Suggested Reads for August 2025

Millstadt Library
5 days ago
8 min read

Looking for some book inspiration? Here are some suggested reads for August!

These books have been on the New York Times Bestseller List and at the top of the Millstadt Library's most circulated list. At the end of these lists, Nichole picks a book or two that she personally recommends.

We just reviewed The Amalfi Curse by Sarah Penner and are reading North Woods by Daniel Mason for our next Senior Center Book Club meeting on Monday, September 15 at 11 a.m.

Without further ado, here are this month's picks!

The Business Trip by Jessie Garcia

Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man—the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.

And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women— or what did they do to him?

Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?

344 pages, Hardcover | First published January 14, 2025

Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

For all humanity, it was, literally and figuratively, childhood’s end.

No one recognized the flashes of bright light that filled the sky. Survivors described colors they couldn’t name. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls.

On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip, looking forward to returning home to his wife and infant son, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived the atomic blast and got on a train to Nagasaki, only to be bombed again.

Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down on Hiroshima and saw the ground boiling. He refused to look at Nagasaki at all. Years afterward, he referred to what he witnessed as “the most bizarre and spectacular two events in the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”

From that first millionth of a second, people began to die in previously unimaginable ways. Near Hiroshima’s hypocenter, teeth were scattered on the ground, speckles of incandescent blood were converted to carbon steel, a child’s marbles melted to blobs of molten glass.

From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked calcium in growing bones and which, ten years after, filled entire hospitals with a shocking nuclear weapons, more than anything else, were child-killers.

Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not.

328 pages, Hardcover | Published August 5, 2025

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle

Lucky Day is the newest novel of terror from Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays, where one woman must go up against the most horrifying concept of all: nothing.

Vera is a survivor of a global catastrophe known as the Low Probability Event, but she definitely isn't thriving. Once a passionate professor of statistics, she no longer finds meaning in anything at all.

But when problematic government agent Layne knocks on her door, she's the only one who can help him uncover the connection between deadly spates of absurdity and an improbably lucky casino. What's happening in Vegas isn't staying there, and the world is at risk of another disaster.

When it comes to Chuck Tingle, the only thing more terrifying than a serious horror novel is an absurd one...

240 pages, Hardcover | First published August 12, 2025

Mona's Eyes by Thomas Schlesser

Fifty-two weeks. That's all the time Mona has left to learn about beauty before she loses her eyesight forever.

Fifty-two works of art. Every Wednesday, Mona's grandfather picks her up after school and takes her to see a great work of art.

Fifty-two chapters. Together, on their visit to Paris' museums, Mona and her grandfather will experience enchantment and sadness.

Above all, they will grow ever closer and learn to lean on each other. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona will discover not only the power of art, but also the meaning of generosity, doubt, melancholy, and loss. A profound, beautifully crafted novel about the fullness of life and an enthralling guide to the world's most renowned art, Mona's Eyes is a moving story about the bond between a young girl and her grandfather.

368 pages, Kindle Edition | First published January 31, 2024

Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.

Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.

Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.

She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.

Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.

She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:

Jet is going to solve her own murder.

392 pages, Hardcover | First published July 17, 2025

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.

357 pages, Hardcover | First published July 15, 2025

Something to Look Forward To: Fictions by Fannie Flagg

Joyful and surprising interconnected stories that celebrate the ways people from all across America are learning to cope and to connect in a changing world—from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

Fannie Flagg once said that what the world needs now is a good laugh. And that is what she gives us in these thirty warmhearted, often hilarious, always surprising stories about Americans finding clever ways of dealing with the curveballs life throws at us.

We meet Velma from Kansas, a loving great-grandmother who struggles to bridge the generational divide with her great-grandchild in California. Why, for instance, does her great-grandchild sign letters to Velma with “(they/them)”? We cheer for Helen, in Ithaca, New York, who takes an audacious course of action when her husband leaves her for a younger woman. Four men in Bent Fork, Wyoming, make a bold decision after learning that the café where they eat breakfast every day is about to be sold to a stranger from out of town. And observing them all is Special Agent Frawley, an odd visitor from another planet, sent to Earth to figure out what makes human beings tick, only to fall in love with one of them—and with her cat.

With her infectious humor, wild imagination, and her great understanding of Americans—and of the human heart—Fannie Flagg holds up a mirror to all of us and lets us laugh at the sometimes eccentric, sometimes brilliant ways people learn to deal with and, ultimately, prevail over life’s challenges.

Genres: Short Stories | Fiction | Humor | Literary Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover | Expected publication August 19, 2025

NICHOLE'S RECOMMENDATIONS

I've been on a binge of bloodthirsty novels lately - I'm sure I'll get into some romance in a month or so, but until then, here's another fun book full of the red stuff.

If you've ever watched Dexter from HBO and liked it, even a little, then you're going to love the books the show is based off of.

Lindsay writes Dexter as a charming, self-depricating monster disguised as a human and it really is a great read. The writing is witty and sharp and the characters are enjoyable. Of course, there's also fun mysteries to solve and bodies to dispose of.

Some of it can be pretty dark and descriptive, but the majority of this book and the rest of the series is not. It's really more of pockets of horror. Although the term "yodeling potato" is a new favorite. (It's in book two of the series.)

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep's clothing. He's handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He's a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened—of himself or some other fiend.

288 pages, Paperback | First published May 5, 2004

*all descriptions of the novels and the book covers are from GoodReads.com