Audiobook lovers, this is your time to shine! It’s officially a new year, and THP’s book team is stoked for what’s in store. Not only do we have 12 months of new audiobooks to round up, but we also have plenty of 2026 book releases we’re keeping our eyes on.
In the mood for a thriller? How about a fake dating celebrity romance? Whatever you’re feeling, our Sweet Listens column has something for you. Here are three January audiobooks to start off your new year right!
Content warning: The Honey POP encourages mindful listening and checking the author’s website for any additional content warnings.
Beth Is Dead By Katie Bernet
Image Source: Simon & Schuster
Let’s start off strong with a January audiobook that we couldn’t hit pause on! Katie Bernet’s debut novel, Beth is Dead, reimagines the classic Little Women story into a thriller. In case you couldn’t tell, Beth March is dead, and it’s up to her sisters Meg, Jo, and Amy to find out who killed her. As the investigation unravels, the bond between the March sisters begins to crack. Secrets and suspicions paint each one with a potential motive for getting rid of Beth. The audiobook alternates between each sister’s point of view, including Beth’s in the form of flashbacks. And the ultimate twist ending is too good!
Love Goes Viral By Alexander Berman, Camille Stochitch, & Estelle Laure
Image Source: Simon & Schuster
The next January audiobook on our radar is Love Goes Viral by Alexander Berman, Camille Stochitch, and Estelle Laure. A swoonworthy romance with fake dating and all-too-real social media moments, we loved diving into this audiobook. Love Thompson is a beloved influencer with dreams of becoming a music artist. When she gets cancelled after taking the fall for her boyfriend’s mistake, Love needs some serious PR magic. By that, she needs to date someone more down to earth. Someone like Austin Grey, a boy trying his best to keep his family’s diner afloat.
Finally, we have Jessica L. Cozzi’s We’ve Hit Turbulence, a second chance romance with a scenic Hawaiian backdrop. 2026 seems to be a big year for second chances, so we’re sat for this January audiobook! Olive Austin wants to surprise her long-distance boyfriend Jack in Hawaii, but she can’t help but feel that their relationship is doomed. Her hope for a peaceful 13-hour flight gets crushed when her seatmate turns out to be her ex-boyfriend Tyler, the person she never truly got over. Their initial awkwardness turns into a trip down memory lane, leaving Olive’s heart as conflicted as ever.
What do you think about our first Sweet Listens of the year? Which of these January audiobooks are you most interested in listening to? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
It’s the start of a new month, and we already can’t wait for the book releases we have in store for November. Just a hint: we have a highly anticipated historical fiction sequel, multiple YA romances, and a swashbuckling adult romantasy!
For today, we’re focusing on a sapphic YA romantasy debut. Brittany Johnson’s Deadly Ever After tells the story of two dead princesses on a journey to find true love and get their lives back. Have we won you over yet? Here are three of our favorite things about Deadly Ever After!
Image Source: Penguin Random House
Book Overview: Deadly Ever After
Content warnings: murder, graphic violence, death of loved ones, child abuse, verbal, emotional, and physical assault, poisoning, serious injuries, blood, weapons (Read at your discretion!)
Summary: Amala has spent her whole life trying to be the perfect princess: delicate, quiet, obedient. But when she’s murdered on the night of her wedding, her story is cut short before it begins.
Kha’dasia has been told her whole life that she is too rough, too loud, too much. She’s no ordinary princess but a ruthless warrior on a quest to fulfill her late brother’s dying wish. Except she dies before reaching her destination.
When both girls wake up in a cursed forest, the gods offer them a second chance at life—if they can find true love’s kiss. But there’s a catch, the gods warn. While the right kiss will save you, the wrong kiss will kill you.
On their journey, the princesses must overcome challenges that force them to face the truth of their lives…and their deaths. And as Amala and Kha’dasia grow closer, they can’t help but wonder if true love has been standing right in front of them all along.
Strength In Different Forms
One of the main things we love about Deadly Ever After is how well our two main characters complement each other’s strengths. Amala and Kha’dasia must work together and make it through the cursed landscape of the dead if they want the chance to get their old lives back. Though they have a rough start, these princesses grow into their strengths and face their past traumas. Amala offers emotional and mental strength, while Kha’dasia brings physical strength and even teaches Amala how to fight and protect herself.
