List

Category
Audience
Tags

The Women's House of Detention

Hugh Ryan

"The Women's House of Detention, Greenwich Village's most forbidding and forgotten queer landmark, stood from 1929 to 1974, imprisoning tens of thousands from all over New York City. The little-known stories of the queer women and trans-masculine people incarcerated in this building present a uniquely queer argument for prison abolition. The 'House of D' acted as a nexus, drawing queer women down to Greenwich Village from every corner of the city. Some of these women--Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur--were famous, but the majority were working-class people, incarcerated for the 'crimes' of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of people in women's prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, the percentage was almost certainly higher. Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis of queer and trans incarceration, connecting misogyny, racism, state-sanctioned sexual violence, colonialism, sex work, and the failures of prison reform. At the same time, The Women's House of Detention highlights how queer relation and autonomy emerged in the most dire of circumstances: from the lesbian relationships and communities forged through the House of D, to a Black socialist's fight for a college education during the Great Depression, to the forgotten women who rioted inside the prison on the first night of the Stonewall Uprising nearby. This is the story of one building and so much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired"--

View Details >>

Mamacita

Andrea Pons

In this inspiring and creative Mexican cookbook, Andrea Pons takes you on a journey through flavor, family, and her immigration story. With 78 easy and delicious recipes from three generations of women in her family, this cookbook offers you a taste of authentic Mexican cuisine.



Mamacita began as a celebration of the authentic Mexican recipes Andrea Pons loved growing up, but it quickly became a way for her to return to her roots and reconnect with her Mexican heritage. In her journey through food, she shares not only her experiences with cooking but also her family's immigration story.



When Pons was faced with the possibility of deportation, and she and her family struggled to navigate the US immigration system--in the country that had been their home for 16 years-- she looked to these recipes for help. To fund her family's significant legal fees, she sold self-published copies of Mamacita, and the cookbook became both a symbol of their journey and a rallying cry.



This new edition of Mamacita offers 30 more photos and 11 additional recipes, allowing you to taste even more of the love in Pons's dishes.



Foreword by James Beard Award nominee Hetty Lui McKinnon

View Details >>

The Sewing Girl's Tale

John Wood Sweet

New York Times Editors’ Choice
Winner of the Bancroft Prize
Winner of the New York Society Library's New York City Book Award

A riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries—and how much has not

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape.

Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives. The trial exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and sexual double standards. The ongoing conflict attracted the nation’s top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the development of American law. The crime and its consequences became a kind of parable about the power of seduction and the limits of justice. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable—but at a terrible cost to herself.

Based on rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a chance encounter in the street into the sanctuaries of the city’s elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors’ prison. The Sewing Girl's Tale shows that if our laws and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again.

Includes photographs

View Details >>

Thirty-Thousand Steps

Jess Keefe

You can't run from your problems forever. Breakups, dead-end jobs, bumps in the road to adulthood--author Jess Keefe and her little brother Matt navigate them together as roommates, sharing late-night conversations and laughs. But when Matt's heroin addiction comes roaring back after lying dormant for years, an overdose on a warm October night changes everything. In the year that follows her brother's death, Keefe tries to start over, but her grief and trauma keep her obsessed with the past. She wonders how things could have turned out differently, diving into research about addiction and drugs and excavating their shared childhood and young adulthood for clues about what happened. To soothe her aching body and scattered brain, she takes on a new physical challenge: training for her first half marathon. She pushes her body to its limits to quiet the chaos in her mind, but as the race date nears, her recklessness catches up with her. With propulsive narrative scenes, a unique voice, empathy, and humor, Keefe combines her grieving experience with explorations of the social, political, and scientific drivers that influenced what happened to her brother. Thirty-Thousand Steps, a powerful, transformative memoir, explores the psychosocial risk factors that lead to addiction, the cudgel of Catholicism, the joy and shame in the early-aughts queer experience, and the extent to which one can push mind and body to regenerate after a major loss.

View Details >>

Palo Alto

Malcolm Harris

The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.



In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

View Details >>

Rikers

Graham Rayman

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A shocking, groundbreaking oral history of the infamous Rikers jail complex and an unflinching portrait of injustice and resilience told by the people whose lives have been forever altered by it
 
“This mesmerizing and gut-wrenching book shows the brutal realities that tens of thousands of people have been forced to navigate, and survive, in America’s most notorious jail.—Piper Kerman, New York Times bestselling author of Orange is the New Black

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City's Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.
 
Offering a 360-degree view inside the country’s largest detention complex, the deeply personal accounts—featured here for the first time—take readers on a harrowing journey into every corner of Rikers, a failed society unto itself that reflects society’s failings as a whole.
 
Dr. Homer Venters was shocked by the screams on his first day working at Rikers: “They’re in solitary, just yelling . . . the yelling literally never stops.” After a few months, though, Dr. Venters notes, one's ears adjust to the sounds. Nestor Eversley recalls how detainees made weapons from bones. Barry Campbell recalls hiding a razor blade in his mouth—“just in case”.
 
These are visceral stories of despair, brutality, resilience, humor, and hope, told by the people who were marooned on the island over the course of decades. As calls to shutter jails and reduce the number of incarcerated people grow louder across the country, with the movement to close the island complex itself at the forefront, Rikers is a resounding lesson about the human consequences of the incarceration industry.

View Details >>

Someone Else's Shoes

Jojo Moyes

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

“Very few authors have the power to make you laugh on one page and cry on the next. Moyes is one of them.” —The New York Times

A story of mix-ups, mess-ups and making the most of second chances, this is the new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and The Giver of Stars

Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else’s shoes?


Nisha Cantor lives the globetrotting life of the seriously wealthy, until her husband announces a divorce and cuts her off. Nisha is determined to hang onto her glamorous life. But in the meantime, she must scramble to cope--she doesn’t even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in.

That’s because Sam Kemp – in the bleakest point of her life – has accidentally taken Nisha’s gym bag. But Sam hardly has time to worry about a lost gym bag--she’s struggling to keep herself and her family afloat. When she tries on Nisha’s six-inch high Christian Louboutin red crocodile shoes, the resulting jolt of confidence that makes her realize something must change—and that thing is herself.

Full of Jojo Moyes’ signature humor, brilliant storytelling, and warmth, Someone Else’s Shoes is a story about how just one little thing can suddenly change everything.

View Details >>

A Day of Fallen Night

Samantha Shannon

The stunning, standalone prequel to the New York Times bestselling The Priory of the Orange Tree.

“A magnificent, sweeping epic. Shannon has created a world rich in intricate mythology, beautifully realized and complex.” Jennifer Saint, bestselling author of Ariadne

In A Day of Fallen Night, Samantha Shannon sweeps readers back to the universe of Priory of the Orange Tree and into the lives of four women, showing us a course of events that shaped their world for generations to come.

Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms – but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory's purpose.

To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow – exactly where she wants to be.

The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother's past is coming to upend her fate.

When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.

View Details >>

River Sing Me Home

Eleanor Shearer

Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery is a remarkable debut.
 
Her search begins with an ending.…


The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs.
 
Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children—the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. The grueling, dangerous journey takes her from Barbados then, by river, deep into the forest of British Guiana and finally across the sea to Trinidad. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear. These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children...and her freedom.

View Details >>

The Survivalists

Kashana Cauley

“A great and engrossing read, Kashana humanizes a way of life that is often made fun of and makes the reader understand why someone would go to such great lengths to prepare for the future, so much so she almost sold me on those Life Preserver soy bars!” —Trevor Noah

A single Black lawyer puts her career and personal moral code at risk when she moves in with her coffee entrepreneur boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping roommates in a novel that's packed with tension, curiosity, humor, and wit from a writer with serious comedy credentials


In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner.

For readers of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Zakiya Harris’s The Other Black Girl, The Survivalists is a darkly humorous novel from a smart and relevant new literary voice that's packed with tension, curiosity and wit, and unafraid to ask the questions most relevant to a new generation of Americans: Does it make sense to climb the corporate ladder? What exactly are the politics of gun ownership? And in a world where it’s nearly impossible for young people to earn enough money to afford stable housing, what does it take in order to survive?

View Details >>

The Snow Hare

Paula Lichtarowicz

In this "riveting, heartfelt" novel of love and consequences (Heather Morris, New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz), a woman dreams of becoming a doctor until World War II leads her instead into an astonishing love--and a fateful choice.



Is it possible to fall in love at the edge of life?



Lena has lived a long, quiet life on her farm in Wales, alongside her husband and child. But as her end approaches, buried memories begin to return. Of her childhood in Poland, and her passion for science. Of the early days of her marriage, reluctant wife to an army officer. Of the birth of her daughter, whose arrival changed everything.



Memories less welcome return, too. Her Polish village, transformed overnight by the Soviets, and the war that doomed her entire family to the frigid work camps of the Siberian tundra. And buried in that blinding snow, amongst the darkness of survival, the most haunting memory of all: that of an extraordinary new love.



Exploring motherhood, marriage, consequences, and our incredible human capacity for hope, The Snow Hare is the story of a woman who dares to love and to dream in the face of impossible odds, and of the peace we each must make with our choices, even long after the years have gone by.

View Details >>

I Have Some Questions for You

Rebecca Makkai

“A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People 

"Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review

"[An] irresistible literary page-turner." The Boston Globe

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by TIME, NPR, USA Today, Elle, Newsweek, Salon, Bustle, AARP, The Millions, Good Housekeeping, and more

The riveting new novel — "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Great Believers


A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

View Details >>

Victory City

Salman Rushdie

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries—from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie

“A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers . . . It does not resemble any other novel I could name.”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: Time, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times, The Week, CNBC, Business Insider, Kirkus Reviews

In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—“victory city”—the wonder of the world.

Over the next 250 years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s, from its literal sowing from a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry—with Pampa Kampana at its center.

Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, Victory City is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.

View Details >>

Big Swiss

Jen Beagin

National Bestseller

A brilliantly original and funny novel about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist who falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions. When they accidentally meet in real life, an explosive affair ensues.


Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house, built in 1737, is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss, since she’s tall, stoic, and originally from Switzerland. Greta is fascinated by Big Swiss’s refreshing attitude toward trauma. They both have dark histories, but Big Swiss chooses to remain unattached to her suffering while Greta continues to be tortured by her past.

One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice at the dog park. In a panic, she introduces herself with a fake name and they quickly become enmeshed. Although Big Swiss is unaware of Greta’s true identity, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…

Bold, outlandish, and filled with irresistible characters, Big Swiss is both a love story and also a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, one-of-a-kind voice in contemporary fiction.

View Details >>

Don't Fear the Reaper

Stephen Graham Jones

December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.

Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

Don’t Fear the Reaper is the page-turning sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

View Details >>

Maame

Jessica George

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! • A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick

"Sparkling." —The New York Times

"An utterly charming and deeply moving portrait of the joysand the guiltof trying to find your own way in life." Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts

"Lively, funny, poignant . . . Prepare to fall in love with Maddie. I did!" Bonnie Garmus, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry

Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means woman.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts”: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But it's not long before tragedy strikes, forcing Maddie to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils—and rewards—of putting her heart on the line.

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.

"Meeting Maame feels like falling in love for the first time: warm, awkward, joyous, a little bit heartbreaking and, most of all, unforgettable." Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming

View Details >>

Funny You Should Ask

Elissa Sussman

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A restless young journalist with big dreams interviews a Hollywood heartthrob—and reunites with him ten years later to discover exactly how he feels about her in this sexy and engrossing novel

“You will absolutely devour this book. It’s filled with delightful banter, hot romance, and a love story that’s worthy of the big screen.”—Kate Spencer, author of In a New York Minute and host of Forever35

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Cosmopolitan, NPR, The Washington Post, Book Riot

Then. Twenty-something writer Chani Horowitz is stuck. While her former MFA classmates are nabbing high-profile book deals, all she does is churn out puff pieces. Then she’s hired to write a profile of movie star Gabe Parker: her number one celebrity crush and the latest James Bond. All Chani wants to do is keep her cool and nail the piece. But what comes next proves to be life changing in ways she never saw coming, as the interview turns into a whirlwind weekend that has the tabloids buzzing—and Chani getting closer to Gabe than she had planned. 
 
Now. Ten years later, after a brutal divorce and a healthy dose of therapy, Chani is back in Los Angeles as a successful writer with the career of her dreams. Except that no matter what new essay collection or online editorial she’s promoting, someone always asks about The Profile. It always comes back to Gabe. So when his PR team requests that they reunite for a second interview, she wants to say no. She wants to pretend that she’s forgotten about the time they spent together. But the truth is that Chani wants to know if those seventy-two hours were as memorable to Gabe as they were to her. And so . . . she says yes.

Alternating between their first meeting and their reunion a decade later, this deliciously irresistible novel will have you hanging on until the last word.

View Details >>

Death by Landscape

Elvia Wilk

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of “fan nonfiction” about living and writing in the age of extinction

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.

Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.

What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

View Details >>

Liberation Day

George Saunders

Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with a collection of short stories that grapple with the complexities of our increasingly troubled world, his first since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December.

The "best short-story writer in English" (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

"Love Letter" is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. "Ghoul" is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In "Mother's Day," two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In "Elliott Spencer," our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory "scraped"--a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And "My House"--in a mere seven pages--comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.

View Details >>

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

View Details >>

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

T Kira Madden

“Frank and funny and powerful and surprising. An utterly gorgeous debut.”-Lauren Groff

One of the most anticipated books of 2019--Electric Literature, Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The Millions, Hyphen, Lit Hub, Nylon, The AV Club, The Advocate, The Rumpus, The Week, Books are Magic

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.

With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

View Details >>

Jade War

Fonda Lee

In Jade War, the sequel to the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Jade City, the Kaul siblings battle rival clans for honor and control over an Asia-inspired fantasy metropolis.
On the island of Kekon, the Kaul family is locked in a violent feud for control of the capital city and the supply of magical jade that endows trained Green Bone warriors with supernatural powers they alone have possessed for hundreds of years.
Beyond Kekon's borders, war is brewing. Powerful foreign governments and mercenary criminal kingpins alike turn their eyes on the island nation. Jade, Kekon's most prized resource, could make them rich - or give them the edge they'd need to topple their rivals.
Faced with threats on all sides, the Kaul family is forced to form new and dangerous alliances, confront enemies in the darkest streets and the tallest office towers, and put honor aside in order to do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival - and that of all the Green Bones of Kekon.
Jade War is the second book of the Green Bone Saga, an epic trilogy about family, honor, and those who live and die by the ancient laws of blood and jade.

The Green Bone SagaJade CityJade War

View Details >>

Lives of the Wives

Carmela Ciuraru

"The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about."--Francine Prose, author of The Vixen

 

 

A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships.

"With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life--dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp."

The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude.

Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in Lives of the Wives is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs.

As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers.

These are stories of vulnerability, loneliness, infidelity, envy, sorrow, abandonment, heartbreak, and forgiveness. Above all, Lives of the Wives honors the women who have played the role of muses, agents, editors, proofreaders, housekeepers, gatekeepers, amaneunses, confidantes, and cheerleaders to literary trailblazers throughout history. In revisiting the lives of famous writers, it is time in our #MeToo era to highlight the achievements of their wives--and the price these women paid for recognition and freedom.

Lives of the Wives is an insightful, humorous, and poignant exploration of the intersection of life and art and creativity and love.

 

 

 

View Details >>

No Words

Meg Cabot

Meg Cabot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Princess Diaries, returns to Little Bridge Island with a new story about a children's book author with a case of writer's block and an arrogant novelist who have to set aside their differences as they get through a weekend long book festival that just might change everything--including their feelings for each other.
 



Don't Judge a Book by Its Author...

Welcome to Little Bridge, one of the smallest, most beautiful islands in the Florida Keys.

Jo Wright always swore she'd never step foot on Little Bridge Island--not as long as her nemesis, bestselling author Will Price, is living there.

Then Jo's given an offer she can't refuse: an all-expense paid trip to speak and sign at the island's first ever book festival.

Even though arrogant Will is the last person Jo wants to see, she could really use the festival's more-than-generous speaking fee. She's suffering from a crippling case of writer's block on the next installment of her bestselling children's series, and her father needs financial help as well.

Then Jo hears that Will is off-island on the set of the film of his next book. Hallelujah!

But when she arrives on Little Bridge, Jo is in for a shock: Will is not only at the book festival, but seems genuinely sorry for his past actions--and more than willing not only to make amends, but prove to Jo that he's a changed man.

Things seem to be looking up--until disaster strikes, causing Jo to wonder: Do any of us ever really know anyone?

View Details >>

Conjure Women

Afia Atakora

A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing--and for the conjuring of curses--are at the heart of this dazzling first novel

"Lush, irresistible . . . It took me into the hearts of women I could otherwise never know. I was transported."--Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses and Away

Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother's footsteps as a midwife; and their master's daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.

View Details >>

Family Album

Gabriela Aleman

Finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize

Family Album is Ecuadorian author Gabriela Alemán's rollicking follow-up to her acclaimed English-language debut, Poso Wells.

Alemán is known for her spirited and sardonic take on the fatefully interconnected--and often highly compromised--forces at work in present-day South America, and particularly in Ecuador. In this collection of eight hugely entertaining short stories, she teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of national identity. A muddy brew of pop-culture and pop-folklore yields intriguing, lesser-known episodes of contemporary Ecuadorian history, along with a rich cast of unforgettable characters whose intimate stories open up onto a vista of Ecuador's place on the world stage.

From a pair of deep-sea divers using Robinson Crusoe's map of a shipwreck to locate sunken treasure in the Galápagos Archipelago, to a night with the husband of Ecuador's most infamous expat, Lorena Bobbitt, this series of cracked "family portraits" provides a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what's happened: they've learned a great deal about a country whose more well known exports--soccer, coffee and cocoa--mask an intriguing national story that's ripe for the telling.

One of The Millions Most Anticipated Books for 2022!

"Ecuadorian writer Alemán's sparkling collection (after the novel Poso Wells) brims with humor and adventure."--Publishers Weekly

"Plays with tropes ranging from the Robinson Crusoe story to the classic betrayed-wife setup to wrestle with the impossible-to-decode oddness of human life, which old stories can only hide for so long."--Lily Meyer, NPR

"It takes a rare and talented writer to create a cast of characters who each feel so unique, distinct, and whose stories unravel unexpectedly while also feeling inevitable, exactly right. Thoughtful and subversive, with Family Album, Alemán has given us a gift."--Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

"Divers, adventurers, wrestlers, athletes: a diverse array of people come to light in these stories to insist again and again in challenging the weight of the written letter. Gabriela Alemán's stories inhabit the past to work through its possible versions. Her characters understand that History is a form of desire and the truth is not a house but a patina covering a place that has ceased to exist."--Yuri Herrera, author of A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire

"Gabriela Alemán's stories unravel a rich and intriguing universe in which nothing, and no one, is what it seems."--Pilar Quintana, author of The Bitch

"These stories are like lizards lying on rocks in the sun. When you try to pick one up it darts away and disappears. Sometimes a tail comes off in your hand or the thing bites your fingers and drops of blood decorate the rock. Best read while listening to Julio Jaramillo sing 'Amor sin Esperanza' and 'Hojas Muertas.'"--Barry Gifford, author of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels

"Gabriela Alemán writes beautiful, sly, enigmatic stories originating in a rogues gallery of real life legends, including El Santo and John Wayne Bobbitt, as well as lesser known and invented souls, all of them struggling against the silent--or is it hostile?--backdrop of Ecuador's past and present. Family Album is a mordantly funny and haunting collection."--Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance

View Details >>

Black Candle Women

Diane Marie Brown

"Propulsive and poignant, Black Candle Women concocts an intoxicating potion of warmth, wisdom, and wonder." --Ava DuVernay

A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family curse, and one very complicated year of heartache, miscommunication, and learning to let go

Generations of Montrose women--Augusta, Victoria, Willow--have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them.

But when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it's even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies.

Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, the family is set on a collision course dating back to a Voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans's French Quarter--where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love...

"Richly imagined and elegantly told, with plenty of satisfying secrets, heartaches, and twists."
--Sadeqa Johnson, international bestselling author of Yellow Wife and The House of Eve

View Details >>

Central Places

Delia Cai

A young woman’s rootless past and uncertain future collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents, toppling her carefully constructed life, in this vibrant, insightful debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she’s become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey’s relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother’s astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she’s shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there’s Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.

Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey’s proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?

View Details >>

Wade in the Water

Nyani Nkrumah

Resonant with the emotional urgency of Alice Walker's classic Meridian and the poignant charm of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, a gripping debut novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class that explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.

Set in 1982, in rural, racially divided Ricksville, Mississippi Wade in the Water tells the story of Ella, a black, unloved, precocious eleven-year-old, and Ms. St. James, a mysterious white woman from Princeton who appears in Ella's community to carry out some research. Soon, Ms. St. James befriends Ella, who is willing to risk everything to keep her new friend in a town that does not want her there. The relationship between Ella and Ms. St. James, at times loving and funny and other times tense and cautious, becomes more fraught and complex as Ella unwittingly pushes at Ms. St. James's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, and dangerous secrets that could have devastating consequences.

Told in two voices, Ella's and Ms. St. James's, and set around richly developed characters, this riveting, page turning coming of age story will keep readers entranced until the last shocking revelation.

