The Best New Book Releases Out August 15, 2023

With The Invisible Hour, the author of Magic Lessons shows the power of reading and how rebellious it can be. Mia Jacob is at the edge of hopelessness when she discovers a book with a story that seems to closely resemble her life. Though written hundreds of years before, the society in The Scarlett Letter has more than a few similarities with the Massachusetts cult Mia has lived in ever since her mother discovered it as a pregnant runaway teen. The Community, as it’s called, has banned books, but Mia’s mother encourages her to read, leading her to independence, love, and a bit of time travel.

I really loved Cañas’ The Hacienda and am super excited for this one. It’s the 1840s, and Mexico has long been threatened by invaders from the north. But there’s another kind of monster that threatens the country’s borders. And when Nena and Néstor were young, it was one of these monsters that attacked Nena and caused Néstor to flee. He’s been fleeing ever since, and doing his best f-boi impression to drown out the guilt of having abandoned his best friend. The two are united, though, when Néstor is part of a militia to fight off the Americans, and Nena is that militia’s curandera, or healer. She (understandably) feels some type of way about how he bolted nine years ago, but the real threat soon takes precedence over any long-held grudges.

After Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead comes another novella that twists familiar stories into something dark, interesting, and even a little funny. This revisits Sleeping Beauty, but it’s not about the girl in the tower. Instead, it follows Toadling, who was stolen as a child by the fairies and given an idyllic childhood. After she grows up, they ask a seemingly simple favor of her — to go back to the world of humans and protect a newborn child. But fairies are eternally shady, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Hundreds of years pass, and when Muslim knight Halim searches out the tower covered in thorns to break the curse he’s heard about, what he finds is Toadling, who will slowly reveal exactly what she’s been keeping in the tower all this time (and who may, on occasion, turn into a toad when things get a little too real).

Though 25-year-old Melanie Carvajal has worked hard to get to where she is, she’s since hit a bit of a wall. Her Miami Herald job is at risk if her writing doesn’t become more inspired, and on top of that, there’s a distance she feels between her and her mother. When she gets the chance to prove herself through an assignment, though, she’ll travel to her mother’s native Colombia, where she’ll connect with family and finally come to realize all it took for her mother to move to the U.S.

When professional backbreaker Hutch goes to collect past due drug money in a raggedy apartment, what he collects instead is a severed hand. A severed hand that he soon realizes causes uncontrollable violence in anyone in close proximity to it. When he calls on Nick to take the hand, well, off his hands, Nick and his singer mother get pulled into the fight for humanity. Government agents are after the hand as bloodthirsty crowds follow it, and family secrets are exposed.

Second chances, older couple cuteness, and quirky small-town romance goodness collide in Williams’ new book, where Dr. Imani Kemp takes the time out of her overly booked schedule as an OB-GYN in Florida to stop her mother’s hasty marriage in Georgia. The wedding, in Imani’s eyes, is coming too soon, especially considering how her mother’s last marriage went. But the son of the would-be groom, Cyril, feels the opposite way, and he’s determined to undermine Imani’s undermining. Naturally, the two see a little something in each other.