Class It Up
Beach read queen Elin Hilderbrand went back to school—with daughter and coauthor Shelby Cunningham—in 2025’s The Academy, set at a fictional Massachusetts prep school. (Cunningham is an alum of the very real St. George’s School in Rhode Island.) The writing duo has re-registered for The Thoroughbreds, #1 on our hardcover fiction list. “Neither students nor administrators can escape drama in this irresistible follow-up,” according to our review.
Skull and Bones
New England is practically synonymous with fall, so it’s fitting that two new novels on our hardcover fiction list are set at fictional, or fictionalized, schools in the region. One notch below The Thoroughbreds, Leigh Bardugo’s Dead Beat wraps up the dark academia trilogy she launched with 2019’s Ninth House and continued with 2023’s Hell Bent, set at an alternate version of Yale. Amazon Studios won the rights to the first book shortly after its release. As Bardugo recalled in an unrelated discussion hosted by PW, “When I turned in the first draft of a pilot for Ninth House, the execs said it was too funny and not enough like the book—which was confusing because I wrote the book.”
Exit Party
Exit Party by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel takes the #6 spot on our hardcover fiction list. Our starred review said, “Mandel’s assured tale offers bracing commentary on the dangers of divisiveness and surveillance.”
Cooking the Books
A trio of debut cookbooks land on our hardcover nonfiction list. At #3, Oversharing is by Cortney “Cheese Gal” LaCorte (735K Instagram followers), who got her start putting together cheese boards for country music stars in Nashville. Tanya Sichynsky, who writes the Veggie newsletter for New York Times Cooking, gathers 101 recipes in Veg Everything, #9 on our list. And at #15, Eat (Like) the Rich is a “delightfully profane recipe collection,” per our starred review, by Olivia Tiedemann, whose work as a private chef in the Hamptons has nabbed her 4.3 million Instagram followers.