View Details >>

Bad Cree

Jessica Johns

In this gripping, horror-laced debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams—and make them more dangerous.

What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?

View Details >>

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • Two estranged siblings delve into their mother’s hidden past—and how it all connects to her traditional Caribbean black cake—in this immersive family saga, “a character-driven, multigenerational story that’s meant to be savored” (Time).
 
“Wilkerson transports you across the decades and around the globe accompanied by complex, wonderfully drawn characters.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & The Six, and Malibu Rising

In development as a Hulu original series produced by Marissa Jo Cerar, Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Films), and Kapital Entertainment
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, NPR, BuzzFeed, Glamour, PopSugar, Book Riot, She Reads

We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right”? Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.

View Details >>

Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Coco Mellors

For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, poignant, and bestselling debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple’s impulsive marriage.

Sunday Times bestseller
Goodreads Choice Award Finalist


Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.

Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it’s Cleo’s best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo’s marriage, or Frank’s financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.

View Details >>

Jackal

Erin E. Adams

RECOMMENDED BY GILLIAN FLYNN ON THE TODAY SHOW • A young Black girl goes missing in the woods outside her white rust belt town. But she's not the first—and she may not be the last. . . .

“I read this thriller that is Get Out meets The Vanishing Half in one night.”—BuzzFeed

“Extraordinary . . . A terrifying tale of fears and hatreds generated by racism and class inequality.”—Associated Press

FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Vulture, PopSugar, Paste, Publishers Weekly

It’s watching.

Liz Rocher is coming home . . . reluctantly. As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward, passive-aggressive reunions. Liz has grown, though; she can handle whatever awaits her. But on the day of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the couple’s daughter, Caroline, disappears—and the only thing left behind is a piece of white fabric covered in blood.

It’s taking.

As a frantic search begins, with the police combing the trees for Caroline, Liz is the only one who notices a pattern: A summer night. A missing girl. A party in the woods. She’s seen this before. Keisha Woodson, the only other Black girl in Liz’s high school, walked into the woods with a mysterious man and was later found with her chest cavity ripped open and her heart removed. Liz shudders at the thought that it could have been her, and now, with Caroline missing, it can’t be a coincidence. As Liz starts to dig through the town’s history, she uncovers a horrifying secret about the place she once called home. Children have been going missing in these woods for years. All of them Black. All of them girls.

It’s your turn.

With the evil in the forest creeping closer, Liz knows what she must do: find Caroline, or be entirely consumed by the darkness.

View Details >>

The Hacienda

Isabel Cañas

Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca in this debut supernatural suspense novel, set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, about a remote house, a sinister haunting, and the woman pulled into their clutches...
During the overthrow of the Mexican government, Beatriz’s father was executed and her home destroyed. When handsome Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes, Beatriz ignores the rumors surrounding his first wife’s sudden demise, choosing instead to seize the security that his estate in the countryside provides. She will have her own home again, no matter the cost.
 
But Hacienda San Isidro is not the sanctuary she imagined.

When Rodolfo returns to work in the capital, visions and voices invade Beatriz’s sleep. The weight of invisible eyes follows her every move. Rodolfo’s sister, Juana, scoffs at Beatriz’s fears—but why does she refuse to enter the house at night? Why does the cook burn copal incense at the edge of the kitchen and mark the doorway with strange symbols? What really happened to the first Doña Solórzano?

Beatriz only knows two things for certain: Something is wrong with the hacienda. And no one there will save her.

Desperate for help, she clings to the young priest, Padre Andrés, as an ally. No ordinary priest, Andrés will have to rely on his skills as a witch to fight off the malevolent presence haunting the hacienda and protect the woman for whom he feels a powerful, forbidden attraction. But even he might not be enough to battle the darkness.

Far from a refuge, San Isidro may be Beatriz’s doom.

 

View Details >>

Kaikeyi

Vaishnavi Patel

"Patel''s mesmerizing debut shines a brilliant light on the vilified queen from [the Indian epic] the Ramayana....This easily earns its place on shelves alongside Madeline Miller''s Circe." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions--much good it did me."


So begins Kaikeyi''s story. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on tales of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain the nectar of immortality, how they vanquish evil and ensure the land of Bharat prospers, and how they offer powerful boons to the devout and the wise. Yet she watches as her father unceremoniously banishes her mother, listens as her own worth is reduced to how great a marriage alliance she can secure. And when she calls upon the gods for help, they never seem to hear.


Desperate for some measure of independence, she turns to the texts she once read with her mother and discovers a magic that is hers alone. With this power, Kaikeyi transforms herself from an overlooked princess into a warrior, diplomat, and most favored queen, determined to carve a better world for herself and the women around her.


But as the evil from her childhood stories threatens the cosmic order, the path she has forged clashes with the destiny the gods have chosen for her family. And Kaikeyi must decide if resistance is worth the destruction it will wreak--and what legacy she intends to leave behind.


A stunning debut from a powerful new voice, Kaikeyi reimagines the life of the infamous queen from the Indian epic the Ramayana, weaving a tale of fate, family, courage, and heartbreak--of an extraordinary woman determined to leave her mark in a world where gods and men dictate the shape of things to come.


Praise for Kaikeyi:


"Utterly captivating from start to finish. I was immersed in Kaikeyi''s world from the moment I opened Vaishnavi Patel''s stunning debut." ―Genevieve Gornichec, author of The Witch''s Heart


"Patel shines an elegant, incisive lens on an ancient epic and the vilified queen tangled within it. Brave, compassionate and powerful." ―Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne


"Mythic retelling at its best: entrancing, troubling, and complicated. Kaikeyi is marvelous." ―R. F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War


"A lyrical and evocative retelling, full of power and grace, which brings forward a traditionally maligned woman of myth. A spellbinding debut." ―Ava Reid, author of The Wolf and the Woodsman


"Compulsively readable and infinitely compassionate, this is the story I''ve been yearning for all my life." ―Roshani Chokshi, author of The Gilded Wolves


"The best kind of retelling. Deftly weaving fantasy elements with beloved mythology, this brilliant reinterpretation enriches the Ramayana with counternarratives." ―Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing


"A thought-provoking, nuanced new look at one of humanity''s most foundational stories." --Shannon Chakraborty, author of The City of Brass


"Kaikeyi is a glorious tapestry of a novel. I adored it." --Lucy Holland, author of Sistersong


"The novel is compelling and rich, drawing on the source material while furnishing its characters with new complexity and motivations. Fans of Madeline Miller''s Circe will fall hard for this story." ―Booklist (starred review)

View Details >>

Daughter of the Moon Goddess

Sue Lynn Tan

The bestselling debut fantasy inspired by the legend of the Chinese moon goddess.


A young woman's quest to free her mother pits her against the most powerful immortal in the realm, setting her on a dangerous path where those she loves are not the only ones at risk...


*THE INSTANT TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*

THERE ARE MANY LEGENDS ABOUT MY MOTHER...


Raised far away on the moon, Xingyin was unaware she was being hidden from the Celestial Emperor - who exiled her mother for stealing the elixir of immortality. But when her magic flares and reveals her, Xingyin is forced to flee her home, leaving her mother behind.


Alone, powerless, and afraid, Xingyin makes her way to the Celestial Kingdom, a land of wonder and secrets. In disguise, she trains alongside the Emperor's son, mastering archery and magic, despite the passion which flames between them.


Vowing to rescue her mother, Xingyin embarks on a quest, confronting legendary creatures and vicious enemies. But when forbidden magic threatens the kingdom, Xingyin must challenge the ruthless Emperor, leaving her torn between losing all she loves or plunging the realm into chaos...


Inspired by the legend of Chang'e the Moon Goddess, this captivating debut weaves Chinese mythology into a sweeping adventure of love and family, immortals and magic.


"A breathtaking debut novel that will sweep readers away. Epic, romantic, and enthralling from start to finish. I love this book."

̄Stephanie Garber, #1 NYT bestselling author of the Caraval series


"This vivid, unputdownable debut effortlessly whisks us into the celestial realms of Chinese high fantasy. A captivating treat for lovers of Chinese fantasy dramas and newcomers alike."

̄Shelley Parker-Chan, bestselling author of She Who Became the Sun


"A lush, dreamy gem of a novel."

̄Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass


"Strikingly evocative, tense, and heartfelt, Daughter of the Moon Goddess leaves you dreaming of dragons."

̄Andrea Stewart, author of The Bone Shard Daughter

View Details >>

Translating Myself and Others

Jhumpa Lahiri

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by the award-winning writer and literary translator

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.

With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.

Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

View Details >>

Financial Feminist

Tori Dunlap

An instant New York Times bestseller

From the globally-recognized personal finance educator and social media star behind Her First $100K, an inclusive guide to all things money--from managing debt to investing and voting with your dollars

Tori Dunlap was always good with money. As a kid, she watched her prudent parents balance their checkbook every month and learned to save for musical tickets by gathering pennies in an Altoids tin. But she quickly discovered that her experience with money was pretty unusual, especially among her female friends.

It wasn't our fault. Investigating this financial literacy and wealth gap, Tori found that girls are significantly less likely to receive a holistic financial education; we're taught to restrain our spending, while boys are taught about investing and rewarded for pursuing wealth. In adulthood, women are hounded by the unfounded stereotype of the frivolous spenders whose lattes are to blame for the wealth gap. And when something like, say, a global pandemic happens, we're the first to have jobs cut and the last to re-enter the workforce. It's no wonder money is a source of anxiety and a barrier to equality for so many of us.

But what if money didn't mean restriction, and instead, choice? The ability to luxuriously travel, quit toxic jobs, donate to important organizations, retire early? The freedom to live the life you want, and change the world while you do it?

Tori founded Her First $100K to teach women to overcome the unique obstacles standing in the way of their financial freedom. In Financial Feminist, she distills the principles of her shame- and judgment-free approach to paying off debt, figuring out your value categories to spend mindfully, saving money without monk-like deprivation, and investing in order to spend your retirement tanning in Tulum.

You will learn:

- Exercises to help you understand your current relationship with money, figure out what you want to change, and how to make that happen

- How to decide on your investment goal, and discover the three steps to meeting it

- Learn how to source the data you need to negotiate the money you deserve

Featuring journaling prompts, deep-dives into the invisible aspects of the financial landscape, and interviews with experts on everything money--from predatory credit card companies to the racial wealth gap and voting with your dollars--Financial Feminist is the ultimate guide to making your money work harder for you (rather than the other way around.)

View Details >>

Weightless

Evette Dionne

A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender--and toward a brighter future--from National Book Award nominee Evette Dionne

My body has not betrayed me; it has continued rebounding against all odds. It is a body that others map their expectations on, but it has never let me down.

