Adult Activity Challenge 2026: Books Published in 2025

"There can be no victory without betrayal. Hara Duja Gatdula, queen of the island nation of Maynara, holds the divine power to move the earth. But her strength is failing and the line of succession gives her little comfort. Her heir, Laya, is a danger--a petty and passionate princess who wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference. Circling the throne is Imeria Kulaw--the matriarch of a traitorous rival family who wields recklessly...

"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...

"When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist...

"Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood-overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences-swoops in and stays. Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history...

"A lifetime ago, Ray 'Spike' Thorns was a well-regarded caretaker on a boarding school's grounds. These days, he lives the life of a recluse in a house rammed with hoarded junk, alone and disconnected from family or anyone he might have at one time considered a friend. When his next-door neighbor drops dead on Spike's doorstep, a case of mistaken identity ensues: according to the police, the hospital, the doctors--everyone--Spike is dead. Spike wants...

"A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who...

""You knew I'd write a book about you someday." Our narrator understands good love stories--their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her...

Stephanie St. Clair, famously known as Madame Queen, rose from West Indian immigrant to the powerful leader of Harlem's numbers game in the 1920s. A savvy businesswoman and fierce advocate for her community, she defied the criminal underworld and systemic racism, becoming a legend often overshadowed by her male contemporaries. This biography reclaims her rightful place in history.

"Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband--with Steph and her younger sister in tow--to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the Moon....

"Raised by her literary icon father Carson Wells, Alison Wells always felt loved, even though her mother died when she was a teen. But when she takes a DNA test on a whim and discovers she has a sister she never knew about, it's clear there are things her father didn't tell her before he died. Determined to meet Juniper-her half-sister-and unravel the truth of what happened all those years ago, Ali finds herself taking a job as Juniper's intern. She'll...