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12 Fantastic Books Now in Paperback

Now’s the time to dive into great reads by Kristin Hannah, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Joe Hill and more top authors

6-minute read

Christina Ianzito,

Updated October 19, 2026

AARP

Updated October 19, 2026

a collage with the covers of books that are new in paperback

AARP (Getty Images; courtesy: St. Martin's Press; Penguin Random House; Simon & Schuster; Penguin Random House, 2.)

Many readers, including members of book clubs, prefer to wait for a bestseller to come out in paperback before diving in. They like that paperbacks are less expensive than the initial hardcover releases and lighter, making them more portable.

If you, too, are a fan, check out these 12 great reads, all out now or coming soon in paperback

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The Women by Kristin Hannah

This megahit from the author of giant bestsellers such as 2021’s The Four Winds and the cinematic World War II–era novel The Nightingale (2015) takes place during the political tumult of the 1960s, when Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a sheltered young nursing student, joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam. Her experience of war is eye-opening and often terrifying, leaving her with emotional wounds that are not soon healed after she returns home to face disrespect and such comments as “There are no women in Vietnam, dear.” A movie based on the novel is reportedly in the works.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

the cover of the novel What We Can Know.

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Other novels imagine a future transformed by climate change, but the author of Atonement offers one that feels chillingly conceivable. It’s set in two periods: In 2014, famous English poet Francis Blundy reads an epic poem he’s written for his wife, Vivien, at her birthday dinner. His drunken friends proclaim its brilliance, but no copies appear to have survived, so the poem’s reputation grows mythic. In 2119, amid rising seas and war, scholar Thomas Metcalfe becomes obsessed with finding the legendary poem, and what he discovers about that evening stuns him. It’s a brilliant story about, among other things, how little we can truly know about the past and the folly of believing that the future will be anything like today.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

Joe Hill happens to have a father who’s a master of the macabre: Stephen King. But Hill has long stood tall apart from his dad. His first horror novel, 2007’s Heart-Shaped Box, won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, and King Sorrow earned high praise from Library Journal: “Hill not only escapes the shadow of his famous father, Stephen King, but may even eclipse him” in this “outstanding tale.” At nearly 900 pages, the story is about a college student who is threatened with harm unless he commits a crime, so he and his friends decide to try to summon a supernatural force to save him. Alas, it works, and they’re forced to contend with the creature they’ve summoned: a dragon hungry for humans.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Desai won the Booker Prize for her 2006 novel, The Inheritance of Loss, and her latest sweeping novel was on the short list for the 2025 Booker and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize (Kirkus Reviews called it “a masterpiece”). Sonia leaves her family in India to study at a Vermont college, where she develops a disturbing relationship with an abusive older artist. Traumatized, she returns home to her ailing father. Sunny has left his mother in India to become a journalist in New York but ends up adrift. Sonia’s and Sunny’s paths periodically cross, and their relationship evolves while each struggles with family obligations and the insecurity of having one foot in two countries as they try to find their place in the world.

Amity by Nathan Harris

Set in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, Amity focuses on Coleman, an intellectual, quirky Black servant who sets out on a dangerous cross-country journey with Florence Harper, the spoiled daughter of his former enslaver. He wants to reunite with his sister, who has trekked to Mexico with the creepy Mr. Harper. (Florence believes her father wants her to join him.) Swindlers and bandits lurk around every corner, but they head doggedly westward. It’s an adventure tale, social commentary, love story and a vivid slice of Reconstruction era history from the author of 2021’s The Sweetness of Water.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

the cover of the novel Mother Mary Comes to Me.

Courtesy Simon & Schuster

Roy, the award-winning author of The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), describes growing up in Kerala, India, rising to literary heights, and her complicated relationship with her late mother, Mary Roy, whom she calls “my shelter and my storm.” She told Publishers Weekly that she never thought she’d write a memoir, but after her mother died in 2022, she was so grief-stricken, “I couldn’t write anything else. I didn’t have a choice.” The memoir was a nonfiction finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

The Black Wolf by Louise Penny

This is the Canadian author’s 20th novel in her best-selling detective series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and set in the quaint Quebec village of Three Pines. Gamache and his deputies (Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste) are now stumped by a character called the Black Wolf, who’d planned a terrorist attack in Montreal — which, they learn, is just one piece of a larger, far more destructive plot. Their few clues to the perpetrators include a notebook left by a murdered biologist and a cryptic phrase from the would-be terrorist: “In a dry and parched land where there is no water.”

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The author of 2019’s brilliant On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous focuses his 2025 novel on Hai, a young Vietnamese American man in the down-and-out, fictional New England town of East Gladness who forges an unlikely, lovely bond with Grazina, a Lithuanian widow with signs of dementia. The richly drawn characters are each struggling financially and emotionally — and living with lies to make their perceived failures bearable. The story’s no joyride, but you’ll surely close this beautiful novel feeling richer for having read it.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Courtesy Penguin Random House

The author of the best-selling 2019 novel Daisy Jones & the Six sets her 2025 page-turner in 1980s Texas. We first meet Joan Goodwin, a young, brilliant astronomer among the astronaut trainees in NASA’s space shuttle program. Joan is communicating with her teammates from mission control, trying to help them navigate a life-or-death crisis in space. The suspense builds as Joan’s backstory unspools, detailing the forbidden love she shares with Vanessa Ford, an aeronautical engineer whose spaceflight may end in flames. Reid’s next novel, The Last Days of Vic & Coco, is due out in March 2027.

Too Old for This by Samantha Downing

the cover of the novel Too Old for This.

Courtesy Penguin Random House

This witty crime tale is full of humor, thanks to its unlikely central character: retired 75-year-old serial killer Lottie Jones, who reluctantly returns to her previous profession after a young woman with a “perky ponytail” and “annoying smile” (in Lottie’s words) comes knocking on her door, hoping to do a podcast about Lottie’s possible involvement in some long-cold cases. Guess who soon turns up missing? Let’s just say that Lottie knows her way around a chainsaw. Downing is the author of, among others, 2019’s My Lovely Wife.

Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin

One of the 20th century’s greatest albums is arguably Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (1975). Music journalist Carlin, author of a 2012 biography of the Boss titled Bruce, describes the album’s conception and the shaping of each track ("Thunder Road,” “Jungleland,” “Backstreets”), offering a window into Springsteen’s obsessive creative process. Writing the title track was particularly torturous, according to the author. Determined to make the song flawless, he spent hours upon hours honing the lyrics, to spectacular effect.

Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive

Hannah is a longtime resident of Florida’s Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian community for queer older women (a “gelato-colored place, its rolling lawns riddled joyfully with lesbians”). When Hannah gets a terminal cancer diagnosis, she decides to throw a wild end-of-life party, while hoping to reconnect with the love of her life. It’s a humorous, irreverent tale set in a near-apocalyptic 2067 that the publisher likens to Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning satirical novel Less (2017) and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People (2024).

Christina Ianzito covers scams and fraud, and is the books editor for aarp.org and AARP The Magazine.

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