovers were married. A secondary character is divorcing his wife for infidelity

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

Everyone knows everyone in the tiny town of Bourne, but the Mitchell triplets are especially beloved. Mirabel is the smartest person anyone knows, and no one doubts it just because she can’t speak. Monday is the town’s purveyor of books now that the library’s closed―tell her the book you think you want, and she’ll pull the one you actually do from the microwave or her sock drawer. Mab’s job is hardest of all: get good grades, get into college, get out of Bourne. For a few weeks seventeen years ago, Bourne was national news when its water turned green. The girls have come of age watching their mother’s endless fight for.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism discussed
  • Disability from factory pollution (theme)

Family Family by Laurie Frankel

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie. Soon she’s at the centre of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism, sexism & body-shaming mentioned
  • Divorce mentioned
  • Anxiety & mentions of eating disorders
  • Substance addiction & drug abuse mentioned
  • Abortion & miscarriages mentioned
  • Death of a mother mentioned