In this insightful, funny, and whip-smart book, acclaimed writer Evette Dionne explores the minefields fat Black woman are forced to navigate in the course of everyday life. From her early experiences of harassment to adolescent self-discovery in internet chatrooms to diagnosis with heart failure at age twenty-nine, Dionne tracks her relationships with friendship, sex, motherhood, agoraphobia, health, pop culture, and self-image.

Along the way, she lifts back the curtain to reveal the subtle, insidious forms of surveillance and control levied at fat women: At the doctor's office, where any health ailment is treated with a directive to lose weight. On dating sites, where larger bodies are rejected or fetishized. On TV, where fat characters are asexual comedic relief. But Dionne's unflinching account of our deeply held prejudices is matched by her fierce belief in the power of self-love.

An unmissable portrait of a woman on a journey toward understanding our society and herself, Weightless holds up a mirror to the world we live in and asks us to imagine the future we deserve.

View Details >>

Mother Brain

Chelsea Conaboy

Health and science journalist Chelsea Conaboy explodes the concept of “maternal instinct” and tells a new story about what it means to become a parent.

Conaboy expected things to change with the birth of her child. What she didn’t expect was how different she would feel. But she would soon discover what was behind this: her changing brain. Though Conaboy was prepared for the endless dirty diapers, the sleepless nights, and the joy of holding her newborn, she did not anticipate this shift in self, as deep as it was disorienting. Mother Brain is a groundbreaking exploration of the parental brain that untangles insidious myths from complicated realities.

New parents undergo major structural and functional brain changes, driven by hormones and the deluge of stimuli a baby provides. These neurobiological changes help all parents—birthing or otherwise—adapt in those intense first days and prepare for a long period of learning how to meet their child’s needs. Pregnancy produces such significant changes in brain anatomy that researchers can easily sort those who have had one from those who haven't. And all highly involved parents, no matter their path to parenthood, develop similar caregiving circuitry. Yet this emerging science, which provides key insights into the wide-ranging experience of parenthood, from its larger role in shaping human nature to the intensity of our individual emotions, is mostly absent from the public conversation about parenthood.

The story that exists in the science today is far more meaningful than the idea that mothers spring into being by instinct. Weaving the latest neuroscience and social psychology together with new reporting, Conaboy reveals unexpected upsides, generations of scientific neglect, and a powerful new narrative of parenthood.

View Details >>

Quilt of Souls

Phyllis Biffle Elmore

The Yellow House meets Hidden in Plain View in this multigenerational memoir that celebrates African American quilting, family, and honoring the past.

At age four, Phyllis Biffle Elmore was plucked off her front porch in Detroit and dropped on her grandmother Lula Horn’s doorstep in rural Alabama. Phyllis felt utterly abandoned until Grandma Lula showed her both all-encompassing love and her intricate “Quilts of Souls.” Phyllis listened intently as Lula told epic stories of folks who had passed on as she turned their clothing into breathtaking quilts for their families.

Grandma Lula’s generosity of spirit, strong will, and creative soul animate every page and through the quilts, she paints portraits of extraordinary Black women born before and after the Civil War. They are enslaved people, laundresses, storytellers, healers, and quilters whose stories have gone untold until now.

Beautifully written and brilliantly told, Phyllis weaves back and forth through time, piecing together true tales of racism, sexism, and colorism, but also strength and pride, creating a multigenerational patchwork honoring her family and ancestors. From the lush visuals to the powerful history, Quilt of Souls is oral tradition written and preserved for posterity.

“Like the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who create masterpieces from cast-off fabrics, Phyllis Biffle Elmore in Quilt of Souls: A Memoir uses snippets of history and fragments of memories to craft a narrative that is a powerful and poignant read.”
–Jessica B. Harris, New York Times best-selling author of High on the Hog

"A fascinating read that unravels how storytellers are born and made, with the goal or retelling family history, culture, loves, losses, victories, and the tragedies of memoerable people, from cradle to grave."
–Omar Tyree, best-selling author and NAACP Image Award winner

View Details >>

I Wish My Dad

Romal Tune

""I Wish My Dad . . ."" what a simple way to start a sentence. But those four words hold the power to heal wounds men may not even know they carry.

From author, speaker, and social entrepreneur Romal Tune and his son, Jordan, comes this tour de force for fathers and sons about healing the unfinished business between them. What do sons wish they had received from their fathers? What might honest, healing conversations between fathers and sons look like?

Tune was raised mostly without a father. He and his dad connected briefly when he was a teenager, and then had no relationship for decades. After years of inner work via therapy and faith, Tune realized that neither he nor his dad possessed what they needed to live up to each other's expectations. He began to wonder if other men also longed to have vulnerable conversations with their fathers--about good memories, about pain, and about what their relationship could still become.

So he sat down with seventeen men of diverse ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds for ""I Wish My Dad"" conversations. In the pages of this book, he invites us into the room as the men unpack relationships with their fathers, learn to work through emotional pain, recount moments of tenderness and care, and describe risks they took to heal and connect with their fathers. Tune also offers us strategies and prompts for initiating our own ""I Wish My Dad"" conversations. And with no pretense, he and Jordan recount their own ""I Wish My Dad"" interview, which helped them chart the way toward a transformed relationship.

I Wish My Dad helps fathers, and their sons move through the past to find deep connection in the present. The lessons in these pages will free us to have--and become--the kind of dad we wish for.

View Details >>

Tanya Holland's California Soul

Tanya Holland

80+ comfort-filled recipes that trace the roots of modern California soul food to the Great Migration—from the acclaimed chef and author of Brown Sugar Kitchen.
 
“The new California Cuisine is California Soul.”—Questlove
 
California Soul is a book that will live on my kitchen counter with drips of California olive oil and splats of buttermilk on every page.”—Bobby Flay

ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle
ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Saveur, Food & Wine, Epicurious, Library Journal


Through more than 80 seasonally inspired recipes, Tanya Holland's California Soul showcases modern soul food from the acclaimed chef of Brown Sugar Kitchen and host of Tanya's Kitchen Table. Tanya’s inventive cuisine—rooted in a Black Southern cultural repertoire with a twenty-first-century sensibility using local, sustainable, chef-driven, seasonal ingredients—is showcased in recipes for every season, such as Collard Green Tabbouleh, Zucchini–Scallion Waffles with Toasted Pecan Romesco, Grilled Shrimp and Corn with Avocado White BBQ Sauce, Fried Chicken Paillards with Arugula and Pea Shoots Salad, Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake, and Honey Lavender Chess Pie. 

The recipes—influenced by the historical migration of African American families, including Tanya’s own—reveal the key ingredients, techniques, and traditions that African Americans brought with them as they left the South for California, creating a beloved version of soul food. Beyond recipes, Tanya spotlights fifteen contemporary Black Californian foodmakers—farmers, coffee roasters, and other talented artisans—whose work help defines California soul food, with stunning portraiture and stories. Filtered through the rich history of African American migration that brought her own family from the Deep South to the West Coast, Tanya's recipes are as comforting and delicious as they are steeped in history.

View Details >>

The Black Period

Hafizah Augustus Geter

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.

“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews

“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.

At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.

Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside stunning original artwork created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.

A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.

View Details >>

Bigger Than Bravery

Valerie Boyd

Best Books of 2022, Library Journal

Big Indie Book of Fall, Publishers Weekly

"Valerie Boyd's Bigger Than Bravery isn't just an anthology; it is a survival guide."
--Courtney B. Vance, Tony- and Emmy-winning actor

An anthology of Black resilience and reclamation, with contributions by Pearl Cleage, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tayari Jones, Kiese Laymon, Imani Perry, Deesha Philyaw, Khadijah Queen, Jason Reynolds, Alice Walker, and more

Born of a desire to bring together the voices of those most harshly affected by the intersecting pandemics of Covid-19 and systemic racism, Bigger Than Bravery explores comfort and compromise, challenge and resilience, throughout the Great Pause that became the Great Call. Award-winning author and scholar of the Black archive Valerie Boyd curates this anthology of original essays and poems, alongside some of the most influential nonfiction published on the subject, inviting readers into a conversation of restorative joy and enduring wisdom.

Bigger Than Bravery captures what Boyd calls the "first draft of history," with poems serving as deep breaths between narrative essays to form a loose chronology of this unprecedented time. Karen Good Marable cranks "Whip My Hair" from the car windows during quarantine joyrides with her daughter. Deesha Philyaw ponders loneliness as she sorts Zoom meetings into those that require a bra and those that don't. Writing in the moment though not of it, Pearl Cleage reflects on what has and hasn't changed since the AIDS epidemic. Jason Reynolds harnesses heat and flavor to carry on his father's legacy.

Sorrow and outrage have their say, but the stories in these pages are bright with family, music, food, and home, teaching us how to nourish ourselves and our communities. Looking ahead as much as it looks back, Bigger Than Bravery offers a window into a hopeful, complex present, establishing an essential record of how Black people in America insist on joy as an act of resistance.

View Details >>

Miss Chloe

A. J. Verdelle

"The award-winning author of The Good Negress shares invaluable insights on the precarious journey toward creativity that is the writer's life, and tells the compelling story of her relationship with Toni Morrison, painting an illuminating portrait of this towering yet enigmatic cultural icon. With the publication of her debut novel The Good Negress in 1995, A. J. Verdelle became an overnight sensation, winning critical acclaim and competing for prestigious literature prizes. But for Verdelle, the most unexpected consequence was the friendship she formed with the legendary Toni Morrison. Receiving an advance copy of the book, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author-notorious for never giving early praise-called The Good Negress, "Truly Extraordinary." It was a writer's dream come true-a dream that for Verdelle would become simultaneously exhilarating and challenging. Now, twenty-five years later, Verdelle tells the story of that success and what came after. Miss Chloe begins with the story of young Verdelle's persistent aim to become an author, spending countless pre-dawn hours writing the novel that became The Good Negress. Verdelle then turns to the heady period after publication, focusing on her relationship with Toni-a precious gift that was most of the time a grace and a blessing, and at other times, confusing and too separate from literature. While Morrison continued to rise as an icon, Verdelle's writing career took a sharp turn. Verdelle's next novel-a Western featuring Black characters-is quickly bought by a young editor who leaves for another job before the manuscript is finished. Searching for direction, Verdelle moves to another publisher. Yet this second book will languish for more than fifteen years. In chronicling her journey, Verdelle offers an honest assessment of what it means to be a writer, including the expectations and let downs that famous friendships do not defray. Miss Chloe ends with the period after Morrison has passed away, when Verdelle is left to face the reality of her writing career, pondering what it means to have promise that is yet to materialize. She finds comfort in advice Morrison offered over the years, insight she shares in this wise book. "In order for Morrison to take you seriously, to have patience with you, to be interested, you had to be able to hear her," Verdelle writes. "You had to be able to sit still and listen. You had to be able to pipe up in the pauses, and prove you understood. You needed demonstrate that language was a skill you had, that Black culture was known to you and respected by you""--

View Details >>

The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

Isaac Blum

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD!
A WILLIAM C. MORRIS AWARD WINNER!

