WOMEN’S FRIENDSHIP / FICTION

Clutch
By Emily Nemens

Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella and Carson formed a rare bond. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID, childbirth and mid-career challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming next.

HISTORICAL FICTION / THRILLER

White River Crossing
By Ian McGuire

A breathtaking and cinematic novel about the lust for gold and its bloody consequences, set in the unforgiving landscape of the sub-Arctic Canadian wilderness, from the acclaimed author of The North Water.

Amid a gold-hunting expedition, an act of violence leads to disastrous consequences as the book transports us back to the furthest edges of the 18th-century British empire, where two radically different worlds – Indigenous and European – collide with calamitous and deadly results.