17 Fantastic Books Now in Paperback

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

Sittenfeld, the author of Prep and Romantic Comedy, among others, released this wonderful story collection in 2025. Many stories feature beautifully drawn middle-aged characters struggling with very human insecurities, disappointments and conflicts with friends or lovers. One tale brings back Fiora from Prep, now decades older and attending her boarding school reunion; in another, “A for Alone,” a woman tries an experiment (“a mixed-media project,” she calls it) where she sees if a man and a woman can really spend time alone together as friends, without complications. The answer is … complicated.

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Crush by Ada Calhoun

Crush (2025) brought up similar themes featured in 2024’s fabulous All Fours by Miranda July, although Crush is a less wacky and more cerebral story about a wife and parent in midlife who begins to wonder if there’s a way to have more. “Don’t we make our own cages?” asks our narrator, a ghost writer and mother of a teenager who’s also supporting her unproductive artist husband. He suggests that they open their marriage a crack and allow each other to flirt with other partners, and she goes for it. What could go wrong? An awful lot, of course, but some things go very right.

Yoko by David Sheff

The author of the memoir Beautiful Boy interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono not long before Lennon’s murder. In the aftermath, Sheff grew close to Ono, allowing him an insider’s view of her life. Although she didn’t grant any interviews while he wrote the book (the book’s publicist says she stopped giving interviews in 2020), he drew on the time he spent with her through the decades and interviews with friends and family. It’s a detailed portrait of an enigmatic woman, from her early years in Tokyo during World War II to the modern day. You can read our story highlighting 13 fascinating things we learned from the book.

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

The third and final book in Turow’s Presumed Innocent series (the inspiration for an Apple TV series starring Jake Gyllenhaal) centers around the now-retired judge Rusty Sabich, whose peaceful life is upended when Aaron, the son of the woman he loves, goes missing. When Aaron is accused of murder, the story moves to the courtroom with a dramatic trial. Booklist called the author’s depiction of courtroom dynamics “a master class in legal suspense,” and the book itself “manna for legal-thriller fans.”

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson

The author of the hit 2022 novel Black Cake focused her 2025 follow-up on a wealthy Black family, one of the few in their tony coastal town. The couple and their adult daughter are still reeling from the long-ago killing of their son in their home, the perpetrator never found. The story deftly jumps back in time to their ancestors, from Africa to New England, with a stoneware jar that’s been passed through the generations — and was shattered during the crime — at the symbolic center. 

Coming soon

April 28: The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark. Clark (The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell) turns the trope of a deathbed confession into a literary thriller as twisty as the canyon roads that lead to Ojai, California, the setting for this noir.   

Courtesy Simon & Schuster

April 28: Matriarch by Tina Knowles. Knowles is inevitably best known as the mother of superstar Beyoncé, and she’s embracing that role in her memoir, an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Born Celestine Beyoncé, she describes her Galveston, Texas, girlhood, her career as a fashion designer, raising and supporting her remarkable family (including singer-dancer Solange) and the wisdom she’s gained through the decades.

May 5: The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso. This mind-bending time-traveling tale, out last year from Gelfuso, a poet and debut novelist, features a library full of memories known as the “time space” and a woman who takes it upon herself to protect it from government agents seeking to alter history by burning memories. A love story and espionage are woven in there, too.   

May 12: Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up by Dave Barry. The hugely popular (and Pulitzer-winning) humor writer and syndicated columnist offers a funny and self-deprecating take on his life. He wrote an essay for AARP last year about how much he loves to dance (unlike the younger generation).

Courtesy Penguin Random House

June 2: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. The Pulitzer winner and author of Alexander Hamilton (inspiration for the Broadway musical) tackled the iconic 19th-century humorist in this 1,200-page bestseller. It’s an intricate portrait of this complicated, irreverent man who, writes Chernow, grew so famous that he “fairly invented our celebrity culture,” despite his dark view of society and human nature. We highlighted some fascinating things we learned about Twain from the book.

June 16: Strangers in Time by David Baldacci. This historical novel from Baldacci is set in London in 1944 and centers on a bookshop owner, Ignatius Oliver, who’s mourning the loss of his wife and forms an unlikely bond with two parentless teenagers amid the destruction of World War II. 

July 14: We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter. Slaughter’s gripping 2025 thriller kicked off a new series by the author of the Will Trent novels (now a TV series). It introduces Officer Emmy Clifton, whose work becomes personal when two teens are murdered, one of them her best friend’s daughter, in their small Georgia town. 

July 21: My Friends by Fredrik Backman (May 6). An aspiring artist embarks on a transformative journey when she investigates the identities of three figures depicted in a painting, by the author of A Man Called Ove. (Check out Backman’s interview with Shelley Emling, editor of AARP’s The Girlfriend, about the book.)