The Romance Buildup
Deadly Ever After will sweep you away with the romantic tension between Amala and Kha’dasia! Amala thinks that finding her way to her new husband Vincent can satisfy the condition of true love’s kiss. On the other hand, Kha’dasia hasn’t ever been in love. That is, until she grows closer to Amala. We absolutely loved reading about their growing attraction and affection, hidden in the stolen glances and injury inspections. Then when neither character could deny their feelings by the end? That’s the good stuff!
Shattering Reality
On a more serious note, Deadly Ever After addresses topics like child abuse on a verbal, emotional, and physical level. We see the effects of having grown up in a hostile and unloving environment in how Amala views and reacts to the world, her mistakes, and especially her father. It takes Kha’dasia and Mya, a divine being, to help Amala unlearn the things her father forced her to believe. She finally allows herself to feel the rage she rightfully deserves to feel, no longer internalizing her father’s insults and lies.
Different forms of strength. Killer romantic tension. And a tale of female rage and empowerment. Brittany Johnson’s sapphic romantasy debut, Deadly Ever After, has us in a chokehold.
Deadly Ever After by Brittany Johnson goes on sale November 4th, and you can order a copy of it here!
What do you think of Brittany Johnson’s debut novel, Deadly Ever After? We want to know your thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
It has been far too long since we’ve read a speculative novel as powerful and political as Helena Haywoode Henry’s debut novel, Last Chance Live! This book centers around a reality TV show of the same name starring ten death row inmates between the ages of 18 to 21. The winner gains clemency, and the losers receive the death penalty within a week of exiting the show.
Last Chance Live! has all the makings of any popular reality show: drama, sabotage, secrets, and betrayals. Viewers root for and decide which contestant deserves a second chance at freedom. It sparks conversations among the general public and readers of which capital crimes can be forgiven, especially when the perpetrators are so young.
We sped through Last Chance Live! within a day, and we have a feeling it’ll stick with us for years to come. Its social commentary and themes of justice, mercy, and agency are too compelling to ignore. Here are three things that stood out to us about Helena Haywoode Henry’s Last Chance Live!
Image Source: Penguin Random House
Book Overview: Last Chance Live!
Content warnings: death, murder, death penalty, suicide, suicidal thoughts, bodies/corpses, prison, graphic violence, gore, torture, rape, sexual abuse, cutting, bullying, fatphobia, slurs, guns, car accident, attempted arson, swearing (Please read at your discretion!)
Summary:Last Chance Live! is the most popular reality show in America—and eighteen-year-old death row inmate Eternity Price’s last chance to live. Getting cast on the show could win her clemency preventing her execution… if she can convince the viewing audience she deserves a second chance. The catch? If America doesn’t vote for her, she loses the chance to appeal her sentence, and she’ll be executed within a week of being eliminated from the show. And since Eternity’s been unpopular her whole life, she’s terrified America won’t pick her. But any chance of getting out of prison and back to her little brother Sincere, no matter how slim, is better than rotting away in her cell.
Eternity never expected to find her first real friends in a reality TV house full of people battling for survival after being convicted of capital crimes, but that’s exactly what happens. So when she gets the opportunity to sabotage them and secure her own victory, she has a choice to make: protect the friendships and acceptance she’s always longed for at the cost of her own life, or sacrifice her newfound community. Eternity must ultimately decide what forgiveness, family, and freedom mean to her, and how far she’ll go to win a game where the stakes are literally life or death.
The Show’s Contestants
Last Chance Live! gives us a diverse group of young convicted criminals with a wide range of crimes. When we watch any reality show (or in this case, read about it), it’s easy to root for more than one contestant to win. But when the show’s sole winner gets freedom for a new life and the rest inevitably gets the death penalty, we learned not to get too attached to the characters. Even so, we had so many conflicted feelings toward each person, especially after the reveal of their crime. Like Eternity, the more the show went on, the more we wanted multiple contestants to survive and make it out.
Eternity’s Strategies
When the cast of Last Chance Live! are all death row inmates, it’s safe to say there are a lot of morally gray areas to consider. Eternity and the other contestants are fighting for their literal lives. They need to curry favor with the public, making sure their image on the show gives them the most votes. They also need to be ruthless no matter what. Eternity learns this the hard way after trying to set up an alliance with all the Black contestants. She twists and sabotages her way through each vote, somehow making it farther than she expected. But things come to a head when she starts to see how much her actions affect others, and she doesn’t only want herself to win anymore.
