Dec 9

Dec 9 Books Publishing This Week

The afternoon in the second week of December settles over everything like a soft blanket—quiet, cool, touched with the kind of pale winter light that feels both calming and a little wistful. The sky outside is a muted gray, the kind that holds the possibility of snow even if none has yet begun to fall. A delicate cold hangs in the air, the kind that makes you reach instinctively for warmth as you move through the house.

You’ve been thinking about this moment all morning—the chance to finally sit down with the new book waiting on your table. The day’s tasks are finished; the house feels still. You warm your hands around a mug of tea or cocoa, steam rising in gentle ribbons, and carry it with you as you move toward your favorite spot. The soft glow from a nearby lamp adds a golden touch to the otherwise wintery light filtering in through the window.

Your blanket waits draped over the back of the couch, thick and inviting. You settle into the cushions, pull the blanket over your lap, and set your warm drink beside you. Outside, bare branches sway lightly in the wind, and the world feels hushed, as though it’s catching its breath before the deeper cold of winter arrives.

The book rests on the cushion next to you, its cover a promise, its pages crisp and untouched. You pick it up, running your thumb along the edge of the pages, savoring the anticipation. There’s something about starting a new book in December—something about the way time slows down, how the early onset of dusk makes each afternoon feel a little more tender, a little more precious.

You open to the first page. The spine gives a soft crack, a sound that feels like the beginning of a ritual. The first lines draw you in gently, steady as snow beginning to fall. You take a sip of your drink and let the warmth spread through your chest as the story begins to unfurl.

The room is quiet around you, but not empty. The hum of the heater fills the edges of the silence, mingling with the soft rustle of the pages as you turn them. You read slowly, savoring each word, your body relaxing deeper into the cushions with every passing paragraph. Outside, the light shifts toward silver, a subtle but noticeable change as the afternoon deepens. You look up just long enough to watch a few leaves skitter across the sidewalk, blown by an insistent breeze.

This is the rhythm of December afternoons: the world outside chilled and subdued, the world inside warm and still. You return to the book easily, slipping back into the story’s unfolding world. The characters begin to feel familiar, the setting vivid and inviting. Each page carries you deeper, offering a welcome escape from the cold gray beyond the window.

You pause again, letting your gaze move around the room. The soft glow of the lamp, the warmth under your blanket, the scent of your drink—they all make the space feel cocooned, safe. The story in your hands feels like a companion, one that’s arrived at just the right moment.

When you read again, the rest of the world seems to disappear. Time loosens its grip; minutes unfold without urgency. By the time you reach the end of a chapter, your drink has cooled, the light outside has dimmed, and you feel suspended in a pocket of quiet comfort.

You close the book gently, marking your page. There’s still time left in the day, but you linger here, enjoying the stillness. The second week of December has given you this gentle afternoon—cold outside, warm within, and a new story beginning to weave itself into the season.

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Books Publishing December 7 - 13

A Weekend on Allyson Island by Susannah B. Lewis

A Weekend on Allyson Island is a heartwarming, humorous novel perfect for fans of RaeAnne Thayne and Elin Hildebrand where a group of five women come together in a mansion on the coast of Savannah to celebrate Moira's 50th birthday--and the things they've tried to keep hidden from one another along the way finally come to light.

Moira Allyson is about to turn 50, and her life doesn't look like she'd hoped it would. Her husband has passed away, and she misses her two sons now that they're away in college. Her financial stability doesn't help the loneliness, so she invites her four friends to come and spend the weekend in her in her extravagant waterfront mansion in Savannah, Georgia, to celebrate her 50th birthday. But the women bring their own sets of struggles, and what looks like the perfect getaway weekend on the surface starts to reveal the cracks and secrets in each of their lives. It will be the friendships they've relied on for years that will bring them strength and healing they didn’t know were possible.

With humor, empathy, and heart, Susannah B. Lewis weaves a compelling and compassionate story that reminds the reader of the hope amidst bleak times and the joy that comes from true friendship.

Seeing Other People by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

Two people haunted by their exes find that love isn’t dead in this new contemporary romance from the beloved authors of The Roughest Draft.

Morgan is being ghosted by her ex. No, really. It’s sad Zach died and became a ghost. But Morgan and Zach only ever went on the one date, and now she’s being haunted by him. Zach has no desire to spend eternity with Morgan, but he can’t recall his past and doesn’t know how to move on.

