Ten Recent Additions to My TBR

I’m linking up with Top Ten Tuesday, which was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Check out upcoming Top Ten themes on Jana’s blog

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Today’s theme is all about storms, but I’ve recently done a couple of “storm” related top ten lists, so I’m going rogue today. And I realize this Ten Recent Additions to my TBR prompt is coming up in January, but I didn’t want to wait! Also, knowing me I’ll have ten more books on my TBR in January that I can share. Here are ten books I recently added to my Goodreads TBR that sound so good (in no particular order):

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou. April 2025. 

Something terrible has happened.

In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child – how do I talk about this? she wonders.

The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale.

And so she begins to construct a beautiful fairy tale for her child – one that begins with a strange baby boy whose nails grow too fast and whose skin smells of soil. As he grows from a boy into a man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Tragedy strikes in cycles – and wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. These ghosts call out desperately to our narrator as she tries to explain, in the very real world, exactly what has happened to her.

And they all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin.

If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

A debut novel as emotionally poignant as it is fiercely smart, Sour Cherry is an arresting debut examining toxic masculinity through its chorus of women – deconstructing the idea of what makes someone a monster.

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The Compound by Aisling Rawle. June 2025.

Love Island meets The Hunger Games in this must-talk-about-it read, as bingeable as the best reality TV.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.

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A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. August 2025.

Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel by the Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper, following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.

A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.

As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper masterfully blends horror, erotica, and psychological thriller in this captivating and chilling story.

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Kill Creatures by Rory Power. June 2025.

From the bestselling author of Wilder Girls and queen of twisty narratives, Rory Power, comes her highly anticipated new Young Adult thriller.

Last summer, Nan’s three best friends disappeared into Saltcedar Canyon.

She’s spent the year since grieving their loss and avoiding questions about what happened that night. Now, on the anniversary, she’s ready to say goodbye, and so are the girls’ families, who have reconvened to hold a memorial. But their vigil is interrupted by the shocking return of one of the missing girls alive. Everybody is overjoyed. Everybody, that is, except Nan, who was pretty sure they were dead.

After all, she’s the one who killed them.

Atmospheric, fast-paced and vividly realised, Kill Creatures is a book about secrets, jealousy, violence and revenge. Perfect for fans of A Good Girls Guide to Murder and Gone Girl.

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Midnight in Soap Lake by Matthew J. Sullivan. April 2025.

A lake with mysterious properties. A town haunted by urban legend. Two women whose lives intersect in terrifying ways. Welcome to Soap Lake, a town to rival Twin Peaks and Stephen King’s Castle Rock.

When Abigail agreed to move to Soap Lake, Washington, for her husband’s research, she expected old-growth forests and craft beer, folksy neighbors and the world’s largest lava lamp. Instead, after her husband jets off to Poland for a research trip, she finds herself alone, in a town surrounded by sand and haunted by its own urban legends.

But when a young boy runs through the desert into Abigail’s arms, her life becomes entwined with his and the questions surrounding the death of his mother, Esme. In Abigail’s search for answers, she enlists the help of a recovering addict turned librarian, a grieving brother, a broken motel owner and a mentally shattered conspiracy theorist to unearth Esme’s tragic past, the town’s violent history and the secret magic locked in the lake her husband was sent there to study.

As she gets closer to the answers, past and present crimes begin to collide, and Abigail finds herself gaining the unwelcome attention of the town’s unofficial mascot, the rubber-suited orchard stalker known as TreeTop, a specter who seems to be lurking in every dark shadow and around every shady corner.

A sweeping, decade-spanning mystery brimming with quirky characters and puzzle-hunt scenarios, Midnight in Soap Lake is a modern-day Twin Peaks—a rich, expansive universe that readers will enter and never forget.

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The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed. June 2025.

Separated by ten thousand years, a team of scientists and their test subject must work together to save the human species―before it’s too late . . .

With humanity facing imminent extinction, the Centauri Project scientists use technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth’s future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches for evidence of remnant populations. He has a protocol to follow and is determined to do so to the bitter end―though he knows he’s probably searching in vain, stranded on an uninhabited planet silently orbiting the sun.

Meanwhile, back in 2068 AD, a devastating hyperpandemic has quelled all talk of interstellar travel and thrown the future of humanity into grave doubt. Four surviving members of the Centauri team board a vintage solar-powered sailing yacht for a harrowing and unlikely journey in search of a second test subject. Their destination is a small volcanic island north of Sicily rumored to harbor that rarest of creatures: a woman capable of getting pregnant, thereby ensuring this generation of Homo sapiens isn’t the last. But first they must make it halfway across the post-apocalyptic globe, risking heatwaves, oceanic megastorms, murderous gangs, deranged cult leaders, a volcanic eruption, and the dangerous microbes that continue to circulate through the planet’s atmosphere.

A finalist for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, The Afterlife Project encompasses a desperate quest for the key to the future of humanity, an impossible love story, and a search for meaning across the inconceivable vastness of geological time.

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Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay. May 2025.

From the bestselling author of If Something Happens to Me, comes one of the year’s most anticipated thrillers.

In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up at dinner.

At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon, the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.

Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella—The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them—come from five very different families. What led them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril or a threat to the friend group from within?

Told through multiple points of view in past and present—and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift—Parents Weekend explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family.

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House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama. August 2025.

A young woman is drawn into a dangerous game after being invited to the mazelike home of her childhood friend, a rumored witch, in this gothic horror set in 1986 Philippines.

Josephine del Rosario feels like a pariah in her town. Long ago orphaned after her father’s political campaign ended in tragedy, she’s all alone, taking care of the family home while her older brother is off in Manila, where a revolution brews. And it’s starting to feel like he’s abandoning her.

When she receives a letter from a cherished childhood friend, Hiraya, inviting her to play a game, she jumps at the reason for leaving town. Josephine will have whatever her heart desires if she wins. Maybe she can change her life. It doesn’t matter that dark rumors have always surrounded Hiraya.

Except Hiraya’s house is strange—labyrinthine and huge, and something seems to be following Josephine everywhere she turns. What’s worse is there’s something her old friend isn’t telling her.

There is something insidious about this invitation, and if Josephine isn’t careful, she’ll find that change is sometimes bought with blood.

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Going Home in the Dark by Dean Koontz. May 2025.

When hometown horrors come back to haunt, friendship is salvation in a novel about childhood fears and buried secrets by #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense Dean Koontz.

As kids, outcasts Rebecca, Bobby, Spencer, and Ernie were inseparable friends in the idyllic town of Maple Grove. Three left to pursue lofty dreams―and achieved them. Only Ernie never left. When he falls into a coma, his three amigos feel an urgent need to return home. Don’t they remember people lapsing into comas back then? And those people always awoke…didn’t they?

After two decades, not a lot has changed in Maple Grove, especially Ernie’s obnoxious, scary mother. But Rebecca, Bobby, and Spencer begin to remember a hulking, murderous figure and weirdness piled on mystery that they were made to forget. As Ernie sinks deeper into darkness, something strange awaits any friend who tries to save him.

For Rebecca, Bobby, and Spencer, time is running out to remember the terrors of the past in a perfect town where nothing is what it seems. For Maple Grove, it’s a chance to have the “four amigos,” as they once called themselves, back in its grasp.

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Esperance by Adam Oyebanji. May 2025.

An impossible Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

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Do any of these sound good to you too?