The Narration In Verse
Another thing that stood out to us in Last Chance Live! is the use of verse in Eternity’s narration. These poems allow us to slow our reading and really take in each word. We aren’t quite sure if there are any clear patterns behind each section of verse. And we never know when they’ll happen. They’re abrupt, cutting in to the prose and then reverting right back almost as if they didn’t happen. This unabridged access to Eternity’s thoughts puts us directly into her shoes, feeling her anxiety and terror as a result of her environment. Now we’re the ones in survival mode—in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode.
It didn’t take much for us to be hooked on Helene Haywoode Henry’s chilling speculative novel, Last Chance Live! From its themes of justice and agency to its masterful characterization and narration, we already want to reread it and uncover even more layers.
Last Chance Live! by Helena Haywoode Henry comes out October 7th, and you can order a copy of it here!
What do you think of the concept behind Last Chance Live! by Helena Haywoode Henry? Did you connect with her debut novel as much as we did? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
Summary: Thea has a secret. She can tell how long someone has left to live just by touching them. Not only that, but she can transfer life from one person to another—something she finds out the hard way when her best friend, Ruth, suffers a fatal head injury on a night out. Desperate to save her, Thea accidentally kills the man responsible and lets his life flow directly into Ruth.
Thea comes to understand that she has a godlike power, but how to use it quickly becomes a question of self-control. Is it really so wrong to take a little life from a bad person—say, a very annoying boss—and gift it to someone who’s truly good? Realizing she needs to harness her newfound skills, Thea creates an Ethical Guide to Murder. But as she embarks on her mission to punish the wicked and give the deserving more time, she finds good and bad aren’t as simple as she first thought.
How can she really know who deserves to live and die, and can she figure out her own rules before Ruth’s borrowed time runs out?
Image Source: Courtesy of HarperCollins
The premise sounds like something dreamed up after a late‑night crime podcast binge: what if you could see the exact moment someone will die just by touching them, and what if you could siphon off their remaining hours for someone else? That’s the hook of AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER, the debut novel by Jenny Morris. The story follows twenty‑six‑year‑old Londoner Thea, a self‑described flake who barely scraped through law school and now works in HR while living with her medical‑student best friend, Ruth. During a night out celebrating Ruth’s success, Thea brushes her roommate’s hand and suddenly knows she will die at precisely 11:44 p.m. When Thea later snatches life from the drunk man who knocks Ruth over, transferring his remaining years to save her friend, she realizes she’s stumbled into a power normally reserved for comic books and ancient myth. Those early pages set up the novel’s central dilemma: if you could decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, what rules would guide you?
So, She Wrote An Ethical Rule Book
Faced with a godlike ability, most of us would panic. Thea makes a spreadsheet. Together with Sam, a high‑powered lawyer and former flame, she tries to codify her newfound talent into something altruistic. The result is the “ethical guide to murder,” a checklist of justifications she’ll use before taking someone’s life: the target must have caused excessive harm, shown no remorse, and be likely to hurt others again. Bonus points if they’ve already killed someone. These rules, borrowed from her own conscience rather than any legal code, sound simple until they collide with messy reality. A belligerent stranger at a club or a corrupt boss might seem like easy marks, but Thea quickly learns that people rarely fit neatly into columns of good and bad.
This tension between intent and action is where Morris has fun. When Thea lends extra years to a masseuse as a generous tip or takes a few months from an annoying colleague, you start to feel complicit. It’s disturbingly relatable to fantasize about redistributing time from the unpleasant to the deserving. The spreadsheet isn’t enough; morality leaks out around the edges, and Thea’s attempts to play judge and jury feel more like someone gamifying guilt than a righteous crusade.
Dark Humor In A Morality Play
One reason the novel might resonate with younger readers is its tonal agility. Morris is a behavioral scientist with a PhD in cognitive psychology. That background peeks through in the way she balances ethical debate with deadpan humor. Thea’s existential crisis is peppered with observational jokes about HR bureaucracy, London nightlife, and the absurdity of trying to quantify morality with bullet points. In one scene, she refers to her power as a “life‑hack” that would make productivity gurus blush. Thea may be saving lives, but she still complains about office politics and ends up planning kills during spin class. That juxtaposition feels very twenty‑first century: serious questions about justice delivered alongside memes about procrastination.