The Chosen meets Adam Silvera in this irreverent and timely story of worlds colliding in friendship, betrayal, and hatred.


Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. He's got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren’t happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in at once, but that’s not Hoodie’s problem.

That is, until he meets and falls for Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary—who happens to be the daughter of the obstinate mayor trying to keep Hoodie’s community out of the town. And things only get more complicated when Tregaron is struck by a series of antisemitic crimes that quickly escalate to deadly violence.

As his community turns on him for siding with the enemy, Hoodie finds himself caught between his first love and the only world he’s ever known.

Isaac Blum delivers a wry, witty debut novel about a deeply important and timely subject, in a story of hatred and betrayal—and the friendships we find in the most unexpected places.

Praise for The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen:

“A deeply authentic story about the terror and glory of encountering the outside world without sacrificing who you are—and who you want to be. It’s touching, tragic, and as Jewish as your Bubbe’s cholent.” –Gavriel Savit, New York Times bestselling author of Anna and the Swallow Man

“Blum gives the common but often-dismissed spiritual journey of many teens the respect it deserves in this witty, profound look at cross-cultural friendship, courageous honesty, and how a willingness to truly see and love our neighbors can change an entire community.” –Vesper Stamper, National Book Award-nominated author of What the Night Sings

“A refreshingly human look at the day-to-day nuances of Orthodox Judaism and the terror of modern antisemitism. I laughed, I gasped, I craved kosher Starburst. Two thumbs up from this nice Jewish girl!” –Tyler Feder, Sydney Taylor Award-winning author of Dancing at the Pity Party

“Bold, brave, and brutally honest, it holds a permanent piece of my heart.” –Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer

"Isaac Blum has the rare talent of telling searing, visceral truths in a witty, funny, punchy way . . . The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen is a vital voice in Jewish YA canon." –Katherine Locke, Sydney Taylor Honor author of The Girl with the Red Balloon

View Details >>

All My Rage

Sabaa Tahir

National Book Award FINALIST
An INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
An INSTANT INDIE BESTSELLER!

"All My Rage is a love story, a tragedy and an infectious teenage fever dream about what home means when you feel you don’t fit in." — New York Times Book Review

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.


Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.
 
Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.  
 
Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever.
 
When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.  
 
From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness—one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.

View Details >>

Seven Percent of Ro Devereux

Ellen O'Clover

Fans of Emma Lord, Rachel Lynn Solomon, and Alex Light will love this clever, charming, and poignant debut novel with a masterful slow-burn romance at its core about a girl who must decide whether to pursue her dreams or preserve her relationships, including a budding romance with her ex-best friend, when an app she created goes viral.

Ro Devereux can predict your future. Or, at least, the app she built for her senior project can.

Working with her neighbor, a retired behavioral scientist, Ro created an app called MASH, designed around the classic game Mansion Apartment Shack House, that can predict a person's future with 93% accuracy. The app will even match users with their soulmates. Though it was only supposed to be a class project, MASH quickly takes off and gains the attention of tech investors.

Ro's dream is to work in Silicon Valley, and she'll do anything to prove to her new backing company--and the world--that the app works. So it's a huge shock when the app says her soulmate is Miller, her childhood best friend with whom she had a friendship-destroying fight three years ago.

Now thrust into a fake dating scenario, Ro and Miller must address the years of pain between them if either of them will have any chance of achieving their dreams. And as the app takes on a life of its own, Ro sees that it's affecting people in ways she never expected--and if she can't regain control, it might take her and everything she believes in down with it.

View Details >>

The Wrong Kind of Weird

James Ramos

"Sweet, snarky, and delightfully dorky." --Elise Bryant, author of Happily Ever Afters



Cameron Carson has a secret. A secret with the power to break apart his friend group.



Cameron Carson, member of the Geeks and Nerds United (GANU) club, has been secretly hooking up with student council president, cheerleader, theater enthusiast, and all-around queen bee Karla Ortega since the summer. The one problem--what was meant to be a summer fling between coffee shop coworkers has now evolved into a clandestine senior-year entanglement, where Karla isn't intending on blending their friend groups anytime soon, or at all.



Enter Mackenzie Briggs, who isn't afraid to be herself or wear her heart on her sleeve. When Cameron finds himself unexpectedly bonding with Mackenzie and repeatedly snubbed in public by Karla, he starts to wonder who he can truly consider a friend and who might have the potential to become more...

View Details >>

The Winter Soldier

Mackenzi Lee

1954: The Winter Soldier is the Soviet Union's greatest weapon. Assigned the most dangerous covert missions from the USSR's secret military branch, and guided by a handler who knows him better than he knows himself, he has only one purpose: to obey orders.
But he wasn't always the Winter Soldier . . .
1941: As World War II begins, sixteen-year-old Bucky Barnes is determined to enlist in the US army--if only the local commander will stop getting in his way. When Bucky is offered enrollment in a training program with the British Special Operations Executive--the UK's secret service--he leaps at the chance to become a hero. But Bucky has hardly touched down in London when he finds himself running from a mysterious assassin and accompanied by an English chess champion fond of red lipstick and double crosses. She's in possession of a secret every side is desperate to get their hands on. If only they knew what it was . . .
Decades later, the Winter Soldier struggles to solve the same mystery Bucky is just beginning to uncover. As their missions intersect across time, their lives collide too--in a way that neither of them would have expected, and that will change the course of their respective wars.
In The Winter Soldier: Cold Front, New York Times best-selling author Mackenzi Lee explores the youth of one of Marvel's most compelling characters, James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes--and the enemy soldier he is forced to become.

View Details >>

This Is Not a Personal Statement

Tracy Badua

Admission meets American Panda in this propulsive, poignant YA contemporary novel about a teen who, after getting rejected from her dream college, forges her own acceptance and commits to living a lie. Perfect for fans of Mary H.K. Choi!

At sixteen, Perla is the youngest graduating senior of the hypercompetitive Monte Verde High. Praised--and not-so-quietly bashed--as "Perfect Perlie Perez," Perla knows all the late nights, social isolation, and crushing stress will be worth it when she gets into the college of her (and her parents') dreams: Delmont University.

Then Perla doesn't get in, and her meticulously planned future shatters. In a panic, she forges her own acceptance letter, and next thing she knows, she's heading to Delmont for real, acceptance or not. Soon, Perla is breaking into dorm rooms, crashing classes, and dodging questions from new friends about her lack of a student ID. Her plan? Gather on-the-ground intel to beef up her application and reapply spring semester before she's caught.

But as her guilty conscience grows and campus security looms large, Perla starts to wonder if her plan will really succeed--and if this dream she's worked for her entire life is something she even wants.

From rising star Tracy Badua comes a gripping, incisive tale of acceptance, self-discovery, and the infinite possibilities that await when we embrace our imperfections.

View Details >>

How to Be a (Young) Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi

The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! Based on the adult bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi, and co-authored by bestselling author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist will serve as a guide for teens seeking a way forward in acknowledging, identifying, and dismantling racism and injustice.

The New York Times bestseller How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi is shaping the way a generation thinks about race and racism. How to be a (Young) Antiracist is a dynamic reframing of the concepts shared in the adult book, with young adulthood front and center. Aimed at readers 12 and up, and co-authored by award-winning children's book author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist empowers teen readers to help create a more just society. Antiracism is a journey--and now young adults will have a map to carve their own path. Kendi and Stone have revised this work to provide anecdotes and data that speaks directly to the experiences and concerns of younger readers, encouraging them to think critically and build a more equitable world in doing so.

View Details >>

Spice Road

Maiya Ibrahim

The first book in an epic fantasy series set in an Arabian-inspired land with secret spice magic. Raised to protect her nation from the monsters lurking in the sands, sixteen-year-old Imani must fight to find her brother, whose betrayal is now the country's greatest threat.

In the hidden desert city of Qalia, there is secret spice magic that awakens the affinities of those who drink the misra tea. Sixteen-year-old Imani has the affinity for iron and is able to wield a dagger like no other warrior. She has garnered the reputation as being the next great Shield for battling djinn, ghouls, and other monsters spreading across the sands.

Her reputation has been overshadowed, however, by her brother, who tarnished the family name after it was revealed that he was stealing his nation's coveted spice—a telltale sign of magical obsession. Soon after that, he disappeared, believed to have died beyond the Forbidden Wastes. Despite her brother’s betrayal, there isn’t a day that goes by when Imani doesn’t grieve him.

But when Imani discovers signs that her brother may be alive and spreading the nation's magic to outsiders, she makes a deal with the Council that she will find him and bring him back to Qalia, where he will face punishment. Accompanied by other Shields, including Taha, a powerful beastseer who can control the minds of falcons, she sets out on her mission.

Imani will soon find that many secrets lie beyond the Forbidden Wastes—and in her own heart—but will she find her brother?

View Details >>

Friday I'm in Love

Camryn Garrett

It's too late for a Sweet Sixteen, but what if Mahalia had a coming-out party? A love letter to romantic comedies, sweet sixteen blowouts, Black joy, and queer pride.


Mahalia Harris wants.

She wants a big Sweet Sixteen like her best friend, Naomi.
She wants the super-cute new girl Siobhan to like her back.
She wants a break from worrying—about money, snide remarks from white classmates, pitying looks from church ladies . . . all of it.

Then inspiration strikes: It’s too late for a Sweet Sixteen, but what if she had a coming-out party? A singing, dancing, rainbow-cake-eating celebration of queerness on her own terms.

The idea lights a fire beneath her, and soon Mahalia is scrimping and saving, taking on extra hours at her afterschool job, trying on dresses, and awkwardly flirting with Siobhan, all in preparation for the coming out of her dreams. But it’s not long before she’s buried in a mountain of bills, unfinished schoolwork, and enough drama to make her English lit teacher blush. With all the responsibility on her shoulders, will Mahalia’s party be over before it’s even begun?

A novel about finding yourself, falling in love, and celebrating what makes you you.

View Details >>

The Stolen Heir

Holly Black

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!

An Instant #1 Indie Bestseller!

Return to the opulent world of Elfhame, filled with intrigue, betrayal, and dangerous desires, with this first book of a captivating new duology from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black.

A runaway queen. A reluctant prince. And a quest that may destroy them both.

Eight years have passed since the Battle of the Serpent. But in the icy north, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has reclaimed the Ice Needle Citadel. There, she is using an ancient relic to create monsters of stick and snow who will do her bidding and exact her revenge.

Suren, child queen of the Court of Teeth, and the one person with power over her mother, fled to the human world. There, she lives feral in the woods. Lonely, and still haunted by the merciless torments she endured in the Court of Teeth, she bides her time by releasing mortals from foolish bargains. She believes herself forgotten until the storm hag, Bogdana chases her through the night streets. Suren is saved by none other than Prince Oak, heir to Elfhame, to whom she was once promised in marriage and who she has resented for years.

