Books We Loved, Oct. 2026

Here we are in mid-October, Halloween straight ahead and the holiday season waiting in the wings for its cue. Before all the mad rush begins, we’d like to recommend three new books we loved, all written in the last year or two—the first futuristic, the second a memoir, and the third historical. Perhaps one or all of them will help you settle in before the six weeks of preparation and celebration that characterize the end of the year.

Justin C. Key, The Hospital at the End of the World (Harper, 2026)

Author and psychiatrist Justin C. Key explores the tension between AI global decisions and the individual human touch, using the medical field as a crucible, in The Hospital at the End of the World.

The novel begins with a road trip that calls to mind Shepherd Peng’s The Book of M. Unexpected encounters turn into lasting friendships as our narrator, Pok, flees through a dystopian landscape on the way to New Orleans.

Pok is the son of a physician in New York, where the ubiquitous AI company shepherd (lower case intentional) controls daily life, including medical care, through algorithms. Pok’s father worked at a shepherd hospital, but insisted his son apply at the last human-led hospital in New Orleans, Hippocrates. Pok looked forward to a bright future in cutting-edge medicine at a shepherd hospital instead.

Then, the unexpected death of his father created suspicion that the AI conglomerate might be involved. Forced into flight after a friend tells him he’s in danger, Pok ends up in Hippocrates, where he finds momentary safety and comradeship in their medical school. But tangled family secrets emerge, and shepherd’s acquisition plan for the last remaining human hospital unfolds.—GM

Deborah K. Shepherd, An Old Man’s Darling (Heliotrope Books, 2026)

Author Deborah Shepherd is in her early seventies and living in Maine in 2019 when she finds an old valise that hasn’t been opened in decades. The love letters that spill forth from it, and the memories they conjure, are the point at which her beautifully written, thought-provoking memoir begins. It is 1968, and the world is different than it is now. The women’s liberation movement has begun in theory, but it hasn’t really taken hold yet. Watching its progression through young Deborah’s eyes, along with the other cultural turns that will mark the years that follow, would make for a worthwhile read in itself, but Deborah has a love story to tell, one that is both beautiful and tragic.

Deborah’s father is dead more than two years already when her story begins. Not only did he die young, but Deborah has come to believe his death is connected to her behavior. Her mother doesn’t even pretend to be her friend. Deborah tries college but drops out to follow some musician friends from Tucson to Brooklyn, where she soon finds herself acting as den mother to a bunch of heroin addicts. With no place else to go, she moves in with an aunt and finds a job working as a library assistant at a consulting firm in NYC.

It is there, at work, that she meets Bill, “one of several old white men” at the company. He’s a nice guy, and he seems to be genuinely interested in her as a person. This is something she hasn’t really encountered to that point, and putting her body image issues aside, she allows their friendship to develop into something more. The fact that he is thirty-four years her senior is one of many considerations that keep Deborah and Bill from celebrating their love for each other publicly.

Love is love. Those lucky enough to find it are likely to stick with it, in spite of what it may look like to other people or how it might impact others’ lives. Readers who have ever pushed obstacles aside to follow their own hearts will cherish the unflinching honesty with which Deborah tells her story, and perhaps look back at their own romantic encounters with a more objective eye.—JS

Christina Ståhle, Before He Was Red (Pebble Press, 2025)

Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman not only set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but also crossed the path of a prince from the House of Osman begs for an answer.

Christina Ståhle tackles this problem with aplomb in Before He Was Red, her debut novel. The title refers to Abdulhamid’s later nickname, Red (in the sense of bloody), reflecting his use of terror and violence to suppress his enemies. Here he goes by the name Hamid, a choice made in part out of necessity (heirs to the Ottoman throne in the 1870s are not supposed to leave the palace) and in part to conceal his true identity from Flora and the numerous rebels, mostly students, massing in the streets of Istanbul to protest the actions, or lack thereof, of the government.

It’s a tense time, with the Russian Empire stirring up rebellion among the Christian populations of the Balkan states, still officially under Ottoman rule, and the British Empire doing its best to control the Turks both financially and politically. Ståhle does a wonderful job of juggling the historical, political, and romantic plot lines, maneuvering a large cast of characters, some of whom have multiple identities, without ever losing sight of the drama inherent in the romance between Flora and Hamid.—CPL