New Edelweiss E-galleys (7/29/2025)

Hello e-galley readers! Check out some of the exciting e-galleys that were recently added to Edelweiss for your downloading pleasure:

A MOUTHFUL OF DUST by Nghi Vo
9781250386403 | 10/7/25

Wandering Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant come to the river town of Baolin chasing stories of a legendary famine. Amid tales of dishes served to royalty and desserts made of dust, they discover the secrets of what happens when hunger stalks the land and what the powerful will do to hide their crimes.

Trapped in the mansion of a sinister magistrate, Chih and Almost Brilliant must learn what happened in Baolin when the famine came to call, and they must do so quickly . . . because the things in the shadows are only growing hungrier.

CINDER HOUSE by Freya Marske
9781250341716 | 10/7/25

Ella is a haunting. Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father’s house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.

Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.

Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.

You think you know Ella’s story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince. You’re halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.

RIPENESS by Sarah Moss
9780374609016 | 9/9/25

Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home.

Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent him away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?

In RIPENESS, Sarah Moss has again tapped into the questions that haunt us individually and as communities. RIPENESS is an extraordinary novel about familial love and the bonds we forge across time, migration and new beginnings, and what it is to have somewhere to belong.

DARING TO BE FREE: REBELLION AND RESISTANCE OF THE ENSLAVED IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD by Sudhir Hazareesingh
9780374611071 | 12/2/25

The ending of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery by European powers during the nineteenth century is generally told as the work of enlightened liberals. Sudhir Hazareesingh turns this narrative on its head, showing the extraordinary degree to which the enslaved resisted their oppressors and emancipated themselves.

DARING TO BE FREE portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved and, wherever possible, in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, Nat Turner, and the pregnant mutineer Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass; and the countless rebels, insurgents, and conspirators. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the role of powerful women as campaigners, warriors, and disrupters.

Drawing on both written archives and oral history, the book traces the networks of cooperation that connected runaway settlements and rebellions from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It shows how the struggle for freedom was shaped less by Western Enlightenment ideals than by spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the lives of the enslaved in Africa before the Middle Passage. DARING TO BE FREE reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by portraying how enslaved lives were defined not by their dehumanization at the hands of colonialists and slavers but by their own resilience, rebellion, and commitment to emancipation.

BIRD SCHOOL: A BEGINNER IN THE WOOD by Adam Nicolson
9780374617370 | 9/16/25

Poets and scientists, saints and naturalists, stalk through these pages. Neighboring cock robins duel almost to the death. Tawny owl widows are seen looking for tawny owl widowers to set up shop with. Blackbirds are found singing phrases from late Beethoven quartets, both in a garden in southern England (where they have been listening to records played through the open window of a drawing room) and in Bonn, where Beethoven himself first heard them and where they are still singing to the same rhythms two hundred fifty years later.

BIRD SCHOOL describes and follows Adam Nicolson’s progress over two or three years in trying to learn about, and eventually to create an environment friendly to, the birds of the farm where he lives in Sussex. In simple language that evinces his careful observational prowess, Nicolson aims to cross the boundary between the scientific and the prescientific understanding of birds, looking into why and how they sing, how they fly and breed, how they survive and migrate, how they have suffered at our hands, how we have loved them and damaged them, and how we might create, or re-create, a refuge for them. Here is a set of lessons for someone who knows little but cares a lot about the living world that is in such dire crisis. Here is life in the “rough grounds,” on the edge of culture and nature.

THE GIRLS BEFORE by Kate Alice Marshall
9781250343086 | 2/24/26

There is a girl in a basement. The door has stopped opening. The light is gone.

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?

Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s most prominent family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

LOVE BY THE BOOK by Jessica George
9781250282545 | 4/7/26

Remy is lucky. Her debut novel, based on her three best friends, became an instant bestseller when it was released, and her agent and publisher are clamoring for a follow-up. But just as Remy’s creative inspiration seems to leave her, so too do her friends: one moves to New York, one gets pregnant, and one gets back together with her (awful) boyfriend. After an ill-advised one-night stand complicates matters further, Remy is left deeply alone—and unable to find her next book idea.