Morris never lets the humor undermine the stakes. Beneath the quips lies a grieving woman traumatized by her parents’ deaths in a hit‑and‑run. The accident left her with a constant need to right wrongs, and her vigilante streak is as much about revenge as altruism! As Thea’s body count rises and Sam’s influence grows, the tone shifts from quirky urban fantasy to thriller. Theirs is a relationship built on shared secrets and convenience; Sam pushes Thea to kill for his own vision of justice, and we’re left wondering whether she’s fallen for him or for the ease of having someone else make the hard decisions.
Characters You Love To Side‑Eye
Readers expecting a plucky heroine may be surprised. Thea is messy. She flunked her bar exams, half‑heartedly chases a career she doesn’t really want, and uses her supernatural gift as both a coping mechanism and a power trip. Her best friend Ruth is grounded and earnest, a doctor who believes in the Hippocratic oath even when it clashes with Thea’s vigilantism. Sam, with his endless legal connections and questionable ethics, oscillates between ally and antagonist. He sees Thea’s talent as a business opportunity, a way to remove obstacles and curry favor, and his moral compass points wherever the money flows. Even Thea’s crusty grandfather, who raised her after her parents’ accident, brings complexity; he embodies the traditional values Thea flouts yet quietly approves of her loyalty to Ruth.
This cast makes Thea’s world feel like a dysfunctional found family. Their dynamics lean into the blurred lines between friendship and co‑dependence: who hasn’t kept a toxic ex around because they feel like there’s unfinished business? Thea’s loyalty to Ruth is the novel’s beating heart; their bond, forged through childhood illness and shared trauma, anchors the narrative. When Thea’s actions threaten that friendship, the story’s moral stakes become personal.
When The Fantasy Gets Uncomfortably Real
The novel’s high concept might sound fantastical, but many of the themes mirror contemporary debates: restorative justice, cancel culture, and who gets to decide what accountability looks like. Morris asks you to confront your own biases. Would you shave years off a murderer’s life to save an innocent? If a corrupt CEO loses a few months of retirement, is that justice or vengeance? And what about smaller, pettier infractions; the commuter who pushes past you on the train, the politician who lies on television? Thea’s internal monologue touches on all of these, and it’s hard not to imagine one’s own ethical spreadsheet.
The book also critiques the allure of vigilantism. It’s seductive to believe in personal retribution, yet the plot shows how quickly righteous action becomes self‑serving. As the story progresses, Thea becomes addicted to the rush of playing god and justifying her choices by cherry‑picking examples of bad behavior. This slippery slope is dramatized when her and Sam’s schemes veer into financial crimes and personal vendettas. The once‑clear lines blur until she’s unsure whether she’s acting to protect others or to soothe her own unresolved anger.
Tempo, Twists, And The Payoff
Pacing can make or break high‑concept fiction, and AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER mostly delivers. The first half feels like an episodic series of vignettes in which Thea tests out her rules and stumbles through moral messes. Some readers may find these chapters repetitive; the thrill of discovering a new superpower gives way to a rhythm of identification, judgment, and redistribution of time. However, the back half accelerates as Thea and Sam’s enterprises unravel. A financial scandal, an investigation into Ruth’s extended lifespan, and Thea’s hunt for her parents’ killer converge in a taut finale that justifies the slow burn! The climax forces Thea to confront the very question she’s been avoiding: can one ever balance the scales when playing with life itself?
Why It Clicks With Younger Readers
There’s a reason this book has been popping up on BookTok feeds and in DMs between friends. The central premise, a woman with an Excel file deciding who deserves more time, speaks to a generation raised on side hustles and moral complexity. For an audience that grew up watching superheroes dismantle systems but also wrestles with the consequences of “canceling” someone, Thea’s story feels like an allegory. It asks whether individual action can substitute for institutional justice, a question that resonates when trust in systems is low.
The novel’s mix of gallows humor and genuine philosophical inquiry also reflects the way many young adults process trauma: through memes, sarcasm, and earnest conversation in equal measure. Thea’s penchant for witty asides while discussing murder invites the kind of darkly comic commentary that thrives on social media threads. Even the ethics spreadsheet has inspired readers to create their own “life‑swap bingo cards” online. The book’s cultural footprint shows that high‑concept crime fiction can be both thought‑provoking and wildly entertaining!
