HPL 2025 Fiction Spotlight

"In this debut, for fans of J. Courtney Sullivan and Mary Beth Keane, three adult sisters grapple with a shared tragedy over a Thanksgiving weekend spent in their childhood home, navigating complex relationships and old tensions. It's been years since the three Ryan sisters were all home together at their family's beloved house on the eastern shore of Long Island. Two decades ago, their lives were upended by an accident on their brother Topher's boat:...

"I bring together the living and the departed. I am the go-between. When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the go-between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who once helped her, she doesn't expect a teenage boy to show up. Dressed in a designer duffel coat and carrying a tattered notebook, Ayumi Shibuya offers an extraordinary service: he reunites the living with their dearly departed. Meeting his clients at a luxury hotel, Ayumi lays down...

"Twenty-year-old Thomas Flett lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, Northern England, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the drizzly shore to scrape for shrimp, and spends the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and sea-scum, pining for his neighbor, Joan Wyeth, and playing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but this remains a private...

Ten years after leaving Houston, a young man living in Tokyo is surprised when his mother shows up unannounced for Christmas. Estranged and burdened by old wounds, they struggle to reconnect amid the bustle of city life, the quiet companionship of a cat, and memories that stretch from Jamaica to Texas. As each learns to see the other anew, their journey reveals how love--messy, imperfect, and deeply human--can bridge even the widest divides.

"An insanely competitive housing market. A buyer pushed to the breaking point. How far would you go for the American Dream? Eighteen months and eleven lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC, suburbs, thirty-seven-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband...

In Japan, cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they'll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a Christmastime Kyoto moon. Satomi is devoted to her job in Tokyo, but when her long-distance boyfriend hints that he is going to propose to her on Christmas Day, she feels pulled between the career that she loves and a quieter...

Two disparate people lost in their own way find an unexpected healing connection in a poignant novel about redemption and chosen family by New York Times bestselling author Catherine Ryan Hyde. An army veteran with a career as a beat cop behind her, security guard Addie Finch is tough on the outside. Internally, she's in crisis mode. She's lonely, introverted, struggling through AA, estranged from her son, and, at sixty-two years old, questioning...

"When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. Agnes has always been more comfortable with the dead than the living, but thisbody is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it wasburied more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved. The mystery of the Iron Age body draws the attention of numerous groups with competing interests : the archaeologists...

"Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They've raised two children in their sleepy Connecticuttown and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long lifespent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it's time to gather loved ones and preparefor the inevitable. Over the years of Claire's illness, Eliot has willingly--lovingly--shifted into the role of caregiver,...

"Fifty years after revealing the secrets of Odessa, an underground organization of former Nazis angling to regain power, Peter Milleris a retired legend in the journalism community. He's spent the last decade caring for his grandson Georg, after the death of his son and daughter in law in a tragic cara accident. Always suspecting thathis own long list of enemies might have been behind his son?s death, Peter pulled back from his career to keep Georg...