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Fall Reading 2026

Fall is known as the biggest season of the year for books. The titles that release during this latter part of the year often become holiday gifts, and many are blockbusters. We spotlighted 12 of these books in our Fall Reading Contests and Feature. While our series of 24-hour giveaways have ended, we encourage you to take a look at our featured titles, which we know people will be talking about this fall and beyond.

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.

Fall Reading 2025

Fall is known as the biggest season of the year for books. The titles that release during this latter part of the year often become holiday gifts, and many are blockbusters. We spotlighted eight of these books in our Fall Reading Contests and Feature. While our series of 24-hour giveaways have ended, we encourage you to take a look at our featured titles, which we know people will be talking about this fall and beyond.

Sarah McCoy, author of Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?

In 1969, 23-year-old starlet Lori Lovely shocks the world by ditching a promising film career to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as a Benedictine nun. Gossip columnists and scandal sheets can’t get enough of the story. Why would such a beautiful girl take the veil? Did it have anything to do with the tragic death of her costar, heartthrob singer Lucas Wesley? In 1990, Lu Tibbott is under the gun to complete her senior thesis in modern American history. She decides to dig into a true 20th-century mystery and write about her aunt Lori, now the Mother Abbess at a cloistered convent in rural New England. Mother Lori has refused all requests for interviews --- until Lu arrives at the abbey with a tape recorder in hand. To her delight, Mother Lori announces she’s finally ready to talk...but only if Lu is truly ready to listen.

Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely? by Sarah McCoy

October 2025

I spent 16 years in Catholic school, so a book about a Hollywood starlet who becomes a nun would grab my attention, the same way that trick-or-treating at the convent would as we hoped we would see what nuns wore when they didn’t have their habits on. We never found out anything about the latter. But with Sarah McCoy’s latest novel, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LORI LOVELY?, we get to learn what happened to Lucille Lorianne Hickey, who first became Lori Lovely when she hit the stage, and then was christened to be Sister Jude and later Mother Lori.

The story of Mother Lori is based partially on the life of Mother Dolores Hart, who acted alongside Elvis Presley before becoming a nun.

Week of September 21, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of September 21st include NASH FALLS, a stunning thriller from David Baldacci that finds Walter Nash's life turned completely upside down when he is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network; Ken Follett's CIRCLE OF DAYS, the deeply human story of one of the world’s greatest mysteries: the building of Stonehenge; TIME OF THE CHILD by Niall Williams, a compassionate, life-affirming novel about the Christmas season that transforms the small Irish town of Faha; Joshua Sharpe's THE MAN NO ONE BELIEVED, the riveting story of a 1985 double murder, a long-overdue investigation, and the fight to exonerate an innocent man; and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LORI LOVELY? by Sarah McCoy, a spellbinding novel based on a true story, in which a beautiful young movie star of Hollywood’s Golden Age gives up her bright career to become a nun.

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