Start Fresh With 9 Books for New Beginnings

Nora Seed has lived a life of misery and regret. She feels like all she’s ever done is let everyone down. Not anymore. Not with the Midnight Library. Through the books, she gets to live differently. Make new choices, undo all her past mistakes, and avoid all of her deepest regrets. 

But not every new experience leads to happiness or fulfilment, and she soon finds herself making choices that put not just the library, but herself in danger. To save them both, Nora has to answer what the best way to live is before time runs out.

Things in A.J. Fikry’s life are not going according to plan. His wife is dead, his bookstore is struggling, and someone just stole his prized collection of Poe poems. Just as he withdraws from the people around him, a package arrives on his doorstep. 

In it is the one thing that might make him happy again: the ability to see everything differently. Soon, the locals can’t help but notice the change in A.J., and they’re not the only ones. As his new perspective changes how life unfolds, A.J. himself is surprised when it takes a turn he never saw coming.

Allan Karlsson knows the nursing home is his last stop. He should be happy to ride out his last days in peace. The only problem is, he’s in good health and has more living to do. The night of his 100^th birthday celebration, instead of celebrating, Allan escapes out of his window in his slippers. 

It should be the adventure of a lifetime. But for someone like Allan, who already lived larger than life and was part of some of the most important events in the 20^th century, he knows that whatever happens will be entirely unexpected.

As a drought grips the Great Plains in 1934, millions find themselves out of work. The Great Depression struck hard, and now the Dust Bowl era is kicking in with a vengeance. 

Like so many of her neighbors, Elsa Martinelli faces a daunting choice. Stay and fight for her land, or pick up and start over in California. Neither path will be easy. 

But Kristin Hannah, premier author of historical fiction she is, shows that both choices will require all of her courage and demand a massive sacrifice.

Ove is not a friendly man. Those who know him would describe him as a curmudgeon. It’s not that he’s unfriendly, exactly. He just has priorities. Standards. Principles. It isn’t his fault that the rest of the world doesn’t meet them. 

The last thing he needs is a chatty neighbor with two even chattier daughters moving in next door. And he really doesn’t need them to flatten his mailbox. 

But sometimes what we want and what we need are two different things. In characteristic Fredrik Backman fashion, Ove is about to discover that sometimes friendship strikes from the most unlikely of places.

When you have everything, you should be happy. Especially when you’re young, thin, pretty, and graduated from Columbia. But for our unnamed narrator, there’s something missing. 

She can’t find it in her easy job at a hip art gallery, or her Upper East Side apartment. Not even in her trust fund. 

But when she stumbles into the care of what might be the worst psychiatrists in literature, she’s about to discover an entirely new perspective on her life.

Taro lives alone in a building destined for demolition. He’s divorced and cut off from his family, and most of his neighbors have already left. All except one. 

Nishi lives upstairs, but every day she passes the sky-blue house next door. That house soon becomes a focus for both Taro and Nishi. It represents everything they loved, everything they lost, and everything they might discover again.

Recently retired and stuck in a small English cottage with his wife, Harold Fry can’t do anything right. Not according to his wife anyway. She’s irritated by everything he does. It’s not the life he once imagined, where one day blends into the next. 

But when he receives a letter from Queenie Hennessey, a woman from his past, saying goodbye, he’s struck by the need to say goodbye. And on the way to mail his letter, he’s struck again by the unshakeable need to deliver his message in person. 

It’s six hundred miles to the hospice. Harold Fry intends to walk every last one of them, leading to a journey of memory, discovery, and everything in between.

An Oprah's Book Club pick, The Sweetness of Water is set after the Civil War and in the days following the Emancipation Proclamation, when brothers Prentiss and Landry find themselves starting their lives over. They work on a farm to save money to find their mother, who was sold years earlier. 

Meanwhile, two Confederate soldiers carry on a secret love affair, only to be discovered. As the chaos of that secret ripples through the small community, it’s the farmer’s wife, Isabelle, who becomes their unlikely leader, offering healing and hope to those who need it most.