At a support group for humans and their haunters, Morgan and Zach run into Sawyer, whose fiancée-turned-ghost has started to fade. Unlike Morgan, Sawyer isn’t ready to part ways with his ghost. Although they face opposite issues, Morgan and Sawyer decide to work together to solve their problems.

As Morgan and Sawyer try to solve their paranormal conundrums together, they find something even more surprising—a tender, growing affection between them that threatens any unfinished business they’re seeking to close. The ghosts of their past might be there in spirit, but the connection between Morgan and Sawyer is as alive as anything they’ve ever felt.

The World at Home by Ginny Kubitz Moyer

San Francisco in 1944 is a bustling place, a revolving door of soldiers and sailors passing through on their way to the war in the Pacific. Twenty-year-old Irene Cleary, however, is not going anywhere. Although she’d love to travel, the seamstress shop she inherited from her mentor keeps her firmly rooted in the only city she’s ever known. She pours her energy into dressmaking and volunteers for the war effort by dancing with servicemen at the USO.

But Irene’s life is transformed when she designs a gown for Cynthia Burke, the socialite whose new marriage to Max, a handsome Chicago businessman, is the talk of the Nob Hill elite. As Irene is drawn into the Burkes’ glamorous, troubled orbit, and as she becomes absorbed in making costumes for the first American performance of a ballet called The Nutcracker, she finds herself on the threshold of exhilarating, perilous new worlds . . . and the most surprising discoveries of all will be the ones about herself.

Set in a vibrant city during a turbulent time, The World at Home is a coming-of-age story about creativity, loss, and the many lessons we learn from love.

The Emotions by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father’s death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.

A European civil servant specializing in strategic foresight, Jean Detrez works on the future with scientific rigor. However, the unexpected seems to invade his life, both professional and personal. The Brexit referendum, the election of Trump, the separation from his partner, the death of his father, but also a night inexplicably spent with a stranger. Questioning what to do with time, the one passing and the one to come, leads him from professional life where anticipation is a scientific discipline, to private life where the past troubles the future.

Do we want to know what the next few days or weeks have in store for us? Do we want to know if we are going to experience a new romantic or sexual adventure in the hours to come? Or how close death really is? This novel is an experiment in the ways in which fiction disrupts our representation of reality. Jean Deprez foresees events that do not occur, does not imagine those that will crush him, does not always perceive what he is experiencing, and is never certain that his reconstruction of the past is faithful to what happened.

Daughter of Genoa by Kat Devereaux

The author of Escape to Florence returns with a thrilling adventure set in the war-torn 1940s and inspired by true events, about a young woman who risks everything to help Jewish Italians flee the fascists, and falls in love with the brave aviator behind a daring secret rescue operation.

Anna's family fled to America years ago, to escape the Fascist regime, but Anna had stayed behind. Alone and terrified of discovery, Anna meets Father Vittorio, a Jesuit priest who takes her to shopkeepers Bernardo and Silvia, an older couple who offer shelter and safety without question. But when Anna discovers that this kind, quiet couple is part of a network of ordinary people daring to help Father Vittorio smuggle Jewish citizens, stripped of their status and rights, out of Italy, she is determined to help.

Anna offers skills essential to the cause: she has a deft hand at ledgers and forgery, talents she learned at the high-powered job she held before the Racial Laws were passed—a past she conceals. Working in secrecy, not knowing others’ real names or sharing her own, Anna begins producing fake identity cards and soon meets another member of the operation: a man known as Mr. X., whom she recognizes instantly as the wealthy aviator Massimo Teglio. And suddenly, without warning—despite the threat of imprisonment, torture, and death—Anna finds herself taking the most dangerous of risk of all: falling in love. And she's not the only one.

Based on the true story of the DELASEM—the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants, an organization of brave volunteers working tirelessly to save innocent lives from the concentration camps—Daughter of Genoa is a poignant look at those who loved and lost yet continued to risk everything to create a better world.

Her Time Traveling Duke by Bryn Donovan

Magic meets science and sunshine meets grumpy when a love spell whisks a Regency-era duke to modern times.

Rose Novak, a free-spirited museum employee who dabbles in magic, has had her share of disappointments. So when she tries a little spell for a romance with an “old-fashioned gentleman,” she doesn’t really expect it to work…especially literally. And yet, the duke from a painting she admired at the museum is now standing in her apartment, demanding to know who abducted him.

