The Little Free Library I visit most often has been full of great finds recently. I definitely have a book twin in the area!
I was cleaning out my son’s bookshelf (we can’t keep them all!) and I traded two board books for Strangers by Belle Burden.
When I told my friend I picked this one up at an LFL she said, “It’s deeply disturbing and raw. I couldn’t put it down.” Of course that’s a 5-star review in my book!
Strangers was published in January 2026 and is 256 pages. The audiobook is 7 hours and is narrated by the author, Belle Burden.
From the publisher:
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.
With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
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