Emerging writers take center stage in Barnes & Noble’s annual Children’s & YA Book Awards, which are selected by booksellers across the U.S.

The 2026 winners are:

• 🏆 School for Thieves by Peter Burns (Overall Winner): A young pickpocket is invited to an exclusive boarding school for thieves in this middle grade adventure.
• 🏆 Broken by X. Fang (Picture Book): A funny and touching story about a young girl who learns important lessons about guilt and forgiveness after she breaks her grandmother’s favorite cup
• 🏆 The Secret Astronomers by Jessica Walker (Young Adult): An illustrated epistolary novel told through the notes and drawings two high school students share in an old astronomy textbook

See all of the books that made the 2026 shortlist.

Whatever your preferred literary cope, there’s something for you in this week’s new books.

David Sedaris explores the many roles he plays—traveler, brother, caretaker, friend—in his latest essay collection , which Publishers Weekly called "among the best of his career." Matt Haig returns to the world of his 2020 smash hit The Midnight Library with a time-travel love story. And Máire Roche delivers a whimsical gay romantasy with the best tagline we’ve seen all year: "Two heroes. One brain cell."

Also hitting shelves this week:

• ☕️ The conclusion of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series
• 🇺🇸 The Declaration of Independence gets a comprehensive biography
• 🏛️ An invitation to get excited about really old books
• 🍰 A celebration of Marilyn Monroe’s literary life in honor of her 100th birthday

📓 Curate your TBR with Book Riot’s New Release Index when you join All Access.

What is a happily ever after really worth?

In The Divorce, #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author Freida McFadden delivers a razor-sharp, subversive thriller where love curdles into vengeance, and survival becomes the most dangerous game of all.

Read the gripping tale of two women with deadly secrets who go head-to-head over the "perfect life" they each want. Subversive, tense, and pulse-pounding, this is Freida at her finest. Booklist says: "Savvy McFadden readers will be bracing themselves for her trademark twists, which will leave them rapidly turning the pages to get to the thrilling conclusion.”

Yesterday was Memorial Day in the U.S., and it was also the intergalactic holiday known as Towel Day in honor of Douglas Adams.

• Adams was drunk in a field in Vienna when he first had the idea that would become The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

His unique blend of comedy and science fiction was inspired by Monty Python and Doctor Who, and it went on to inspire a Radiohead album, countless tech bros who misunderstood Adams’s whole vibe, and the names of two asteroids, a fish species, and a moth species. Dude had range!

He also had a singular talent for naming characters. Do you know which of these is not a real character in H2G2? Answer in the endnotes.

• Zaphod Beeblebrox
• Phartiphukbolz
• Slartibartfast
• Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

🛸 Learn all about this legendary read on Zero to Well-Read.

Enrollment for Pizza Hut’s Summer 2026 Book It program opened May 1st and will officially kick off June 1st.

• The much-beloved reading challenge rewards pre-K through 6th-grade readers with personal pan pizzas for reaching their parent-set reading goals.
• Kids can earn one pizza per month for June, July, and August if they meet their reading goals for 15 days of each of those months, with the goal ranging from 20 minutes to 50 minutes per day, depending on what the parents have decided.

Setting goals, marking them complete, and redeeming the reward certificates all happen through the Book It App, and parents can manage multiple children under their account. (Note that the number of free pizzas per household is capped at five per month.)

Begun in 1984 (right when this writer was in prime summer reading challenge years), the Book It program reaches more than 14 million children per year. The program also provides some supporting materials, including printable goal trackers and discussion questions, on its resource pages.

For fans of Sex Education, Normal People, and One Day

In Taylor Romagnoli’s Crash Into Me, two people fighting different battles—disordered eating and drug abuse—find each other and embark on the messy, complicated work of learning how to be better people for themselves and the people they care about. This Watty Award-winning story is a raw, emotional romance about falling for someone while you’re still figuring out how to show up for yourself.

Now available in print from Anna Todd’s Frayed Pages x Wattpad Books.

You say, generational saga about Black women. I say, give it here.

I will tell you, though, that picking up African American historical fiction is a personal bracing exercise. We don’t have the option of looking back without confronting slavery, segregation, oppression, and all manner of racial atrocities.

This layer of history is as personal and painful to visit in stories real and imagined as it is undeniable. And in one of my favorite new releases of 2026 so far, The Seven Daughters of Dupree  by Nikesha Elise Williams, generational trauma born from the murder of an enslaved woman metastasizes into a curse that haunts the maternal bloodline of her descendants, following them from 19th-century Land’s End, Alabama to 1990s Chicago, Illinois. — SZW

➡️ Read the full review.

Cynthia Gómez is the author of Muñeca, out June 2nd from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Below, she discusses why she chose to write a Latine Gothic novel.

Close your eyes and picture a classic Gothic novel cover. (Or disable “AI results” and search for that phrase in Google Images.) Chances are fairly high that at least one of the pictures in your head and/or on your screen was of a young white woman running from a mansion in a nightgown, an image and phrase so clichéd that it’s spawned multiple blogs and at least one podcast. But you know what those novels very rarely concern themselves with? 

Just who was washing all those gowns, anyway? And what might their lives and their interiority—and their political agenda—bring to the Gothic?

That’s one of the questions I wanted to explore in Muñeca. Nati, my protagonist, knows all about [washing nightgowns], but she’s actually there to play a different Gothic role: the domestic employee who occupies a liminal class position. She serves as a caregiver for Violeta, a young heiress who’s completely paralyzed, unable to move or speak.

Nati learns quickly that she’s really been hired to keep Violeta company, by a family that can’t be bothered to do so themselves. (Nati definitely has her own agenda, involving spells and witchcraft that were delightfully fun to write.)

The liminal figure is there in the Gothic to bring in simmering class tension—and Nati’s is a very particular kind. Muñeca is set in 1968, and Nati comes into the wealthy house from her queer found family, with her suitcase of radical books and songs from the civil rights movement and the class-conscious politics she learned from her mother, who once worked as a maid in that very house.

Because I wanted to write a novel about the politics and the worldview of the working class that those women are part of: people who, unlike their wealthy employers, have never earned their existence from colonization or subjugation.

Nati wants nothing more than freedom: for herself, for the woman she comes to love, and for everyone else who’s had freedom denied them. At what price that freedom might come, and who is faced with paying it,  I would not dream of spoiling for you.

ThriftBooks’ 500 Billion Page Challenge ~ #GetYourPagesIn

A decade ago, Americans read nearly 500 billion pages a year. Then something shifted. We’re now reading 200 billion fewer pages. ThriftBooks is here to change that. Join the challenge today!

Did you know? Alan Hollinghurst collects paintings by British disciples of the American artist James Whistler.

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