Now seventeen, Oak is charming, beautiful, and manipulative. He's on a mission that will lead him into the north, and he wants Suren's help. But if she agrees, it will mean guarding her heart against the boy she once knew and a prince she cannot trust, as well as confronting all the horrors she thought she left behind.

View Details >>

Unseelie

Ivelisse Housman

The start of a swoony, high-energy duology that Emily Lloyd-Jones, author of The Bone Houses, calls "reminiscent of classic fairytales yet brimming with a charm all its own."



"A world of glimmering fae that sparkles with mystery, adventure, and enchantment." --Andrew Joseph White, New York Times bestselling author of Hell Followed with Us



Iselia "Seelie" Graygrove looks just like her twin, Isolde...but as an autistic changeling left in the human world by the fae as an infant, she has always known she is different. Seelie's unpredictable magic makes it hard for her to fit in--and draws her and Isolde into the hunt for a fabled treasure. In a heist gone wrong, the sisters make some unexpected allies and find themselves unraveling a mystery that has its roots in the history of humans and fae alike.



Both sisters soon discover that the secrets of the faeries may be more valuable than any pile of gold and jewels. But can Seelie harness her magic in time to protect her sister and herself?



"Housman's stunning debut is the sort of love letter only an autistic author could write. Fae canon has been waiting for this one." --H.E. Edgmon, author of The Witch King


 

View Details >>

When You Wish Upon a Lantern

Gloria Chao

Acclaimed author Gloria Chao creates real-world magic in this luminous romance about teens who devote themselves to granting other people's wishes but are too afraid to let themselves have their own hearts' desires—each other.

Liya and Kai had been best friends since they were little kids, but all that changed when a humiliating incident sparked The Biggest Misunderstanding of All Time—and they haven’t spoken since.

Then Liya discovers her family's wishing lantern store is struggling, and she decides to resume a tradition she had with her beloved late grandmother: secretly fulfilling the wishes people write on the lanterns they send into the sky. It may boost sales and save the store, but she can't do it alone . . . and Kai is the only one who cares enough to help.

While working on their covert missions, Liya and Kai rekindle their friendship—and maybe more. But when their feuding families and changing futures threaten to tear them apart again, can they find a way to make their own wishes come true?

View Details >>

Wildblood

Lauren Blackwood

A thrilling new fantasy from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Blackwood!

Eighteen-year-old Victoria is a Wildblood. Since she was kidnapped at the age of six and manipulated by the Exotic Lands Touring Company, she’s worked as a tour guide ever since with a team of fellow Wildbloods who take turns using their magic to protect travelers in a Jamaican jungle teeming with ghostly monsters.

When the boss denies Victoria an earned promotion to team leader in favor of Dean, her backstabbing ex, she’s determined to prove herself. Her magic may be the most powerful on the team, but she’s not the image the boss wants to send their new client, Thorn, a renowned goldminer determined to reach an untouched gold supply deep in the jungle.

Thorn is everything Victoria isn't - confident, impossibly kind, and so handsome he leaves her speechless. And when he entrusts the mission to her, kindness turns to mutual respect, turns to affection, turns to love. But the jungle is treacherous, and between hypnotic river spirits, soul-devouring women that shed their skin like snakes, and her ex out for revenge, Victoria has to decide - is promotion at a corrupt company really what she wants?

A fierce, lush fantasy by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Blackwood, Wildblood tells the story of a girl who must find the strength to defeat the demons of the jungle as well as her own to find where she truly belongs.

"A lyrically told story of healing after trauma and finding home, Wildblood is as fierce as it is beautiful, and as hopeful as it is heartbreaking." - Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf

"Wildblood is a poignant, thrilling, emotionally complex story of love and sacrifice. Victoria's tense journey through the haunted jungle is filled with terror and beauty, both supernatural and human, and will grip you until the very last page." - L. Penelope, award-winning author of the Earthsinger Chronicles

View Details >>

The Long Run

James Acker

"A boldly authentic new voice in queer fiction." --Abdi Nazemian, author of Stonewall Honor book Like a Love Story and The Chandler Legacies



Two track and field athletes find an unexpected but powerful love in this unapologetically blunt and unforgettably real YA debut.



Sebastian Villeda is over it. Over his rep. Over his bros. Over being "Bash the Flash," fastest sprinter in South Jersey. His dad is gone, his mom is dead, and his stepfather is clueless. Bash has no idea what he wants out of life. Until he meets Sandro.



Sandro Miceli is too nice for his own good. The middle child in an always-growing, always-screaming Italian family, Sandro walks around on a broken foot to not bother his busy parents. All he wants is to get out and never look back.



When fate--in the form of a party that gets busted--brings these two very different boys together, neither of them could've predicted finding a love that they'd risk everything for...

View Details >>

Lot

Bryan Washington

One of Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year” 

"Phenomenal" --Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

"Brilliant" --Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun
“A profound exploration of the true meaning of borders.” —The New York Times Book Review

NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2019 in the New York Times by Dwight Garner
New York Times Notable Book of 2019


In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.


Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

View Details >>

Real Life

Brandon Taylor

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
 
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York TimesThe Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's BazaarFinancial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, VultureThrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.


Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  
 
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

View Details >>

Such a Fun Age

Kiley Reid

A Best Book of the Year:
The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • NPR Vogue • Elle  Real Simple • InStyle • Good Housekeeping • Parade • Slate  Vox  Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal  BookPage

Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

A Reese's Book Club Pick 

"The most provocative page-turner of the year." --Entertainment Weekly

"I urge you to read Such a Fun Age." --NPR

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.


Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

View Details >>

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott

 

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER***

***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER***

Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Shortlist, 2022 Maya Angelou Book Award Shortlist, 2022 Carnegie Medal Longlist

A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick! 

One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021



An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?  Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

 

View Details >>

The Death of Vivek Oji

Akwaeke Emezi

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE

Electrifying. -- O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, USA TODAY, Vanity Fair, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, Shondaland, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Lit Hub, Bustle, Electric Literature, and BookPage

What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew?

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens--and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis--the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

Propulsively readable, teeming with unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations--a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.

View Details >>

Queenie

Candice Carty-Williams

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 BY WOMAN’S DAY, NEWSDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BUSTLE, AND BOOK RIOT!

“[B]rilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.” —Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You

For fans of Luster and I May Destroy You, a disarmingly honest, unapologetically black, and undeniably witty debut novel that will speak to those who have gone looking for love and found something very different in its place.

Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

With “fresh and honest” (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.

View Details >>

Pizza Girl

Jean Kyoung Frazier

In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.

View Details >>

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke

English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.

But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.

All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.

View Details >>

Riot Baby

Tochi Onyebuchi

Winner of the 2021 World Fantasy Award
Winner of an 2021 ALA Alex Award
Winner of the 2020 New England Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Ignyte Award
Winner of the 2021 AABMC Literary Award

A 2021 Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Best Outstanding Work of Literary Fiction
A 2021 Hugo Award Finalist
A 2021 Nebula Award Finalist
A 2021 Locus Award Finalist
A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist


A Most Anticipated in 2020 Pick for Book Riot | Buzzfeed | Paste | WBUR

Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR | Wired | Book Riot | Publishers Weekly | NYPL | The Austen Chronicle | Kobo | Google Play | Powell's Books | Den of Geek

"Riot Baby, Onyebuchi's first novel for adults, is as much the story of Ella and her brother, Kevin, as it is the story of black pain in America, of the extent and lineage of police brutality, racism and injustice in this country, written in prose as searing and precise as hot diamonds."—The New York Times

"Riot Baby bursts at the seams of story with so much fire, passion and power that in the end it turns what we call a narrative into something different altogether."—Marlon James

Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor's son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven't happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.

Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.

View Details >>

Our Wives Under the Sea

Julia Armfield

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (NPR, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, The Telegraph, Goodreads, Tor.com, them, and more)

“A deeply strange and haunting novel in the best possible way...An impressive and exciting debut novel that may leave you thinking about your own relationships in a new light.” —NPR

“Shocking...Achingly poetic...Sharp and beautiful as coral polyps...Armfield exercises an exquisite—even sadistic—sense of suspense." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.

View Details >>

We Sold Our Souls

Grady Hendrix

“A gloriously over-the-top scare fest that has hidden depths. Readers will root for Kris all the way to the explosive, poignant finale.”—Publishers Weekly

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

Only a girl with a guitar can save us all.

Every morning, Kris Pulaski wakes up in hell. In the 1990s she was lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a heavy-metal band on the brink of breakout success until lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom, leaving his bandmates to rot in obscurity.

Now Kris works as night manager of a Best Western; she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Then one day everything changes—a shocking act of violence turns her life upside down, and she begins to suspect that Terry sabotaged more than just the band. Kris hits the road, hoping to reunite Dürt Würk and confront the man who ruined her life. Her journey will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a celebrity rehab center to a satanic music festival. 

A spine-tingling horror novel, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, pill-popping, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul.

View Details >>

The Drowning Kind

Jennifer McMahon

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLER OF 2021

In this “blisteringly suspenseful tale that will keep you up at night” (Wendy Webb, author of Daughters of the Lake), a woman returns to the old family home after her sister mysteriously drowns in its swimming ​pool…but she’s not the pool’s only victim.

Be careful what you wish for.

When Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.

A modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us, The Drowning Kind “is satisfying on every level: Marvelously chilling, elegantly written, a true page-turner” (Janelle Brown, New York Times bestselling author).

View Details >>

No Hiding in Boise

Kim Hooper

A 2021 INDIE NEXT Pick

A Women's National Book Association 2021 Great Group Read

 

 

"With this novel, Kim Hooper has created magic from the seemingly impossible. In her hands, the gossamer threads that tie three perfect strangers to each other following a shared tragedy, become nothing less than a transformative bond of human connection. Honest, brave, messy and unsparing, her characters are fearless pioneers in the darkness, and ultimately shed light for us on the most precious gift of all...life after loss." -Brad Silberling, Writer/Director of Moonlight Mile, Director of City of Angels

 

When Angie is awakened by a midnight call from an officer with the Boise Police Department, she thinks there must be a misunderstanding. The officer tells her that her husband was involved in a shooting at a local bar, but how can that be possible when her husband is sleeping right next to her? Except when she turns to wake him, he isn't there.

 

Tessa is the twenty-three-year-old bartender who escapes to a backroom storage closet during the shooting. When it comes to light that five people were killed, she is burdened with the question of why she survived.

 

Joyce wakes up to a knock at her front door, a knock she assumes is her wayward son, Jed, who must have lost his keys. It's not Jed, though. Two police officers tell her that Jed is dead, shot at the bar. Then they deliver even worse news: "We have reason to believe your son was the shooter."

