'Love on the Brain,' by Ali Hazelwood. (Berkley, $17)

A year after TikTok helped send Hazelwood's debut, "The Love Hypothesis," rocketing up the bestseller list, the romance writer returns with an even funnier, steamier STEM-set love story. In this installment, neuroscientist and Marie Curie fangirl Bee Königswasser gets her dream job working at NASA. The only catch? She'll have to make nice with her nemesis, who happens to be tall, brooding and dreamy in the nerdiest way.

'A Place in the World,' by Frances Mayes. (Crown, $27.)

In her memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun," Mayes took us, of course, to Italy. In her latest outing, she stays much closer to home. "A Place in the World" is an homage of sorts to the South, where Mayes grew up — in Fitzgerald, Ga. She writes, too, about Chatwood, a house in Hillsborough, N.C., where she now lives after an extensive remodeling. The experience is both a homecoming and a reckoning with the past. "I returned to the South after a long quarrel with the place," she writes. "Racism, sexist zeitgeist, anti-intellectualism, self-satisfaction. ... Those still hover, but this town, intolerant of such stupidity, is aspirational."

'Thank You for Listening,' by Julia Whelan. (Avon, $28.99)

Whelan is most famous for her voice: She's the go-to audiobook narrator for countless bestselling authors. But she also has a distinctive voice in a writerly sense. In her feel-good second novel, an actress on the rise suffers a horrific accident that derails her career. For her second act, she becomes a successful — if ambivalent — audiobook narrator. But she finds a kindred spirit when she strikes up a flirtatious correspondence with an enigmatic man who narrates romance novels.

Nora Krug and Stephanie Merry are critics for the Washington Post.