The best new books out this week 📚
  Hello, book lovers! Each week, dozens of new releases hit the shelves. Here are our favorites. ❤️📚 –The BuzzFeed Books team
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 Credit: Little, Brown and Company A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
Sixty-nine-year-old Charlie Barnes has cancer. His business as a financial adviser is on shaky ground following The Great Recession, and his relationships with his adult children and ex-wives are strained, save for his relationship to his second-born son, Jake, who narrates the novel. Jake paints a compelling portrait of a man "Updikean in his defects and indulgences," born in Illinois at the turn of the century, always trying to start a new business, and who is a profligate cheater and a less than ideal father. But his declining health compels Charlie to make amends. With a Rothian sense of humor and equally slippery relationship to fiction and fact, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is a return to form for the author of the 2007 bestseller Then We Came to the End. —Tomi Obaro
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Avon, MIRA, Berkley Books The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling
When Vivienne Jones and Rhys Penhallow broke up nearly 10 years ago, Vivienne did what any young witch with a broken heart would do: She put an ex hex on him. But with only a scented candle on hand, she had no doubt the effects would be mild and inconvenient, at best. At least...that's what she thought, until Rhys showed up at their town of Graves Glen, Georgia, years later. His quick trip to the annual fall festival is suddenly plagued with a town full of murderous toys, a talking cat, and angry ghost, to name a few. Now these exes have to work together to reverse the curse, and more than a little magic sparks between them. —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here. The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer
Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl...who loves Christmas. In fact, she's a bestselling Christmas romance novelist, which she has kept secret from those close to her. When her publisher asks that she write a Hanukkah romance next, she gets a serious case of writer's block. To help with inspiration, she decides to attend the Matzah Ball, a music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah. She's determined to have a good time, but when she runs into her childhood nemesis Jacob Greenberg, she fears he'll ruin everything. Instead, he might be the muse that sparks not only a book idea but a forgotten feeling in her heart. —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here. The Sweetest Remedy by Jane Igharo
Hannah Bailey never knew her father. After a brief affair with her white mother, the Nigerian entrepreneur abandoned them. After Hannah gets word that her father has died, she is invited to Nigeria to attend the funeral. When she arrives on Banana Island, Lagos, one of the most affluent places in the country, she meets her father's side of the family, the Jolades, for the first time. Some are excited to get to know her, while others insist that she doesn't belong. Over the next few weeks — with the help of a man who captures her eye and steals her heart — Hannah tries to navigate her new world and discover a part of herself she never knew. —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie at Indiebound here.
 Credit: Tor Books, Del Rey Books, ECW Press, Quill Tree Books, Harper Voyager Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
This delightful mix of fantasy and science fiction set among the classical violin scene revolves around three main characters. Famed violin teacher Shizuka Satomi, known as the Queen of Hell in the violin world, made a pact with the devil to deliver seven souls. Once she has, she'll be able to perform her music once more. She's already delivered six souls and is struggling to find her seventh. Katrina Nguyen, whose most cherished possession is her violin, flees her home because her abusive family doesn't accept her as a trans woman. She has no safe place to escape to. Lan Tran, an alien starship captain, fled an intergalactic war with her family across space and landed in a donut shop — which they bought and now run. When these three characters meet, they form their own found family, but with the devil knocking, their close-knit community is in peril. —Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop or a local indie via Indiebound here. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
The second book in the Scholomance trilogy shows El stepping up her game and becoming the most powerful sorceress in the school's history. With graduation approaching, seniors like her need to prepare if they're going to survive. The school helpfully creates a deadly maze to test their skills. However, El decides surviving isn't enough. She wants to save everyone in the school, not just the seniors — but to do so, she needs more than powerful spells. She needs to be likable and earn everyone's trust. Meanwhile, El's mother has smuggled in a note that warns her to stay away from Orion, but teenage hormones outweigh a mother's warning. This second book is as compulsive a read as the first. As a warning, it ends on another killer cliffhanger. —Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop or a local indie via Indiebound here.