 

 

So begins the story of three women tied together by tragic fate--a wife trying to understand why her now-comatose husband was frequenting a bar in the middle of the night, the young woman who her husband was apparently pursuing, and a mother who is forced to confront the reality of who her son was and who she is.

 

View Details >>

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times


Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

View Details >>

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V. E. Schwab

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
USA TODAY BESTSELLER
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
THE WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, NPR, Slate, and Oprah Magazine
#1 Library Reads PickOctober 2020
#1 Indie Next PickOctober 2020
BOOK OF THE YEAR (2020) FINALISTBook of The Month Club

A “Best Of” Book From: Oprah Mag * CNN * Amazon * Amazon Editors * NPR * Goodreads * Bustle * PopSugar * BuzzFeed * Barnes & Noble * Kirkus Reviews * Lambda Literary * Nerdette * The Nerd Daily * Polygon * Library Reads * io9 * Smart Bitches Trashy Books * LiteraryHub * Medium * BookBub * The Mary Sue * Chicago Tribune * NY Daily News * SyFy Wire * Powells.com * Bookish * Book Riot * Library Reads Voter Favorite *

In the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab’s genre-defying tour de force.

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.


France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Also by V. E. Schwab

Shades of Magic
A Darker Shade of Magic
A Gathering of Shadows
A Conjuring of Light


Villains
Vicious
Vengeful

View Details >>

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR) • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER LIST

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

View Details >>

Before We Were Trans

Kit Heyam

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity 



Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives.



Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

View Details >>

When I Was Red Clay

Jonathan T. Bailey

A young person’s story of growing up gay in a rural Mormon town and the wild places where he found refuge.

This intimate record lays bare one person's experience growing up in a rural Mormon community and struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with the religious doctrine of his childhood. Weaving together prose, poetry, and stories scrawled on the margins of high school notebooks, Jonathan T. Bailey encounters truth-seeing owls, anachronistic gourds, and the hard-edged realities of family and church. In When I Was Red Clay, he navigates desert landscapes, mental health, and the loss of faith with unflinching honesty and biting humor.

View Details >>

American Sirens

Kevin Hazzard

"Hazzard tells a ... story of heroes and villains, of brutal attempts to stifle hope, and the resilience of a community that fought back. He follows a rich cast of characters that includes John Moon, an orphan who found his calling as a paramedic; Peter Safar, the Nobel Prize-nominated physician who invented CPR and realized his vision for a trained ambulance service; and Nancy Caroline, the idealistic young doctor who turned a scrappy team into an international leader. At every turn they battled racism--from the community, the police, and the government. Never-before revealed in full, this is a rich and troubling hidden history of the Black origins of America's paramedics, a special band of dedicated essential workers, who stand ready to serve day and night on the line between life and death for every one of us"--

View Details >>

Breathless

David Quammen

National Book Award Finalist

The story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

Breathless is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a “forever virus,” destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that:
-Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming
-Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that “the next big one” would be caused by a changeable new virus—very possibly a coronavirus—but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons
-The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed
-And much more.

Breathless takes you inside the frantic international effort to understand and control SARS-CoV-2 as if we were peering over the shoulders of the brilliant scientists who led the chase.

View Details >>

The Grimkes

Kerri K. Greenidge

New York Times • "15 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Fall"
Boston Globe • "20 New Books We're Most Excited to Read This Fall"

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.


Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.

In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

View Details >>

Feral City

Jeremiah Moss

What happens when an entire social class abandons a metropolis? This genre-bending journey through lockdown New York offers an exhilarating, intimate look at a city returned to its rebellious spirit.

 

The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class—and their controlling influence. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche.”

 

In public spaces made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss experienced an uncanny time warp. Biking through deserted Manhattan, he encountered the hustlers, eccentrics, and renegades who had been pressed into silence and invisibility by an oppressive, normative gentrification, now reemerging to reclaim the city. For one wild year the streets belonged to wandering nudists and wheelie bikers, mystical vagabonds and performance artists working to disrupt the status quo, passionate activists protesting for Black lives—along with the everyday New Yorkers who had been pushed to the margins for too long. Participating in a historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity, from queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, Moss discovered an intoxicating freedom. Without “hyper-normal” people to constrain it, New York became more creative, connected, humane, and joyful than it had been in years.

Moss braids this captivating narrative with an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, weaving together insights from psychoanalysis, literature, and queer theory. A kaleidoscopic vision of a city transformed, Feral City offers valuable insight into the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and can be set free.

View Details >>

Revolutionary Women

Ann Shen

Revolutionary Women celebrates the amazing stories of 50 women of color who pushed boundaries, rewrote the rules, and inspired women everywhere to follow in their footsteps.

Discover the remarkable true stories of a diverse group of women who were trailblazers and leaders in their field, becoming visible icons of excellence in their communities and beyond. From making their mark on the big screen and in the halls of NASA to ruling on the courts of the US Open and the Supreme Court, their incredible stories will inspire you to embrace your authentic self and live your life in full color.

For fans of Ann Shen's beloved Bad Girls Throughout History, this spiritual successor celebrates the accomplishments of these incredible women alongside Ann Shen's signature artwork. From dancers, actors, and singers to scientists, astronauts, politicians, and activists, these women used their voices and their passions to change the world. They include:

- Gloria Estefan, one of the best-selling female music artists of all time.
- Anna Sui, an iconic fashion designer for over four decades.
- Bessie Stringfield, the motorcycle queen of Miami.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever sworn into Congress.
- Misty Copeland, the first Black woman principal dancer at American Ballet Theater.
- Joyce Chen, the first Chinese celebrity chef.

Revolutionary Women captures their extraordinary stories in a beautiful and inspiring format that elevates their achievements. Readers will love the new take on Ann Shen's beloved first book, as well as the uplifting stories, beautiful and rich art, and the inspiration for readers to forge their own paths.

BEAUTIFUL GIFT: This book combines fun and colorful illustrations with important history through the lens of intersectional feminism, celebrating women of color for the amazing things they accomplished, appealing to people of all ages and genders.

Perfect for:

- Customers who also bought BAD GIRLS THROUGHOUT HISTORY or LEGENDARY LADIES
- Fans of Fashion, Art, and History
- Self-Proclaimed Feminists

View Details >>

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

Baek Sehee

The South Korean runaway bestseller, debut author Baek Sehee's intimate therapy memoir, as recommended by BTS.

PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you?

ME: I don’t know, I’m – what’s the word – depressed? Do I have to go into detail?

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness. It will appeal to anyone who has ever felt alone or unjustified in their everyday despair.

View Details >>

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom

Rabia Chaudry

“A delicious and mouthwatering book about food and family, the complicated love for both, and how that shapes us into who we are . . . I absolutely loved it!”
—Valerie Bertinelli

From the bestselling author and host of the wildly popular Undisclosed podcast, a warm, intimate memoir about food, body image, and growing up in a loving but sometimes oppressively concerned Pakistani immigrant family.


"My entire life I have been less fat and more fat, but never not fat." According to family lore, when Rabia Chaudry’s family returned to Pakistan for their first visit since moving to the United States, two-year-old Rabia was more than just a pudgy toddler. Dada Abu, her fit and sprightly grandfather, attempted to pick her up but had to put her straight back down, demanding of Chaudry’s mother: “What have you done to her?” The answer was two full bottles of half-and-half per day, frozen butter sticks to gnaw on, and lots and lots of American processed foods.
 
And yet, despite her parents plying her with all the wrong foods as they discovered Burger King and Dairy Queen, they were highly concerned for the future for their large-sized daughter. How would she ever find a suitable husband? There was merciless teasing by uncles, cousins, and kids at school, but Chaudry always loved food too much to hold a grudge against it. Soon she would leave behind fast food and come to love the Pakistani foods of her heritage, learning to cook them with wholesome ingredients and eat them in moderation. At once a love letter (with recipes) to fresh roti, chaat, chicken biryani, ghee, pakoras, shorba, parathay and an often hilarious dissection of life in a Muslim immigrant family, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is also a searingly honest portrait of a woman grappling with a body that gets the job done but that refuses to meet the expectations of others.
 
Chaudry's memoir offers readers a relatable and powerful voice on the controversial topic of body image, one that dispenses with the politics and gets to what every woman who has ever struggled with weight will relate to.
 

View Details >>

Goliath

Tochi Onyebuchi

A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick!

A Most Anticipated Pick for USA Today | Bustle | Buzzfeed | Goodreads | Nerdist | io9 | WBUR | Polygon | The New Scientist

Connecticut Book Award for Fiction winner! Dragon Award Finalist!

"In this ambitious novel, dense with perspectives and social commentary, Onyebuchi dreams up disparate lives in a crumbling future America—with gentrifiers returning to Earth from space colonies and laborers trying to make a precarious living—while leaving room for moments of beauty and humor."—The New York Times, Editors' Choice

In his adult novel debut, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Award finalist and ALA Alex and New England Book Award winner Tochi Onyebuchi delivers a sweeping science fiction epic in the vein of Samuel R. Delany and Station Eleven.

In the 2050s, Earth has begun to empty. Those with the means and the privilege have departed the great cities of the United States for the more comfortable confines of space colonies. Those left behind salvage what they can from the collapsing infrastructure. As they eke out an existence, their neighborhoods are being cannibalized. Brick by brick, their houses are sent to the colonies, what was once a home now a quaint reminder for the colonists of the world that they wrecked.

A primal biblical epic flung into the future, Goliath weaves together disparate narratives—a space-dweller looking at New Haven, Connecticut as a chance to reconnect with his spiraling lover; a group of laborers attempting to renew the promises of Earth’s crumbling cities; a journalist attempting to capture the violence of the streets; a marshal trying to solve a kidnapping—into a richly urgent mosaic about race, class, gentrification, and who is allowed to be the hero of any history.

View Details >>

Sweep of Stars

Maurice Broaddus

Maurice Broaddus's Sweep of Stars is the first in a trilogy that explores the struggles of an empire. Epic in scope and intimate in voice, it follows members of the Muungano empire – a far-reaching coalition of city-states that stretches from O.E. (original earth) to Titan – as it faces an escalating series of threats.

"The beauty in blackness is its ability to transform. Like energy we are neither created nor destroyed, though many try." - West African Proverb

The Muungano empire strived and struggled to form a utopia when they split away from old earth. Freeing themselves from the endless wars and oppression of their home planet in order to shape their own futures and create a far-reaching coalition of city-states that stretched from Earth and Mars to Titan.

With the wisdom of their ancestors, the leadership of their elders, the power and vision of their scientists and warriors they charted a course to a better future. But the old powers could not allow them to thrive and have now set in motion new plots to destroy all that they've built.

In the fire to come they will face down their greatest struggle yet.

Amachi Adisa and other young leaders will contend with each other for the power to galvanize their people and chart the next course for the empire.