The Verdict
AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER is messy, provocative, and undeniably fun. Its central conceit will stretch your suspension of disbelief, but its characters and the questions it raises about justice and self‑interest will keep you up at night. Young readers will appreciate the mix of dark comedy and serious introspection, and even those who find Thea unlikable may still be captivated by her journey. Ultimately, the book succeeds not because it tells us who should live or die, but because it forces us to confront why we feel qualified to make that call. It’s a novel that invites you to argue with yourself, jot down rules, cross them out, and then throw the list away! If you’re craving a fresh voice in crime fiction that doubles as a philosophical thought experiment, this one’s worth your time.
Maybe the real crime isn’t the kill, but how casually we assume we’re the ones who should decide who gets to live!
It’s no secret that one of our biggest weaknesses is a swoony adult romance. Gabriella Gamez’s debut novel, The Next Best Fling, may just be our favorite one this year! And we can’t think of a better time to read it (or re-read it) than now, just before the peak of the summer.
The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gamez follows Marcela Ortiz, a plus-size, Latina librarian who’s been secretly in love with Ben Young, her best friend from college. When Ben gets engaged, she realizes it’s time to move on. But what she doesn’t realize is how much Theo Young, Ben’s older brother, will change her life with a rebound relationship.
We read this book in one sitting, so we can tell you just how much we’re obsessed with this debut! Here are three things we love about Gabriella Gamez’s The Next Best Fling!
Summary: Librarian Marcela Ortiz has been secretly in love with her best friend for years—and when he gets engaged, she knows it’s long past time to move on. But before she gets the chance, she has a bigger problem to contend with in the form of Theo Young, ex-NFL player and older brother of the man she’s in love with. When she discovers Theo’s plans to confess his feelings for his brother’s fiancée at their engagement party, Marcela is quick to stop him—despite how tempting it is to let him run away with the bride-to-be. She manages to convince Theo to sleep off his drunken almost-mistake at her place and when they arrive at a family brunch the next day together, everyone wrongly assumes they hooked up.
Since Theo needs a cover for his feelings for the bride and Marcela needs a distraction from her unrequited feelings for the groom, they decide to roll with the lie. Until one late night at a bar, they take it a step further and discover a layer of attraction neither realized existed. Soon, they find themselves exploring the simmering chemistry between them, whether in library aisles or Marcela’s bed. There are no boundaries for the rebound relationship they form—just a host of complicated feelings, messy familial dynamics, and uncovered secrets that threaten to tear them apart before they can even admit to themselves that their rebound is working. Maybe a little too well.
Marcela’s Relatability
We love when a book makes us feel seen, and The Next Best Fling does exactly that! The main character, Marcela, has a lot of baggage. But who doesn’t? Her father left her when she was 12, and she’s been pining after her best friend Ben for years. She’s dealt with dating and hooking up with people who have treated her terribly for being plus-size. Marcela’s character is so relatable, both in how she copes with trauma and in the growth she goes through. And it helps that she’s a huge bookworm like us, even starting a YA book club at her library. We want to be her when we grow up (we say as if we aren’t around the same age).
Theo’s Green Flags
If we ever met someone who treats us the way Theo treated Marcela, we’d fold immediately. Because we fell in love with the way he communicates with Marcela and is as honest as he can be, given his past trauma. Theo respects Marcela’s boundaries, making sure she initiates the intimacy she’s most comfortable with. He took two weeks to plan a proper date with a super sweet surprise at the end of the night. And he pays attention to so many details about Marcela that even we forgot about. Theo’s just a 10/10 love interest. We want to know how to find someone like that ourselves.
Their Chemistry
Okay, we need another section just to talk about Marcela and Theo’s chemistry because hello?? We can honestly say we’ve never giggled this much reading an adult romance before! Their flirting and banter checked off all our boxes. We can feel the passion radiating off our main characters. Not only that, but they make each other better people when they’re together. They share so much patience while figuring out their complicated relationship. And there’s a perfect balance between the sweet romance, the emotional angst, and, of course, the spicy scenes!
Good news! The Next Best Fling is only the first in Gabriella Gamez’s Librarians in Love series, so we’re already excited for the next installment. Will it be Marcela’s best friend Angela exploring her asexuality? Or will it be the mysterious managing librarian Erica? Either way, we hope this isn’t the last time we’ll see Marcela and Theo!
Gabriella Gamez’sdebut captures the perfect blend of a swoony and spicy romance, combined with an emotional plot that will have you crying, laughing, and everything in between!
The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gamez is out July 9th, and you can preorder a copy of it here!
Have we convinced you to read The Next Best Fling yet? Are you giving this debut romance a try? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
