Books That Don’t Flinch: Real, Raw, Unforgiving Literary Fiction

26 Jun 2025

Books That Don’t Flinch: Real, Raw, Unforgiving Literary Fiction

Unvarnished, unfiltered, unforgettable. These novels refuse easy answers, delving into trauma, identity, and all the things polite stories leave out. For readers who want to feel cracked open, not comforted.

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The Me I Left Behind (Tuckaway Bay Book 4)

by Madeleine Jaimes

Release Date: June 24, 2025

Maggie Oliver has everything—beautiful children, a lovely home, and financial security—but she’s losing herself. When she discovers her husband has a secret family in another country, her life starts to unravel. Then a family tragedy changes everything, and her path to finding herself takes an unexpected turn.

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Finding Scarlet

by Kirsten Pursell

Release Date: May 1, 2025

Blending romance and deeper emotional themes, follow Scarlet as she starts over after divorce: friendships, love, and a place to call home. A divorced woman’s book club was supposed to be like-minded women, but things aren’t that easy in a small town. *Note: This is the same content as The Scarlet D but with a new title and cover.

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Forever, Cedar Key (Michael Presley Bobbitt’s Cedar Key Trilogy Book 2)

by Michael Presley Bobbitt

Release Date: June 7, 2025

A year has passed since the old world ended in a terrible flash. Just as the island of Cedar Key is settling into a new way of living, a figure from its past arrives on the horizon, commanding a fleet of sailing ships. A dark chapter from Cedar Key’s history is reopened in the devastated present, and now war is coming, inexorable as the tides.

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The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

Release Date: June 24, 2025

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

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Bug Hollow

by Michelle Huneven

Release Date: June 17, 2025

When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.

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Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Release Date: June 3, 2025

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

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