Books We Loved, Sep. 2025

How did it get to be September already? Seems like yesterday that we were celebrating Memorial Day, then July 4, yet here the kids are already back in school. So as the days shorten, even though it’s not yet cooling and not even officially autumn, it’s time to take a new look at the bookshelf and think of ways to relax after the increasing demands that September tends to impose. Here are three books we loved at Five Directions Press this month—one contemporary, two historical, very different in tone and intent but each engrossing in its own way—to get you started.

Liana De la Rosa, Gabriela and His Grace (Berkley, 2025)

I love a good romance—historical or contemporary. But what I really enjoy is a novel that takes me to a place and/or time that I don’t know much about, then brings it to life for me. Gabriela and His Grace (the third and last of Liana De la Rosa’s series featuring the Luna sisters) does that.

The background to all three novels is the Second Mexican Empire of the 1860s. What Emperor Napoleon III of France thought he was doing when he established his puppet, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, on the Mexican throne, I can barely imagine, but it was an imperial age and Napoleon no doubt felt the push to compete with the British in India and perhaps even his own uncle of the same name. In any case, Maximilian’s arrival was greeted with joy by monarchists and considerably less than joy by supporters of the ruling president of the Mexican Republic, Benito Juarez.

The Luna sisters and their parents are on the side of Juarez, but they have spent the two previous books in London after being shipped off for their own safety by their parents. Since her marriage, Isabel, the second sister, has returned home with her British husband. Gabriela, the heroine of this novel, decides to return as well after a harrowing incident in a London drawing room. Naturally, since this is a romance, she has no sooner set foot on the boat than she discovers one of her fellow passengers is Sebastian Brooks, the eleventh Duke of Whitfield, with whom she already has a contentious relationship. And if you can’t guess where things go from there, well, you need to read a lot more romances.

Although definitely on the steamy side, this is a fun story, well told and richly brought to life. You might even learn some Mexican history along the way. I know I did.

Find out more from my interview with Liana De la Rosa.

Katie Kitamura, Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025)

Audition is a psychological thriller narrated by an unnamed, middle-aged actor who is currently rehearsing for a new play in which she hopes to give the performance of her lifetime.

Her story begins with her going into a restaurant in the financial district of Manhattan to meet with a young man, Xavier, a stranger who first sought her out at the theater where she works, claiming that he needs to talk to her about something. He is already seated when she arrives, and as she joins him, she wonders if that is judgment she sees in the eyes of the waiter and a few diners, which causes her to ask herself what her intentions are and why she even agreed to come. They could have met just as easily for a quick cup of coffee.

While Xavier is eating his hamburger (she has two drinks but never touches her fish), and before he has a chance to explain what it is he’s after, the woman’s husband, Tomas, walks into the establishment and proceeds to move in their general direction. The woman is momentarily terrified that he will see her with the young man. She makes a half-hearted attempt to get his attention nonetheless, so as to confirm the integrity of the situation before he has a chance to make his own assessment. But either he doesn’t see her, or he pretends not to. He stops moving all at once, and after feeling around in his jacket pocket, as if for a phone or wallet, he turns abruptly and walks back out.

The woman, who has already admitted in her narration that she has handled her marriage carelessly in the past, must now add to her concerns what Tomas will have to say later, if in fact he did register the scene. Suddenly she no longer wants to be there. She tells Xavier that she must go and hurries to the door, too, but Tomas has already disappeared into the crowd.

This is not the last she sees of Xavier, of course. Not only does he turn up outside her apartment, still wanting to tell her something, but he has gotten the producer of the play to hire him as an assistant as well. Thereafter the narrative is driven as much by Xavier’s revelation—and its impact on the woman and Tomas—as it is by the woman’s extreme apprehension over a challenging transitional scene in the script that will have to be done perfectly if the play is to be a success.   

Katie Kitamura’s attention to detail is meticulous. Every scene is visual, mesmerizingly so, which is not to say that the work feels cluttered in any way. Her descriptions are precise, nuanced. The relationships among the characters, Tomas and Xavier and the narrator, change in accordance with their interactions with one another, so that the reader is continuously readjusting her suspicions about where the story is headed. And then, in the second half of this short novel, there is an even more significant shift, not only in the characters’ behaviors but in the reality they inhabit. It is as if they all walked out of the book and returned in different roles. Audition is wonderfully intense, brilliant—a rabbit hole into which discerning readers will be only too happy to enter.—JS

Chrystal Schleyer, A Rather Peculiar Poisoning (Park Row Books, 2025)

The publisher summarizes this novel as “Knives Out meets Bridgerton.” The Bridgerton part I’m not so sure of, but the Knives Out reference is spot-on. I would describe it rather as a contemporary version of Penmarric or any of the other Gothic novels I devoured in high school. Either way, it’s a fun read.

The basic idea goes like this. It’s 1910, or thereabouts (the story flips back and forth in time, within a range of about five years), and Asquith manor—a crumbling aristocratic estate in an unidentified county, presumably British—houses a wonderfully dysfunctional family. At the center of the story are two identical twins named Easton and Weston, whom almost no one can tell apart. Easton, being the elder by eight minutes, will inherit the property, while Weston gets nothing but a pittance.

The twins, being so close in age, compete in just about every arena, and they are both in love with the same girl: Eloise Sutcliffe, who lives nearby and whom they’ve both known since childhood. Eloise has a clear preference for Weston but no money, and she ends up engaged to Easton while Weston courts a wealthy heiress. Then Weston is poisoned, and tensions ramp up.

Although the book is billed as a whodunit, there is no investigation; the truth is gradually revealed through the shifting perspectives of past and present. Interesting, complex characters, an eerie atmosphere, and the sheer originality of the plot make this a novel worth savoring.

Find out more from my interview with Chrystal Schleyer.—CPL