New Adult Fiction
For the years when everyone expects you to know who you're becoming. You are supposed to have a plan by now. A career. A relationship. A place that feels like yours. Some reasonably convincing answer when someone asks what you're doing with your life.
But becoming an adult rarely happens that neatly.
Sara Madden's New Adult novels are stories about the years between leaving and belonging—when love gets complicated, ambition gets personal, old wounds follow us into new rooms, and the life we're building doesn't always resemble the one we thought we were supposed to want. These are novels about women finding their voices, questioning the stories they've told about themselves, and discovering that growing up isn't about finally becoming certain.
It's about learning what—and who—you are willing to choose.
Cafe Doors
She kept every door she walked out of. Until someone asked her to stay.
Eliza Mercer learned at eighteen that permanence was something other people got. Aging out of foster care with two garbage bags, a borrowed duffel, and three months of transitional housing, she makes herself a promise: Leave first. Always leave first.
Years later, Liza owns Café Doors—a place built entirely on her own terms. Across one brick wall hang six brightly painted apartment doors, each salvaged from a relationship she ended before the other person could leave her.
Customers think they're art.
Liza knows they're evidence.
Proof that she was there. Proof that she mattered. Proof that every ending was hers to choose. But when the stories behind the doors stop belonging only to her, Liza is forced to confront something she has spent her entire life avoiding: leaving first may keep you from being abandoned, but it can also keep you from ever discovering who might have stayed.
Café Doors is a contemporary New Adult novel about foster care, attachment, memory, chosen family, accountability, and the terrifying difference between independence and trust.
Because sometimes the bravest thing isn't walking through the door.
It's believing you might still belong when it closes.
FOR READERS WHO LIKE: Found family • complicated women • unconventional love stories • foster-care narratives • emotional slow burns • symbolic objects • stories about belonging • women learning to stay
ZuZu's Petals
What if the life you thought was too small was the one that mattered most?
Georgia Bailey is twenty-four years old when she realizes everyone else has become something. Her classmates are lawyers. Professors. Entrepreneurs. World travelers.
Georgia stayed in Bedford Falls. She runs the flower shop her parents built, remembers which flowers belonged in someone's wedding bouquet twenty years ago, knows which widow needs thistle tucked quietly into a Christmas wreath, and can tell more about a person's heart from the flowers they choose than from the words they say.
It is a good life.
So why does it feel so small?
Then, on a snowy December night, a mysterious stranger gives Georgia an impossible gift: The chance to see the life she would have lived if she'd left. And that life is beautiful.
Georgia is successful. Recognized. Brilliant at work she was born to do. People know her name. Her talent finally has room to become enormous.
Nothing about that life is false. Which makes choosing between the woman she might have become and the life she actually built far harder than Georgia ever imagined.
Inspired by the spirit of It's a Wonderful Life, ZuZu's Petals is a New Adult holiday novel about ambition, comparison, grief, family, ordinary acts of love, and the dangerous belief that a meaningful life must also be an impressive one.
Not every life that matters becomes big. Some become indispensable.
FOR READERS WHO LIKE: It's a Wonderful Life • holiday fiction with substance • small towns • flowers and flower shops • alternate lives • family stories • quiet romance • questions about ambition and success • emotionally hopeful fiction
Resource: Discussion Guide
Date a Girl Who Reads
He wants to know whether books can teach empathy. She wants to know whether he can learn not to make her a story.
Rosette Warren knows exactly what books can do.
They can give language to things you thought only you felt. They can preserve voices. They can change the way you see another person. They can also be used to speak for someone who never gave you permission.
Graduate student Tommy Fitzgerald is studying whether literature can measurably change empathy when he meets Rosette—the brilliant, guarded university librarian who has spent years protecting the boundary between being known and being interpreted.
Their experiment begins simply: She gives him books. He reads them. And slowly, both begin to change.
Then Tommy writes about what it means to “date a girl who reads.” And when his words escape into the world without Rosette's consent, an intimate relationship becomes a public narrative she never agreed to inhabit.
Now admiration isn't enough. Apology isn't enough.
And love, if it is going to survive, will have to become something neither of them can merely talk about.
It will have to become a practice.
Date a Girl Who Reads is a New Adult novel about books, race, consent, grief, intellectual intimacy, narrative ownership, accountability, and what it means to love someone without turning them into your lesson.
Some people want to be understood. Rosette wants to remain the author.
FOR READERS WHO LIKE: Bookish romance • university settings • intellectual chemistry • complex heroines • conversations about consent • emotional accountability • marginalia • slow-burn relationships • books about books
Resource: Discussion Guide
Stories to Talk About
The book doesn't have to end on the last page.
Sara's New Adult novels are written for the conversations that happen afterward—the Would you have stayed? Was he wrong? What would you have chosen? and Why did that part hit me so hard? kind of conversations. Each novel includes a free downloadable Read & Discuss Guide with questions for book clubs, reading groups, classrooms, or two readers who simply aren't finished talking yet.
Café Doors
When does independence become isolation?
ZuZu's Petals
How do you measure a life well lived?
Discussion Guide
Date a Girl Who Reads
What do we owe the people whose stories change us?
Discussion Guide