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed
This slim, literary dystopia explores a mother and daughter's relationship in a setting ravaged by climate change. Reid and her mother live on a college campus in Alberta that has been transformed into a tight-knit community. In a future without electricity, running water, or refrigeration, they have little ability to contact anyone outside their own village. Both Reid and her mother have been infected by a parasite called Cad, which invades bodies and can even control the host's thoughts. When Reid receives a letter informing her she's received a full scholarship to attend a university within a dome, she's at first ecstatic for the chance to escape. However, her mother's guilt trips and constant gaslighting have her questioning whether she should go, or even if the university is real.—Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop or a local indie via Indiebound here. Dark Rise by C. S. Pacat
This first book in a new YA historical fantasy series set in Victorian London gave me The Dark Is Rising vibes, though with much denser and more complicated world-building. When Will Kempen's mother died, she told him to run, and he's been on the run ever since. He's captured by a group of men who serve Simon, a wealthy aristocrat who seeks to resurrect the Dark King along with his evil magic. A secret society called the Stewards serves the light and helps keep Simon and his men from unearthing dangerous artifacts. Meanwhile, teenager Violet longs to one day join her brother Tom in becoming one of Simon's chosen underlings. However, when the Stewards attack Tom's ship, she discovers Will in chains below and watches as he saves everyone on the ship from a sword's evil magic the fight accidentally unleashed. She decides to save Will and the two escape with the Stewards. When Violet hears her father say he brought her from India to England merely for Tom to kill her, she decides to switch sides. Both she and Will begin training with the Stewards in the hope of stopping the rise of the Dark King. —Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop or a local indie via Indiebound here.
Activation Degradation by Marina J. Lostetter
Unit Four, a biological robot, awakens into war. Hours after its birth, Unit Four's handler sends it out to fight an enemy spaceship set upon destroying Earth and all who live there, or at least that's what Unit Four has been programmed to believe. However, when the enemy captures Unit Four, it finds a group of what it assumes are robots calling themselves humans, and they refer to Unit Four as a human and dub it Aimsley. As Aimsley attempts to sabotage the humans, it uncovers more and more information, leading it to doubt its programming. This character-centered sci-fi about found family and indoctrination combines thought-provoking concepts with action. While it works well as a stand-alone, I'm hoping for a sequel. I listened to the audiobook engagingly narrated by Hayden Bishop. —Margaret Kingsbury
 Credit: Flatiron Books Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber
Once Upon a Broken Heart is an explosively rich fairytale with an intricate world weaved with fast-paced plot and intriguing twists. Garber continues to show up with lush, atmospheric writing and charming characters that we can't help but want to journey with until their final scene. Evangeline Fox seeks out the Prince of Hearts when she discovers her true love will marry her cousin instead of her, and she is desperate for his help in stopping the wedding. But when that wish turns sour, the Prince of Hearts demands much more than she bargained for, leading Evangeline to uncover an unfulfilled prophecy and the role she comes to play in it. —Farrah Penn
Get it from Bookshop or your local indie through Indiebound here.
 Credit: Yali Books, Scribner House of Glass Hearts by Leila Siddiqui
A genre-bending debut that blends historical fiction with fantasy and family drama. Maera and her ammi never talk about the fact that, when they were children, Maera's brother Asad disappeared in their grandfather's greenhouse in Karachi. But when her grandfather dies and his diary mysteriously appears under her pillow and his greenhouse in their backyard — which her mother insists was "there all along" — Maera enlists her cousin and some friends to finally discover what happened to Asad. Switching between their grandfather's past in colonial India and their adventure into the mysterious greenhouse, this stunning debut is sure to entertain. —Kirby Beaton
Get it from Bookshop or through your local indie through Indiebound here.
The follow-up to Doerr's Pulitzer Prize–winning All the Light We Cannot See, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel of epic stature and ambition. It oscillates between five disparate characters: Anna and Omeir, two young children witnessing the fall of Constantinople in the year 1453; Seymour and Zeno, whose lives intersect during an attempted bombing at a library in present-day Idaho (some readers have criticized the portrayal of Seymour's neurodivergence and his vilification); and Konstance, a 14-year-old living on a spaceship drifting through the cosmos on a centurieslong voyage. These vignettes can last years or just a moment; though their lives are separated by time and space, they're unified by an ancient Greek fable and the enduring tradition of storytelling. The novel itself is not strictly story-driven and instead operates as a series of independent character studies (which works because of Doerr's deep and tender empathy for said characters) — but there is so much book in this book: It is in turn a coming-of-age tale, war epic, and historical fiction and cycles between pulsing drama, magical realism, and high-concept sci-fi. —Emerson Malone
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