Simone is successful. A Kindergarten teacher with a passion for kids, and a well-paying side hustle that affords her all the material comforts she desires, Simone doesn’t have time for a robust social life. All she needs is her close-knit family—but after the true nature of her work is revealed, they cut her off, and she realizes for the first time just how isolated she is.

When Simone and Remy bump into each other (literally) in a bookstore, it isn’t exactly soulmates at first sight. Simone is guarded and prickly, Remy is insecure and heartbroken, and each woman is harboring a secret. And yet they might just be the missing piece the other has been searching for—if only they can let each other in. In Jessica George’s heartwarming, funny, and soulful second novel, she explores the restorative nature of female friendship and the life-changing power of platonic love.

CROSS YOUR HEART AND HOPE HE DIES by Jenny Elder Moke
9781250354990 | 1/20/26

Juliette Winters is used to taking care of business alone. She has no time for petty things like romance, friendships, or emotional commitments. Love is for people who believe in reality TV dating and holding hands in public. She’s too busy dominating the publishing world by single-handedly saving her company from financial ruin with the book deal of the century.

Business magnate Warren Ellingham has guaranteed Juliette exclusive rights to his explosive memoir that promises to expose the secrets of his ultra-exclusive country club, Pacific Pines. But when Warren drops dead of an apparent heart attack and the memoir is stolen, Juliette suspects that someone was willing to resort to murder to keep their secrets from being exposed.

Enlisting the help of Charlie Hawkins, a doctor with a heart of gold and abs of steel, Juliette dives into the glamorous and messy world of Pacific Pines Country Club. As the investigation heats up, so does the tension between Juliette and Charlie. But Juliette can’t afford any distractions because the bodies keep dropping, and Juliette is tee-d up to take the blame. If she doesn’t uncover Warren’s killer soon, the thing that was supposed to secure her future might just be the thing that ends it.

Jenny Elder Moke’s twisty mystery rom-com blend will delight readers with its outrageous characters, laugh-out-loud jokes, and opposites attract romance.

THE SNOW LIES DEEP by Paula Munier
9781250389985 | 12/2/25

It’s December in Vermont—and Mercy is determined to give her baby Felicity the very best first Christmas ever. Starting with a visit to see Santa on the Northshire town common, home to all of the village’s holiday celebrations. But when Santa abandons his post and runs into the woods, Mercy and Elvis go after him—and the shepherd finds the jolly old elf flat on his back in a small clearing, dead, a Yule log ablaze on his belly.

Mercy wants nothing more than to stay at home at Grackle Tree Farm taking care of Felicity, but as this St. Nick is really “Uncle” Lazlo, her family presses her to help solve their old friend’s murder and save the Solstice Soirée. She demures, but when another Santa ends up dead and the bones of a long-missing trapper turn up in the woods, Mercy and Troy and the dogs team up with Captain Thrasher and Detective Harrington to rid Northshire of the bad elements ruining the holidays for their town and their family.

Together they chase down clues leading to poachers and endangered lynx, evangelical zealots and Russian emigrés, and the terrible secrets of the past haunting the village, past, present, and future. It’s not just Santa at risk, it’s everyone in town—including baby Felicity. It’s up to Mercy and Troy and the dogs capture The Yuletide Killer before he strikes again, this time far closer to home.

AFTER THE FALL by Edward Ashton
9781250375650 | 2/24/26

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the “good” grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral for an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon, he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl raised by feral humans who has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

With sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due, John must unravel the mystery of how humans wound up at the wrong end of domestication and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into enough profit to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

New Edelweiss E-galleys (7/29/2025)

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Hello e-galley readers! Check out some of the exciting e-galleys that were recently added to Edelweiss for your downloading pleasure:

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