Skip to main content

Features

End-of-the-Year Contest 2025

Congratulations to the winners of our 2025 End-of-the-Year contest! One reader received all 42 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2025, while seven others won six of these titles.
 
You can see all the winners below, along with 2025's Bets On selections.
 
If you would like to know more about these books, be sure to check out this video and podcast where Carol talks about each of her 42 picks.

Wally Lamb, author of The River Is Waiting

New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown Corby Ledbetter’s marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation still might be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?

The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb

June 2025

Wow is the first word that I use to describe this powerful and moving work from Wally Lamb. I finished THE RIVER IS WAITING last Saturday morning and went through most of the rest of the weekend ruminating about it.

I will say that this is not a happy book. In fact, there is a lot of sadness woven between its pages. There are moments when you will want to knock characters’ heads together. There are other times when you will have so much sympathy and know that this novel will have you seeing incarceration up close in a raw way.

Week of May 18, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of May 18th include THE RIVER IS WAITING by Wally Lamb, which tells the propulsive story of a young father who, after an unbearable tragedy, reckons with the possibility of atonement for the unforgivable; Megan Abbott's EL DORADO DRIVE, a simmering, atmospheric novel of friendship and betrayal that follows a women-led pyramid scheme in suburban Detroit; GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE, a sweeping novel from Emily Henry that finds two writers competing for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve; THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW, Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son, James; and MURDER IN THE DOLLHOUSE  by Rich Cohen, a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Jennifer Dulos and the aftershocks that rattled a wealthy suburb.