Pick Your Plot
Not a fan of surprises? Choose your own book each month from our curated selection of eight handpicked titles.
Available with our Book and Pamper and The Box of Books subscriptions.
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October Pick Your Plots
Pick any of the following books for your October box. Simply choose the genre that matches your favourite title.
Please note: The books shown here are based on stock availability, and we can't guarantee that every title will still be available when your box is prepared.
If you'd like to change your renewal date to earlier in the month, so there's a greater likelihood of your chosen book being in stock, please drop us an email.
Britt-Marie Was Here
by Fredrik Backman
Good Reads Score: 4.09 / 5(213,733 ratings, 23,797 reviews)
Britt-Marie can't stand mess. A disorganized cutlery drawer ranks high on her list of unforgivable sins. She is not one to judge others—no matter how ill-mannered, unkempt, or morally suspect they might be. It's just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But hidden inside the socially awkward, fussy busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams, and a warmer heart that anyone around her realizes.
When Britt-Marie walks out on her cheating husband and has to fend for herself in the miserable backwater town of Borg—of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it—she finds work as the caretaker of a soon-to-be demolished recreation center. The fastidious Britt-Marie soon finds herself being drawn into the daily doings of her fellow citizens, an odd assortment of miscreants, drunkards, layabouts. Most alarming of all, she's given the impossible task of leading the supremely untalented children's soccer team to victory. In this small town of misfits, can Britt-Marie find a place where she truly belongs?
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
by Tia Williams
Good Reads Score: 3.98 / 5(59,602 ratings, 10,648 reviews)
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Romance (2024)
An epic love story one hundred years in the making…
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.
Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she's the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they're long-stemmed roses, she's a dandelion: an adorable bloom that's actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.
When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.
One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.
Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.
The Talented Mr. Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
Good Reads Score: 3.96 / 5(128,841 ratings, 10,175 reviews)
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.
The Crows
by C.M. Rosens
Good Reads Score: 4.08 / 5(244 ratings, 83 reviews)
Her fate is sealed. Her death is inevitable...
Carrie Rickard, leaving an abusive relationship back in London, tries to escape her past by throwing herself into her restoration project: Fairwood House, known to locals of Pagham-on-Sea as The Crows.
Unable to resist as it whispers to her, Carrie's obsession only grows when she discovers it was the site of a gruesome unsolved murder. As she digs deeper into the mystery, she awakens dark and dangerous forces.
Cue an introduction to her foul-mouthed neighbour, Ricky Porter, who is as obsessed with The Crows as Carrie is, and who has several secrets of his own. Not least of which are what's really under his hood, and what he's got in the cellar...
A chilling gothic horror novel of haunted houses, eldritch monsters and things that go bump in the night.
The Bear and the Nightingale
by Katherine Arden
Good Reads Score: 4.08 / 5(245,812 ratings, 33,528 reviews)
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Fantasy (2017), Nominee for Readers' Favorite Debut Goodreads Author (2017)
At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. Vasilisa doesn't mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.
After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.
And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa's stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.
As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse's most frightening tales.
A New Home at the Wartime Hotel
by Maisie Thomas
Good Reads Score: 4.39 / 5(1,657 ratings, 65 reviews)
Manchester, 1941
Kitty learned early on in her marriage that her husband, Bill Dunbar, isn't reliable with money. So when they inherit the Dunbar family hotel at the start of the war, she's hopeful that their financial worries are over… until the bailiffs turn up! With Bill away fighting, it's up to Kitty to turn things around for her family, or risk ruin.
Lily worked as a chambermaid at Dunbar's before the war. She met Daniel there, but their relationship was complicated by class differences and the disapproval of Daniel's mother. Now Lily is pregnant – and with Daniel away at sea, she is all alone. When tragedy strikes, will Kitty and Dunbar's come to her rescue?
Beatrice is in her forties, unmarried, and working in a job that exposes her to the harsh realities of poverty and sacrifice. She wonders whether the war might give her the opportunity to change lives for the better - including her own. But when she's accused of a crime she didn't commit, the future looks bleak... until Kitty makes a surprising suggestion.
Can the community around Dunbar's hotel pull together and provide a beacon of hope and resilience, in the dark days of war?
The Mountain in the Sea
by Ray Nayler
Good Reads Score: 3.86 / 5(41,615 ratings, 6,747 reviews)
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.
Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.
The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA's team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world's first android.
The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses' advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.
But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind's legacy.
Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three
by Mara Leveritt
Good Reads Score: 4.16 / 5(13,168 ratings, 1,116 reviews)
In 2011, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American legal history was set right when Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were released after eighteen years in prison. Award-winning journalist Mara Leveritt's The Devil's Knot remains the most comprehensive, insightful reporting ever done on the investigation, trials, and convictions of three teenage boys who became known as the West Memphis Three.
For weeks in 1993, after the murders of three eight-year-old boys, police in West Memphis, Arkansas seemed stymied. Then suddenly, detectives charged three teenagers—alleged members of a satanic cult—with the killings. Despite the witch-hunt atmosphere of the trials and a case that included stunning investigative blunders, a confession riddled with errors, and an absence of physical evidence linking any of the accused to the crime, the teenagers were convicted. Jurors sentenced Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley to life in prison and Damien Echols, the accused ringleader, to death. The guilty verdicts were popular in their home state—even upheld on appeal—and all three remained in prison until their unprecedented release in August 2011.
With close-up views of its key participants, this award-winning account unravels the many tangled knots of this endlessly shocking case, one that will shape the American legal landscape for years to come.
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