Penguin Random House Books Featured in Apple’s “Best of the Year So Far” List!

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

What is wrong meets what feels right in this romance set in Italy by the New York Times bestselling author of Deep End. Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life. Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him. It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life. But not everything is as it seems—and clichés sometimes become plot twists. When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs—even if it’s a problematic one.

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

From the New York Times bestselling poet and author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Ocean, Vuong returns with his heart-rending novel about friendship as salvation and the stories to which we cling in the face of anguish.

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

How do you find yourself after you lose the one you loved the most? Grieving the loss of her best friend, a young woman’s life is turned upside down when she meets a grumpy stranger who swears he can help her live again, in this heartwarming, slow-burn romance by the author of Ready or Not.

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

A glorious chronicle of a life like none other—enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering—and a testament to the world-changing power of Black motherhood.

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang’s new novel tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

Listed on Apple’s 2025 “Best Books of the Year So Far” list

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.

Winner of the Westport Prize for Literature Finalist for New American Voices Award and Pacific Northwest Book Award Best Book of the Year at TIME, Apple, Debutiful, Electric Literature, and Goodreads Best Book of the Month at Oprah Daily, Apple Books, Alta Journal, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, The Roots, Write or Die, and Southern Review of Books Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.