A man of science and truth, Henry Leighton-Lyons, the Duke of Beresford, has searched tirelessly for a way to turn back time and be with his late wife again. Instead, just as he’s about to pose for his portrait, he’s ripped centuries forward by a feckless, scantily dressed—and utterly bewitching—woman who believes in nonsense like crystals and astrology.

Unable to immediately reverse her spell, Rose vows to help Henry return to his own century, even though disguises and high jinks are required to get their hands on an enchanted astrolabe and master the art of time travel. But it’s hard not to fall for the irritable yet honorable duke.

Little does she know that he’s starting to wonder: did a reckless love spell get it right, after all?

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by Maria Tatar, foreword by Samantha Power

With a Foreword by Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling war correspondent, human rights advocate, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

A Penguin Classics Hardcover

Galvanized by youthful idealism and patriotic fervor, nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer and his schoolmates enlist in the German army at the onset of World War I. But soon their dreams of heroism shatter beneath the first shells of the bombardment, as they find on the battle front not the glory they were promised but savage brutality.

The most influential war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies, been translated into more than fifty languages, and been adapted into three acclaimed films. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan included it among three books that have left an impression on him since elementary school: “This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. . . . I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.” In this brilliant new translation, the distinguished Harvard professor Maria Tatar draws on her lifelong engagement with German literature to give a new generation of readers an English version that comes closest to the lyrical tragedy of the 1929 original. It compels us to see with fresh eyes the abject horror of trench warfare, and to feel with a quickened heart the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged among Paul and his fellow soldiers as they fight not just for their country but also for their own survival. At a time when we are more divided than ever, Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel reminds us that enemy soldiers who’ve been demonized by the rhetoric of war actually have much in common, giving it the potential to generate principled outrage about the senselessness of war for another hundred years.

Tell Me I Belong by David Weill

In this heart-wrenching memoir by a renowned transplant doctor who grew up without religion, a journey of self-discovery as he uncovers his family’s past.

David Weill grew up in New Orleans the only son of a world-famous Jewish pulmonologist and a Southern Baptist mother. Religion was never discussed in his home, and as a young child, Weill always felt something was amiss—that he never quite fit in with either his Christian or Jewish friends. These feelings stayed with him even as he became the head of heart and lung transplant at Stanford University, which lead to two journeys of discovery: first, converting to Catholicism, and then embarking on an intense search for his Jewish roots after he discovered his mother had converted.

The author takes the reader on his journey—hiring investigators in Berlin, who found his grandfather’s records of his time imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp; a heart-wrenching trip to Berlin to find his father’s first home—and ultimately does the internal work to define himself.

A Spy Inside the Castle by M.B. Courtenay

When intelligence analyst Ethan Briar is drawn into a covert mission on the windswept Isle of Skye, he enters a world where nothing is as it seems. An abandoned supercomputer, a defector's warning, and the specter of a long-buried betrayal set the stage for a high-stakes investigation with global implications.

At Castlemartin Manor-a decaying stronghold for a once-cutting-edge surveillance program-Ethan is forced to navigate shifting loyalties, encrypted legacies, and the labyrinthine politics of modern intelligence. As the storm outside intensifies, so does the war within: between faith and cynicism, memory and manipulation, human judgment and machine prediction.

Gripping, intelligent, and hauntingly prescient, A Spy Inside the Castle explores the intersection of technology and truth in an age where perception is weaponized-and no one is beyond suspicion.

A Grave Deception by Connie Berry

Antiques expert Kate Hamilton dives into the past to solve a fourteenth-century mystery with disturbing similarities to a modern-day murder in the sixth installment of the Kate Hamilton mystery series.

Kate Hamilton and her husband, Detective Inspector Tom Mallory, have settled into married life in Long Barston. When archaeologists excavating the ruins of a nearby plague village discover the miraculously preserved body of a fourteenth-century woman, Kate and her colleague, Ivor Tweedy, are asked to appraise the grave goods, including a valuable pearl. When tests reveal the woman was pregnant and murdered, the owner of the estate on which the body was found, an amateur historian, asks Kate to identify her and, if possible, her killer. Surprised, Kate agrees to try.

Meanwhile, tensions within the archaeological team erupt when the body of the lead archaeologist turns up at the dig site with fake pearls in his mouth and stomach. Then a third body is found in the excavations. Meanwhile, Kate’s husband Tom is tracking the movements of a killer of his own.

