Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times, TIME, and Oprah Daily

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity

When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

“Groff is one of this country’s most successful and versatile literary figures.”—New York Times

“Brawler captures a towering talent.” —Financial Times 

“A knockout.”—Minnesota Star Tribune

“Wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force even as it demonstrates artistic delicacy, intellectual subtlety, and ethical nuance.”—Boston Globe

A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region -- from New England to Florida to California -- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.

“In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death,“ one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples’ good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

"Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

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 Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her 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, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, 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.

From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to the Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures.

Alexandria "Alix" Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy--Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?

“Mind-expanding . . . The Score is so exuberant and readable that the depth and seriousness of its insights almost sneak up on you.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“Brilliant and wildly original . . . The Score is socially attentive, historically literate and imbued with sensual glee.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“I give this excellent book five stars.” —Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times

A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape our desires.

Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there, by giving us new goals to try on.

Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple, countable things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters; they only capture what’s easy to measure. The price of that clarity is our independence.

The Score asks us is this the game you really want to be playing?

A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK • “A wildly good time . . . a swoony, funny, romantic novel” (Rebecca Serle, New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years) about a woman thrown a curveball by fate, and the family secret that makes her question everything.

“Warm, lush, addictive, with just the right amount of magic.” —Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divergent

“Meet my new favorite book!” —Katherine Center, New York Times bestselling author of The Bodyguard

She knows what her happily ever after looks like. And it’s not him.

Cassia Park believes in soul mates. Fated love stories. It’s her family business, after all—for centuries, from Korea to Los Angeles, Park women have peered into clients’ past lives to find their one true love, their fated. This magical secret is why One & Only Matchmaking has a 100% guarantee…for everyone but Cassia.

For ten years, Cass has been searching for her fated, a man named Daniel Nam. But he’s still nowhere to be found.

And so, on the eve of her 40th birthday, Cass decides to do something for herself. She impulsively has a fling with Ellis. He’s twenty-eight, indecently handsome, and not destined to be the love of her life. But she’s surprised by their connection and their fling feels like something more—up to the moment he introduces her to his boss…Daniel Nam.

As she battles between fate and chance, head and heart, a family secret is revealed that will make her question everything she’s ever known. Cassia will have to decide if she’ll follow her fate…or make her own.

In this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, one American woman’s vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way.

Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American Officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI’s, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes.

Philadelphia born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948, eager to make his mark in the world. While serving in Manheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, Jelka, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever.

In 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity. 

Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms—familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self—can be transcendent.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family—steadfast, complicated, begrudging, and loving—from the bestselling author of Isola

“Wise, witty . . . a deliciously readable book [about] the delicate minutiae of family life, played beautifully, boldly, brightly in a major key.”—The New York Times Book Review 

“Goodman’s mature and deftly written book suggests that, in family as in art, there is no such thing as uncomplicated happiness.”—The Wall Street Journal

Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubinstein family, it could go either way.

When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.

With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman—whose prior collection was heralded as “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life” (The Boston Globe)—returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.
 

From “one of today’s most interesting thriller writers” (Lee Child) comes an immersive, propulsive novel in which a detective and a crime writer conduct parallel investigations, six years apart, into a series of puzzling murders.

“[Nesbo] can heighten suspense with a single word and wrong-foot the most attentive customer.” —Wall Street Journal

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016. When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past—and deep connections to a notorious gang—who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis—a self-described crime writer—has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer’s seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe.

Wolf Hour is a twisty and unforgettable thriller in classic Jo Nesbø style, which bears out Vanity Fair’s observation that “Nesbø explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them. . . . His novels are maddeningly addictive.”

Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.

The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Prosperous, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.

When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?

Like a literary game of ping-pong, Good People compels the reader to reconsider what might have happened even on the previous page. Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, it is a riveting, provocative, and haunting story of family—sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, and the communities that claim us as family in difficult times.

“After his spectacular Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders returns . . . with a new novel even more spectacular than the last.”—Los Angeles Times

A “daring” (Time) novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Tenth of December, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next

“Vibrant, fiendishly clever . . . Vigil is pure Saunders: the death of empathy, he insists, is greatly exaggerated.”—The Boston Globe 

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Burden’s searing, probing memoir explores . . . what she learned about intimacy and her own spirit.”—People​​

“A beautifully written instant classic. Strangers is gripping and heartbreaking and a must-read for every wife—and husband.”—Graydon Carter

“Asks us to examine life’s most perplexing questions: Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?”—Lori Gottlieb

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.

In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.

With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FIRST LIE WINS

Two women. One dead husband. And only one alibi.

“Elston expertly unravels a web of secrets and lies. You won’t be able to put this excellent thriller down until the final shocking page.” —Megan Miranda

Everyone at Chantilly’s Bar noticed out-of-towner Camille Bayliss. Red lips, designer heels, sipping a Negroni. But that woman wasn’t Camille Bayliss. It was Aubrey Price.

Camille Bayliss appears to have the picture-perfect life; she’s married to hotshot lawyer Ben and is the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family. Only nothing is as it seems: Camille believes Ben has been hiding dirty secrets for years, but she can’t find proof because he tracks her every move.

Aubrey Price has been haunted by the terrible night that changed her life a decade ago, and she’s convinced Benjamin Bayliss knows something about it. Living in a house full of criminals, Aubrey understands there’s more than one way to get to the truth—and she may have found the best way in.

Aubrey and Camille hatch a plan. It sounds simple: For twelve hours, Aubrey will take Camille’s place. Camille will spy on Ben, and the two women will get the answers they desperately seek.

Except the next morning, Ben is found murdered. Both women need an airtight alibi, but only one of them has it. And one false step is all it takes for everything to come undone.