Fela Buhari and her elite unit will take the fight to regions not seen by human eyes, but no training will be enough to bring them all home.

Stacia Chikeke, captain of the starship Cypher, will face down enemies across the stars, and within her own vessel, as she searches for the answers that could save them all.

The only way is forward.

View Details >>

The Book of Everlasting Things

Aanchal Malhotra

FOR FANS OF ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, A LUSH, SWEEPING LOVE STORY ABOUT A HINDU PERFUMER AND A MUSLIM CALLIGRAPHER, SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF PARTITION

“Monumental...A far-reaching love story.” —NPR (A Best Book of the Year)

“Mesmerizing.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Exquisite.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Majestic.” —Booklist (starred review)


On a January morning in 1938, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family’s ittar shop in Lahore. Over the years that follow, the perfumer’s apprentice and calligrapher’s apprentice fall in love with their ancient crafts and with each other, dreaming of the life they will one day share. But as the struggle for Indian independence gathers force, their beloved city is ravaged by Partition. Suddenly, they find themselves on opposite sides: Samir, a Hindu, becomes Indian and Firdaus, a Muslim, becomes Pakistani, their love now forbidden. Severed from one another, Samir and Firdaus make a series of fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives forever. As their paths spiral away from each other, they must each decide how much of the past they are willing to let go, and what it will cost them.

Lush, sensuous, and deeply romantic, The Book of Everlasting Things is the story of two lovers and two nations, split apart by forces beyond their control, yet bound by love and memory. Filled with exquisite descriptions of perfume and calligraphy, spanning continents and generations, Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.

View Details >>

The Widowmaker

Hannah Morrissey

A wealthy family shrouded in scandal; a detective tasked with solving an impossible cold case; and a woman with a dark past collide in Hannah Morrissey's stunning new Black Harbor mystery, The Widowmaker.

Ever since business mogul Clive Reynolds disappeared twenty years ago, the name "Reynolds" has become synonymous with "murder" and "mystery." And now, lured by a cryptic note, down-on-her-luck photographer Morgan Mori returns home to Black Harbor and into the web of their family secrets and double lives. The same night she photographs the Reynolds holiday get-together, Morgan becomes witness to a homicide of a cop that triggers the discovery of a long-buried clue.

This could finally be the thing to crack open the chilling cold case, and Investigator Ryan Hudson has a chance to prove himself as lead detective. If only he could stop letting his need to solve his partner's recent murder distract him. But as Morgan exposes her own dark demons, could her sordid history be the key to unlocking more than one mystery?

View Details >>

Witcha Gonna Do?

Avery Flynn

An unlucky witch and her know-it-all nemesis must team up in the first of a new, spicy romantic comedy series from USA Today bestselling author Avery Flynn.
 
Could it possibly get any worse than having absolutely no magical abilities when you’re a member of the most powerful family of witches ever? It used to be that I’d say no, but then I keep getting set up on dates with Gil Connolly whose hotness is only matched by his ego. Seriously. I can’t stand him. Even if I also can’t stop thinking about him (specifically kissing him) but we’re going to pretend I never told you that part.
 
So yeah, my life isn’t the greatest right now, but then it goes straight to the absolute worst hell when I accidentally make my sister’s spell glitch and curse my whole family. And the only person who can help non-magical me break the spell? You guessed it. Gil the super hot jerk. 
 
Now we have to work together to save my family and outmaneuver some evil-minded nefarious forces bent on world domination. Oh yeah, and we have to do all that while fighting against the attraction building between us because I may not be magical, but what’s happening between Gil and I sure feels like it.

View Details >>

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights

Kitty Zeldis

"A haunting meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. Zeldis offers a fascinating look into historic New York City and New Orleans, and her skill as a storyteller is matched by her compassion for her characters. What a beautiful read."--Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Magnolia Palace

"By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kitty Zeldis's The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, set against the backdrop of the not-always-so-roaring Twenties, is an only-in-America story of reinvention, rising above tragedy, and finding family."--Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of Band of Sisters

For fans of Fiona Davis, Beatriz Williams, and Joanna Goodman, a mesmerizing historical novel from Kitty Zeldis, the author of Not Our Kind, about three women in 1920s New York City and the secrets they hold.

Brooklyn, 1924. As New York City enters the jazz age, the lives of three very different women are about to converge in unexpected ways. Recently arrived from New Orleans, Beatrice is working to establish a chic new dress shop with help from Alice, the orphaned teenage ward she brought north with her. Down the block, newlywed Catherine is restless in her elegant brownstone, longing for a baby she cannot conceive.

When Bea befriends Catherine and the two start to become close, Alice feels abandoned and envious, and runs away to Manhattan. Her departure sets into motion a series of events that will force each woman to confront the painful secrets of her past in order to move into the happier future she seeks.

Moving from the bustling streets of early twentieth century New York City to late nineteenth-century Russia and the lively quarters of New Orleans in the 1910s, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights is a story of the families we are born into and the families we choose, and of the unbreakable bonds between women.

View Details >>

A Dash of Salt and Pepper

Kosoko Jackson

Sometimes two cooks in the kitchen are better than one in this swoony romantic comedy from the author of I’m So (Not) Over You.

Xavier Reynolds is doing less than stellar. He just got dumped, was passed over for a prestigious fellowship, and to top it all off he's right back home in Harper's Cove, Maine (population: 9,000). The last thing he wants to do is to work as a prep chef in the kitchen of the hip new restaurant in town, The Wharf. Especially since the hot, single-father chef who owns it can’t delegate to save his life.
 
Logan O’Hare doesn’t understand Xavier or why every word out of his mouth is dipped in sarcasm. Unfortunately, he has no choice but to hire him—he needs more help in the kitchen and his tween daughter, Anne, can only mince so many onions. It might be a recipe for disaster, but Logan doesn’t have many options besides Xavier.
 
Stuck between a stove and a hot place, Logan and Xavier discover an unexpected connection. But when the heat between them threatens to top the Scoville scale, they’ll have to decide if they can make their relationship work or if life has seasoned them too differently.

View Details >>

Kundo Wakes Up

Saad Z. Hossain

Saad Z. Hossain's Kundo Wakes Up is a companion to the Ignyte and Locus Award-Nominated novella The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday.

Hundreds of miles away from the techno-utopia of Kathmandu, the all-powerful, all-seeing AI known as Karma has gone silent, leaving the dying city of Chittagong—along with all its remaining residents—to continue its inexorable fall into the sea.

Kundo, once a famous artist with the Karma points to prove it, goes searching for his missing wife, only to uncover more inexplicable disappearances. And so Kundo and a group of motley companions embark on a tumultuous journey through an overwhelming maze made up of Chittagong’s neighborhoods, the hidden backrooms of video game parlors, and the depths of cyberspace, culminating in the realm of the djinn themselves, in search of love, redemption, and a good meal.

View Details >>

Midnight, Water City

Chris McKinney

Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her.

Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.

When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.

View Details >>

Scattered All Over the Earth

Yoko Tawada

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language."

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm.

With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

View Details >>

Here and Now and Then

Mike Chen

From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Brotherhood

A Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 Semifinalist

One of BookBub's Best Science Fiction Books of 2019

One of Book Riot's Best Books of 2019 So Far

One of The Nerd Daily's Best Debut Novels of 2019

Featured in The Millions "A Year in Reading"

One of Entropy's Best Fiction Books of 2019

He'll go anywhere and any when to save his daughter

Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter.

But his current life is a far cry from his previous career...as a time-traveling secret agent from over a century in the future.

Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, until one afternoon, his "rescue" team arrives--eighteen years too late.

Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he's been gone only weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can't remember.

Torn between two lives, Kin's desperate efforts to stay connected to both will threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself. With his daughter's very existence at risk, he will have to take one final trip to save her--even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.

"Heartfelt and thrilling... Chen's concept is unique, and [his characters'] agony is deeply moving. Quick pacing, complex characters, and a fascinating premise."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

View Details >>

The Memory Librarian

Janelle Monáe

New York Times bestseller!

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, singer-songwriter, actor, fashion icon, futurist, and worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe brings to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, exploring how different threads of liberation--queerness, race, gender plurality, and love--become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape...and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms.

Whoever controls our memories controls the future.

Janelle Monáe and an incredible array of talented collaborators have crafted a collection of tales comprising the bold vision and powerful themes that have made Monáe such a compelling and celebrated storyteller. Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts--as a means of self-conception--could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether you were human, AI, or other, your life and sentience were dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate.

That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free.

Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in such a totalitarian society . . . and what it takes to get out of it. Building off the tradition of speculative fiction writers such as Octavia E. Butler, Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor--and filled with powerful themes and Monáe's emblematic artistic vision--The Memory Librarian serves to readers tales that dissect the human trials of identity expression, technology, and love, reaching through to the worlds of memory and time, and the stakes and power that pulse there.

View Details >>

The Rock Eaters

Brenda Peynado

An NPR Best Book of 2021
NYPL 10 Best Books for Adults, 2021

A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia

 
What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart?
These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their “thoughts and prayers” will protect them from the world’s violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. “The Great Escape” tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she’s hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded.
 
With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying, and marvelous nature of humanity.

View Details >>

The Old Drift

Namwali Serpell

"A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage."--Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize * "Clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining."--The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times * The New York Times Book Review * Time * NPR * The Atlantic * BuzzFeed * Tordotcom * Kirkus Reviews * BookPage

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives--their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes--emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.

Praise for The Old Drift

"An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic . . . This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"A founding epic in the vein of Virgil's Aeneid . . . though in its sprawling size, its flavor of picaresque comedy and its fusion of family lore with national politics it more resembles Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children."--The Wall Street Journal

"A story that intertwines strangers into families, which we'll follow for a century, magic into everyday moments, and the story of a nation, Zambia."--NPR

View Details >>

Impossible Return

Caroline Laurent

Winner of the Prix Maison de la Presse

An epic love story set against a backdrop of injustice, devastating secrets, and the painful price of independence.

It's 1967 in the Chagos Archipelago--a group of atolls in the Indian Ocean--and life is peaceful and easy for hardworking Marie. Her fierce independence and love for her home are quickly apparent to Gabriel, the handsome and sophisticated Mauritian secretary to the archipelago's administrator; it's love at first sight. As these two lovers from neighboring islands welcome a new son, Joséphin, a bright future seems possible. But Gabriel is hiding a terrible secret. The Mauritian government is negotiating independence from Britain, and this deal with the devil will mean evacuating the Chagos, without warning or mercy--a betrayal that will put their love to the test.

Inspired by a shocking travesty of justice, the repercussions of which still reverberate more than fifty years later, bestselling Franco-Mauritian author Caroline Laurent paints a shimmering portrait of island life, a sensual paradise lost, and a gorgeous star-crossed love against all odds.

View Details >>