With the help of 700-year-old documents and the unpublished research of a deceased historian, Kate must piece together the past before the grave count reaches four.

Bed Chemistry by Elizabeth Mckenzie

One bed. One (very awkward) shared past. What could go wrong?

With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of The Love Hypothesis and The Paradise Problem.

Chemistry teacher Ashleigh Hutchinson knows better than anyone that love and lust don’t mix. The feelings come from different hormones, they trigger different responses, and they demand different reactions. Which is why she doesn’t date. She hooks up. No catching-of-feels required.

When Ashleigh is fired from her job without notice, she signs up to participate in a month-long sleep study, which will pay her enough to cover rent while she job hunts. It seems easy enough—until she walks into the clinic and finds herself staring right into the gorgeous eyes of Xander Miller, the only man to have ever tempted her to abandon her no-relationships rule.

When Xander and Ashleigh realize the study is only looking for couples, they agree to pretend to be together—which means sleeping in the same bed every night for the next few weeks. How hard can it be to keep their cool under the covers?

With steamy “will they or won’t they” tension and plenty of hilariously awkward moments, Bed Chemistry is sure to appeal to fans of Christina Lauren, Ali Hazelwood, and Meghan Quinn.

Midnight Somewhere by Johnny Compton

From Bram Stoker Award–nominated author Johnny Compton, Midnight Somewhere is a frightening collection of thought-provoking stories perfect for fans of Stephen King’s Night Shift, Tananarive Due’s The Wishing Pool, and the work of Junji Ito.

A man gets into a car that can take him anywhere he can imagine—including the past, into the worst mistake of his life, a memory he does not want to relive, cannot escape, and is even more afraid to alter …

A seemingly harmless, forgettable film about “alien hand syndrome” inspires a wave of self-harm among viewers—and even stranger things among those who become obsessed with it …

A woman tries to bring her dead lover to life through a macabre ritual that requires attacking his corpse. Is it because she longs to be with him again … or because the two of them have unfinished business?

The assorted characters in this thrilling collection encounter horrors that range from mysterious to murderous, discovering that darkness can find anyone, anywhere, at any hour of the day. After all, it’s always Midnight Somewhere …

Tidying Up: 100 Ways to Infuse Order and Joy into Every Area of Your Home by Ea Fuqua and Meg DeLong

Peace and purpose are just around the corner. In fact, they can be around every corner of your home, from the kitchen to the living room to that dangerously dark section of the laundry room.

In Tidying Up, Meg DeLong and Ea (pronounced ee-uh) Fuqua—founders and owners of The Tidy Home Nashville—offer a shame-free, straightforward approach to embracing organization as self care. They believe that outer order creates inner calm. Their agenda is not pretty perfection, but helping people hone in on what they need and want from their living environment–then showing a reasonable and doable means to achieve that.

Whether you have a studio apartment or an overflowing house, Meg and Ea help:

Tailor your living space to complement your personal lifestyle and life stage
Discover how regaining authority over your stuff invites your brain and body to rest
Put into practice 100 strategies—organized room by room—that make an immediate difference
Create sustainable systems that free you rather than bog you down

These two sisters and partners have helped countless clients tackle their living spaces and create peaceful and practical homes—so they know what really works and lasts! Their insights are a must for anyone looking to maximize their living space and create an organized, peaceful home that works for them. Meg and Ea feel strongly that a well-designed dwelling has the power to calm your mind, inspire your day, and maybe even change your life.

Class Action by Gail Ward Olmsted

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3rd year law student Lennon Gallagher’s life turns from complicated to overwhelming when she receives a message meant for someone else. The text offers an advance copy of a final exam—a guaranteed ‘A’—but accepting it will violate the honors code she refuses to break. When Lennon declines, the collaborators behind the cheating scheme demand her silence or they will ensure she takes the fall if necessary.
Fighting for her future while balancing an internship, exams, studying for the bar, a boyfriend who no longer seems to understand her, and a mother who needs help rebuilding her life after prison, Lennon tries to handle everything alone. But when she discovers the lead plaintiff in her firm’s class action lawsuit might be the father she’s never known, it’s the final straw. She needs help.
With the support of her friend and mentor, attorney Miranda Quinn, Lennon must navigate betrayal, legal intrigue, and personal discovery. As one relationship unravels, another blooms in this gripping story of resilience, secrets, and second chances.

A captivating read full of unexpected twists and emotional depth.

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