8 New Books You'll Love This Month

Still Me is the third and final novel in Jojo Moyes' Me Before You trilogy. When we meet Louisa in Me Before You, she's a plucky, cheery, hopeful caretaker for Will Traynor, a moody, morose quadriplegic who is determined to end the pain he's carried since his accident. Louisa and Will ultimately fall in love, but it's not enough to stop Will from completing his plan, and in the second novel After You, Louisa's story continues, showing her tricky journey with grief and the guilt of moving on following Will's death.

Still Me gives fans of the trilogy a truly satisfying conclusion for a heroine they've come to know (and love) so well. Louisa begins the novel starting a new life in New York City to serve as an assistant to Agnes, the wife of a wealthy Fifth Avenue business executive. When she gets mixed up in the secrets of Agnes's life, Louisa starts to lose herself, forgetting her passions and neglecting her relationship with her relatively new boyfriend Sam, who's back home in London. But with each challenge she faces in her new environment, Louisa slowly learns how to rebuild a life that is truly hers.

Me Before You was undoubtedly one of the weepiest books I've read in recent memory, but with Still Me, I found myself tearing up not from sadness, but rather contentment with how purely realistic Moyes portrays Louisa's difficult journey to find her true purpose in life. The warmth and earnestness of Moyes' storytelling will leave you entranced to the very end, and even though you'll be sad to leave Louisa's story behind, you'll finish the book feeling completely at peace with her ending. —Ciera Velarde

Get it from Amazon for $15.03, Barnes & Noble for $16.20, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

In Text Me When You Get Home, journalist Kayleen Schaefer takes both a sociological and personal approach to explain how female friendships have evolved over the years. By using a combination of historical research, pop culture case studies, first-person experiences, and interviews with her own friends, Schaefer creates a beautiful portrait of how modern female friendship has evolved to be a positive force that is making women stronger than ever.

She artfully explains how the intense bond we experience as friends carries us through many different eras of our lives and dispels the idea that female friends are less important than romantic relationships, family, or careers. In fact, our female friends become our "people," the ones we keep in our lives for no other reason than that we really, really love being around them. Whether you connect more with Schaefer's personal stories or her examples of strong female friendship in pop culture (Broad City, Grey's Anatomy, Parks & Recreation), you will find something in this book that will make you want to text your own person and tell her how much she means to you. —Ciera Velarde

Get it from Amazon for $15.91, Barnes & Noble for $16.23, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

In The Body Is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor asks us to consider all the ways we participate in and fall prey to body terrorism in regard to our own bodies as well as the bodies of others. Taylor argues that the violence that happens to people, whether it is state-sanctioned or occurs in individual interactions, or physical or emotional or mental, ultimately happens to bodies.

Taylor argues that her antidote for this violence is ubiquitous, radical self-love.

In her book, Taylor’s call to radical self-love demands that we pursue changes to the way we have been configured to think of bodies. Her insistence on the amount of self-reflection is challenging, if repetitive, and ultimately states that in order to create a world for all bodies, we must be willing to do the work. In reading the book, one is assured that though the work of radical self-love is difficult labor, it is also labor that is rewarding for our individual selves and for the world. —Kovie Biakolo

Get it from Amazon for $12.16, Barnes & Noble for $12.64, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

The quietly devastating effects of mass incarceration hit one recently married couple hard in Tayari Jones’ moving, new novel An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are upwardly mobile Southerners considering expanding their family when Roy is arrested and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The rest of the novel explores the fallout through letters and deftly handled switches in points of view. Though it’s a heavy subject, Jones wields a light hand, imbuing Roy, Celestial, and their friends and family with nuance and sympathy. What could have been an overwrought, didactic allegory about the prison industrial complex is instead a subtle, powerful portrayal of ordinary Americans and the human costs of unjust systems. —Tomi Obaro

Get it from Amazon for $13.14, Barnes & Noble for $16.17, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

When I was a young girl, I read one of those little pocket biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt — there she was, on the cover, not beautiful, exactly, but stately, and as I learned inside, a total and indefatigable boss. She was everything that my burgeoning, ambitious, writerly self admired: self-determined, independent, compassionate, and largely dismissive of social mores that dictated how she should behave in public, how she should dress, how she should think of herself and her capabilities.

Since girlhood, I haven't lost that admiration so much as allowed it to go dormant. But White Houses, the historical fiction-ish book from Amy Bloom, reactivated all that. Drawn from Bloom's extensive research in the Franklin D. Roosevelt papers, White Houses is told from the point of view of Eleanor's longtime assistant, confidante, and rumored lover, Lorena Hickok. It adds texture and insight to the flat history most of us learned of the "great man" FDR and his presidency — did you know, for example, that he was a cad? — while reacquainting readers with the peculiar and beguiling charms of both Eleanor and Hickock. Bloom's writing is always compact and piercing; she's particularly good at reproducing the wit that made Hickock so successful and so suspect. A truly beautiful, rapturous book. —Anne Helen Petersen

Get it from Amazon for $18.76, Barnes & Noble for $17, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

Katie Heaney's Would You Rather? is the kind of book you want to hug when you finish it. I wish I could have read it when I was a 19-year-old college kid trying to figure out her sexuality. I related so hard to every chapter: coming out, then realizing you have no idea how to dress anymore, even though there shouldn't be any such thing as looking "gay enough"; getting pumped for your first pride event as an out gay person but then it's kind of a letdown; worrying about how people who loved and related to you before you came out will be able to reconcile this new version of you. Would You Rather? is charming, and fun, and so, so funny — and perhaps best of all, it's a love story. And we could all use a beautiful story of queer love right now. —Shannon Keating

Get it from Amazon for $11.90, Barnes & Noble for $12.45, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

Christine Mangan's heart-stopping thriller Tangerine will suck you in, and not just for the dark, mounting tension at its core, but also for its ability to build an all-encompassing world around you. It's dense and atmospheric in its detail, but also paranoid — a world in which truth is subjective and reality can't be trusted. It's Tangier in 1956, to be exact, and when the depressive wife of an uncaring husband is surprised by a visit from her former college roommate, she finds their insidious history slowing infecting her current circumstances, and neither she nor the reader knows how disastrous the repercussions will be.

The best way I can explain just how fully this book will take over your life is this: I read it while on my honeymoon, and at some point I found myself telling my husband I didn't CARE about the beautiful landscapes we were passing on the train, I had 30 PAGES LEFT AND I WASN'T ABOUT TO LOOK UP. So, definitely read it, but be prepared to consider pausing everything else while doing so. —Arianna Rebolini

Get it from Amazon for $15.35, Barnes & Noble for $17.05, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.

Bernice Yeung's In a Day's Work is necessary reading, especially now, as the #MeToo movement demonstrates the vastness of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. Through her rigorous investigation and thoughtful writing, Yeung shares the stories of women — specifically farmworkers, domestic workers, and janitorial workers — whose jobs are isolated, undervalued, and poorly regulated, and whose economic and citizenship status often keeps them quiet.

These harrowing accounts (which focus primarily on sexual assault but inevitably involve all manner of exploitation) are difficult to read for sure, but they are also illuminating — and, often, inspiring. Yeung describes the policies that allowed for, and even encouraged, the circumstances which have allowed for the mistreatment of these workers, but she also points to ways in which those circumstances are improving. She speaks to women who have suffered and survived, who are now helping to pull other women out of dangerous situations they understand too well; they are advocates, social workers, public speakers, and fighters. Readers of In a Day's Work will likely be moved to join the fight, too. —Arianna Rebolini

Get it from Amazon for $19.27, Barnes & Noble for $20.75, or a local bookseller through IndieBound here.