Friendship (6/16/26)

Discover new reads that explore the power of friendship!

ALL OUR EVENINGS by Ruthvika Rao
9781250419354 | 9/1/26

In 1990s Hyderabad, three teenagers—Arjun, Ruhee, and Ganesh—forge an unexpected bond. Over the course of a single sun-drenched summer, they discover love, friendship, and solace from their troubled families. They also discover the Red House, an abandoned house in their neighborhood, which becomes the site of their intimate friendship. But one night at the Red House, an unexpected act of violence shatters their lives forever.

A decade later Ruhee returns to Hyderabad, and Arjun, who has never forgotten his first love, is given a chance to tell the truth, both to himself and to those around him. But the tangled threads of fate, class, and desire remain, as does a lacerating secret.

By turns tender and unsettling, Ruthvika Rao’s ALL OUR EVENINGS is a deeply affecting novel about youthful passion, redemption, and the people we can never let go.

LINA & JUNE by Genevieve Wheeler
9781250280862 | 12/8/26

Lina and June’s friendship shouldn’t make sense. June has her future planned to a T; Lina takes life day by day, party by party. June’s dreams are color-coded and neatly filed, while Lina’s dreams are even too big for New York City, where she and June are students at the same university. But after a messy night out throws the two girls together, it seems like nothing can tear them apart.

Until June’s health takes an unexpected turn for the worse.

Until Lina jets off to Paris, leaving her best friend behind.

As Lina and June’s once-intertwined lives veer off on separate paths, they’re on their own to figure out how to fix their severed bond—and decide if it’s even worth repairing—or risk running out of time completely.

Are some heartbreaks too big to patch?

DESTINATION FUNERAL by Paige Harbison
9781250358103 | 7/21/26

When Babe—the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers—dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a stormswept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.

Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again—along with the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.

What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover . . . it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.

Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES by Malavika Kannan
9781250420787 | 8/18/26

Which comes first: experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. A burnt-out youth climate activist, she used to want to save the world, but now she just wants to have gay sex. Her plan is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian American childhood in Florida, study literature, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she makes her first best friend, falls in love with her situationship, and promptly gets her heart broken.

What is not a part of Rishi’s plan is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she increasingly finds solace in the friendships she’s made. Instead of virtual college, however, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective, where their political discussions and growing disillusionment collide with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES captures the beauty, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.