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#1 New York Times Bestseller

A 2025 best book of the year so far by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and more

“Careless People is darkly funny and genuinely shocking...Not only does [Sarah Wynn-Williams] have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods." -Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times 

“When one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this — it’s time to pull out all the stops.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post 

An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them. 

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • A revealing personal life story like no other—enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering—and a testament to the world-making power of Black motherhood

“A fascinating memoir of Tina Knowles’s journey to become the global figure she is today.”—Oprah Winfrey

“You are Celestine,” she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. “Like my sister and my grandmother.” And there, under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me.

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.

Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world, with extended family on every other porch and the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot. But as the realities of race and the limitations of girlhood set in, she begins to dream of a more grandiose world. Her instincts and impulsive nature drive her far beyond the shores of Texas to discover the life awaiting her on the other side of childhood.

That life’s journey—through grief and tragedy, creative and romantic risks and turmoil, the nurturing of superstar offspring and of her own special gifts—is the remarkable story she shares with readers here. This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It’s one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America—and the wisdom that women pass on to one another, mothers to daughters, across generations.

“The best thriller of 2025.” —The Boston Globe * “Genius.” —The Washington Post

“A literary thriller of the highest order” (Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Couple), Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time after an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is an “unputdownable” (Real Simple) and redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller! 

“Comprehensive, enthralling . . . Mark Twain flows like the Mississippi River, its prose propelled by Mark Twain’s own exuberance.” —The Boston Globe

“Chernow writes with such ease and clarity . . . For all its length and detail, [Mark Twain] is deeply absorbing throughout.” — The Washington Post

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.

In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.

A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade.



Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.



Journalist Alexander Clapp spent two years roaming five continents to report deep inside the world of Javanese recycling gangsters, cruise ship dismantlers in the Aegean, Tanzanian plastic pickers, whistle-blowing environmentalists throughout the jungles of Guatemala, and a community of Ghanaian boys who burn Western cellphones and televisions for cents an hour, to tell readers what he has figured out: While some trash gets tossed onto roadsides or buried underground, much of it actually lives a secret hot potato second life, getting shipped, sold, re-sold, or smuggled from one country to another, often with devastating consequences for the poorest nations of the world. 



Waste Wars is a jaw-dropping exposé of how and why, for the last forty years, our garbage -- the stuff we deem so worthless we think nothing of throwing it away -- has spawned a massive, globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar economy, one that offloads our consumption footprints onto distant continents, pristine landscapes, and unsuspecting populations. If the handling of our trash reveals deeper truths about our Western society, what does the globalized business of garbage say about our world today? And what does it say about us?

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! ∙ A radiant escape to the lake from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After and This Summer Will Be Different

As featured in The New York Times ∙ People ∙ Good Morning America ∙ The Washington Post ∙ Cosmopolitan ∙ TODAY ∙ USA Today ∙ Harper's Bazaar ∙ Glamour ∙ E! News ∙ Buzzfeed ∙ ELLE ∙ Us Weekly ∙ The New York Post ∙ FIRST for Women ∙ Woman's World ∙ Katie Couric Media ∙ SheReads ∙ and more!

I never anticipated Charlie Florek.

Good things happen at the lake. That’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and it’s true. Alice spent just one summer there at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen—it’s where she took that photo, the one of three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat, the image that changed her life.

Now Alice lives behind a lens. As a photographer, she’s most comfortable on the sidelines, letting other people shine. Lately though, she’s been itching for something more, and when Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice comes up with a plan for them both: another summer in that magical place, Barry’s Bay. But as soon as they settle in, their peace is disrupted by the roar of a familiar yellow boat, and the man driving it.

Charlie Florek was nineteen when Alice took his photo from afar. Now he’s all grown up—a shameless flirt, who manages to make Nan laugh and Alice long to be seventeen again, when life was simpler, when taking pictures was just for fun. Sun-slanted days and warm nights out on the lake with Charlie are a balm for Alice’s soul, but when she looks up and sees his piercing green gaze directly on her, she begins to worry for her heart.

Because Alice sees people—that’s why she is so good at what she does—but she’s never met someone who looks and sees her right back.

The instant New York Times bestseller • Oprah’s Book Club Pick • Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

“Stunning . . . A heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.” —Oprah Winfrey

“Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Propulsive and powerful. . . A gripping roller coaster ride of escalating danger.” —New York Times Book Review
“Pick up the novel everyone will be talking about.” —The Atlantic
“Dark, riveting, and accomplished.” —Washington Post

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns. 

"[A] sizzling summer read that concludes with a few unexpected twists.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution