Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic bildungsroman told in lyric fragments through the eyes of the character Ezra. The world of the book unfolds as Ezra's life flashes across time and geography during their final act of protest. The novel leaps from memories of childhood, gender identity formation, and political revelation to the inherited memory and historical movements of Ezra's family. This book explores how historical memory shapes our political and emotional present as it exists at the intersections of protest, religion, and desire.

Someone Like Us is a compelling narrative that delves into the life of the son of Ethiopian immigrants, who embarks on a quest to unravel a hidden family history, shedding light on a past fraught with unexpected loss, addiction, and the constant emotional pull towards home.

Having left behind a promising career as a journalist to start anew in Paris, Mamush encounters Helen, a photographer whose unique perspective on the world opens up the possibility of not just love, but also family. Five years down the line, with his marriage to Helen teetering on the edge, Mamush returns to the tight-knit Ethiopian immigrant community in Washington DC that shaped his upbringing. The community is anchored by his unwavering mother and Samuel, a charismatic father figure whose infectious charm and humor mask a more complex and troubling reality.

On the day of Mamush's return to Washington, the shocking news of Samuel's death in his garage reaches him. With Helen and their young son back in Paris, Mamush embarks on an unexpected cross-country journey in America, seeking answers to questions he was always discouraged from asking. In his pursuit of truth, he comes to realize that the key to salvaging his family and returning home may lie in confronting not only the enigma surrounding Samuel's life and demise but also his own haunted memories and the years he spent camouflaging them.

This is an unforgettable and masterful work from Dinaw Mengestu, an author celebrated for his extraordinary talent.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, Feh: A Memoir is an exploration of Shalom Auslander's attempt to escape the biblical story he was raised on and his struggle to construct a new narrative for himself and his family. Raised in a dysfunctional family within the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York, Auslander recounts his life as the son of an alcoholic father, a guilt-wielding mother, and a violent, overbearing God.

Now, reaching middle age, he suspects that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't easily escape: a story. The story. Implanted in him at an early age, it told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting—a narrative we have all been told for thousands of years by both the religious and secular worlds, a story called “Feh”, Yiddish for “Yuck.”

Feh follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles. Can he move from Feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcise the story he was raised with—before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him—isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman's daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has come to an end along with the women's baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy's Red Scare.

Grace's weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.

A National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honoree delivers her first work of nonfiction: a compulsively readable, genre-bending story of finding her missing birth mother and, along the way, learning the priceless power of self-knowledge.

In 2020, Tracy O'Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship, thirtysomething, and in a world playing by new rules, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious birth mother she'd never met--may be dying somewhere in South Korea. Hiring a grizzled private investigator, O'Neill took his suggested homework to heart and, when he disappeared before the job was done, picked up the trail, becoming her own hell-bent detective.

Covid could have already gotten to her mother. Yet the promise of whom and what she might discover--the possibility that her biological mother was her own kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own--was too tempting. Written like a mystery novel, Woman of Interest is a tale of self-discovery, featuring a femme fatale of unique proportions, a former CIA operative with a criminal record, and a dogged investigator of radical connections outside the nuclear family and fugitivity from convention.

O'Neill gorgeously bends the detective genre to her own will as a writer, stepping out of the shadows of her own self-conception to illuminate the hope-filled woman of interest she is becoming.

Fire Exit is Morgan Talty's debut novel that promises to be utterly consuming. Set against the backdrop of Maine's Penobscot Reservation, it tells the story of Charles Lamosway, who has lived a life filled with secrets and longing from across the river.

Charles has silently observed the life of a family that could have been his own, witnessing the growth of Elizabeth, a child unknowingly connected to him by blood. But the weight of the untold truth looms over him as he cares for his property, his volatile friend Bobby, and his mother Louise, who is losing herself to dementia.

Haunted by his past, including a lost childhood on the reservation, a truncated love affair, and the tragic death of his stepfather, Charles faces the daunting questions he's avoided for so long. As he grapples with the decision to unveil his secret, the novel delves deep into themes of family, legacy, culture, and the debts we owe to each other.

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Fire Exit is poised to be a masterful and unforgettable exploration of the ties that bind us and the truths that define us.

Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family, and had possibly done something awful that put a curse on his descendants. About his grandfather, young Noé was sure of only one thing: That he had played the accordion.

Now an adult, reckoning with the legacy of silence surrounding his family’s migration from Mexico, Álvarez resolves both to take up the instrument and to journey into Mexico to discover the grandfather he never knew. Álvarez travels across the US with his accordion, meeting makers and players in cities that range from San Antonio to Boston. He uncovers the story of an instrument that’s been central to classic American genres, but also played a critical role in indigenous Mexican history.

Like the accordion itself, Álvarez feels trapped between his roots in Mexico and the U.S. As he tries to make sense of his place in the world—as a father, a son, a musician—he gets closer to uncovering the mystery of his origins.

An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.

Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired by stories of her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amidst the social and political upheaval of a recently vanished world. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force... one of those rare novels which a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).

Lucky is a soaring, soulful novel about a folk musician's rise to fame, penned by the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jane Smiley. Jodie Rattler, a girl growing up in St. Louis, discovers her love for music at a young age. A lucky day in 1955 at the racetrack with her Uncle Drew sets her on a path of chance and grit.

With a roll of two-dollar bills as her talisman, Jodie's hard work and serendipity spark a singing career that takes her from the heartland of America to the bustling streets of New York City, from the quaint English countryside to the sun-soaked beaches of St. Thomas, and from the cultural hubs of Cleveland and Los Angeles and back again.

As she matures in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, Jodie seeks to carve her own identity amidst the legends of her time—Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. Yet, as her fame grows, she grapples with a longing for something more. Is it true love she seeks, or is there another quest at the heart of her journey?

Rich with atmosphere and brimming with longing, exuberance, romance, and rock'n'roll, Lucky paints a colorful portrait of one woman's journey to find herself. It is a narrative woven with the threads of chance, the sparkle of true talent, and the enduring question of what it means to be truly 'lucky'.

Literary icon Julia Alvarez returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling itself that will be an instant classic.

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool their secret tales. Among them are Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

The characters defy their creator; they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories poses the question: Whose stories get to be told, and whose are buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.

Readers of Isabel Allende's Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez's extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

The Moon That Turns You Back is a new collection of poetry by Hala Alyan, the author of The Arsonists' City and The Twenty-Ninth Year. This collection explores the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family across different times and places. Alyan delves into the experiences of displacement and war, creating a tapestry of memories that interlink Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem.

The poems challenge the boundaries between space and time, intermingling daily life with the brutalities of geopolitical strife. Alyan examines the forces that can displace an individual from home and body, and conversely, the resilience and love that can anchor a person back into their essence and familial legacy. The work raises poignant questions about transformation and stability for those who have led a life in constant change.

An epic novel of the construction of the Panama Canal, casting light on the unsung people who lived, loved, and labored there, by Cristina Henrquez, acclaimed author of The Book of Unknown Americans

It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister's surgery. When she sees a young manOmarwho has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada's bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.

Wandering Stars is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange's breakout bestseller There There. This novel traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in There There.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father's jailer. Under Pratt's harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America's war on its own people.

Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, or life force, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking...

Manchuria, 1908. A young woman is found frozen in the snow. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes involved, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and men. Bao, a detective with a reputation for sniffing out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman's identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they've remained tantalizingly out of reach. Until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family that owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments, but not the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. Now the only grandson of the family is twenty-three. When a mysterious woman enters their household, their luck seems to change. Or does it? Is their new servant a simple young woman from the north or a fox spirit bent on her own revenge?

Bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about a winter full of mysterious deaths, a mother seeking revenge, and old folktales that may very well be true.

This Is the Honey: An Anthology Of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander, is a breathtaking poetry collection that embodies hope, heart, and heritage. As the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time come together, this anthology serves as a beacon of inspiration.

Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Amanda Gorman, Terrance Hayes, and Nikki Giovanni, the anthology is a rich tapestry of voices that resonate with generations of resilient joy.

The collection is replete with poems exploring themes of joy, love, origin, resistance, and praise, with language that drips with poignant and delightful imagery. It is a definitive, fresh, and deeply moving tribute to the power of words and an essential addition to any lover of language.

Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel that captures the cinematic yet intimate journey of a young Jamaican woman, Akúa, as she grapples with grief and the elusive concept of home.

Tired of feeling unmoored, twenty-year-old Akúa travels from Canada to Jamaica to seek a connection with her estranged sister Tamika following the death of their younger brother Bryson from sickle cell anemia—the same disease that claimed their mother ten years earlier. Akúa's mission is to spread Bryson's ashes and rekindle familial bonds.

During two pivotal weeks, the sisters revisit childhood haunts, revealing the chasm between them and the cultural distance Akúa has traversed. Struggling with her identity, she repeatedly questions, "Am I Jamaican?" Beneath these doubts simmer anger and abandonment issues, manifesting in the unasked question, "Why didn’t you stay with me?"

As Akúa disperses her brother's ashes around Kingston, she encounters Jayda, a bold stripper who introduces her to an alternate side of the city. Their growing closeness forces Akúa to face the harsh realities of being gay in a devoutly religious family and the broader implications of being a gay woman in Jamaica.

Broughtupsy weaves a narrative that is part family saga, part coming-of-age story, and part exploration of sexual identity. It is a profound narrative that delves into the complexities of family obligations and the lengths one will go to experience the essence of home.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is an electrifying, funny, and wholly original novel that heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction. The story follows Cyrus Shams, a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, who is guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings on a remarkable search for a family secret. This journey leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus grapples with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother's plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident, and his father's life in America was circumscribed by his work at a factory farm. As a drunk, an addict, and a poet, Cyrus's obsession with martyrs drives him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death and toward his mother, through a painting that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, and others.

A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He's good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he's also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico's most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio's timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors' crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that's epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author's own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.

The Survivors of the Clotilda joins the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, offering an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil. This compelling narrative is told through the stories of its survivors—the final documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways.

The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after a federal law banned the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the start of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century, serving as the last witnesses to the final act of a significant and tragic period in world history.

In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.

An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.

A spellbinding, sweeping novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.

A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an 'Asia for Asians.' Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them.

Spanning years of pain and triumph, told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, The Storm We Made is a dazzling saga about the horrors of war; the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” — Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

The Postcard is a moving novel from the bestselling author Anne Berest. In January 2003, the Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques.

Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale based on true events that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself.

At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

How to Say Babylon is a profound memoir by Safiya Sinclair, offering a glimpse into her journey to find her voice as a woman and a poet amidst a strict Rastafarian upbringing. The narrative echoes the struggles depicted in Educated and Born a Crime, presenting Sinclair's battle against her father's patriarchal views and his obsession with protecting her and her sisters from what Rastas call Babylon—the Western world's immoral and corrupting influences.

The memoir recounts how Sinclair's father, a militant Rastafari and reggae musician, imposed severe restrictions on the women in the family, including the prohibition of pants, makeup, jewelry, and personal opinions. Amidst this repressive environment, Sinclair's mother provided her children with books, including poetry, which became Safiya's solace and a means to develop her own identity.

Through education and the power of words, Sinclair forges a path toward independence, despite the inevitable confrontations with her father that escalate into violence. How to Say Babylon is not only Sinclair's personal reckoning with her cultural roots and the stifling traditions she grew up with but also a lyrical exploration of a woman's resilience and empowerment. It is a story that resonates universally, while offering an intimate look into the world of Rastafari—a culture often named but seldom understood.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, The Fraud is a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and about who deserves to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life, and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle meanwhile grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. He knows that the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task…

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of “other people.”

Banyan Moon is a sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family's inherited burdens and buried secrets.

When Ann Tran gets the call that her beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. Ann has built a seemingly perfect life. She lives in a beautiful lake house and has a charming professor boyfriend, but it all crumbles away with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Hu'o'ng. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who's always held them together.

Running parallel to this is Minh's story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House's attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life and her family.

Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.

Loot is a spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century, weaving together a hero's quest, a love story, and the coming of age of a young artist with an exuberant heist adventure. This narrative traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years, making for an irresistibly inventive storytelling experience from the imaginative mind of Tania James, who is at the height of her powers.

At the tender age of seventeen, Abbas's talents as a woodcarver catch the eye of Tipu Sultan, leading him to the palace to construct a grand tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a commemoration of their return from British captivity. The journey of Abbas—and the wooden tiger he contributes to—reflects the tumultuous shifts of nations and empires devastated by conflict across India and Europe.

In the company of the renowned French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas refines his craft, picks up French, and encounters Jehanne, a French expatriate's daughter. Once Du Leze is allowed to journey back to Rouen, he takes Abbas under his wing as an apprentice. However, Abbas's European endeavor is met with the harsh reality that Tipu's palace has been pillaged by British troops, and the tiger automaton has vanished. To establish his worth, Abbas is compelled to reclaim the tiger from an English estate where it stands amongst a trove of looted treasures.

Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are.

Through evocative illustrations and sharp humor, Bell examines how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood. While coming of age in Los Angeles—and finding a voice through cartooning—Bell becomes painfully aware of being regarded as dangerous by white teachers, neighbors, and police officers and thus of his mortality. Drawing attention to the brutal murders of African Americans and showcasing revealing insights and cartoons along the way, he brings us up to the moment of reckoning when people took to the streets protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And now Bell must decide whether he and his own six-year-old son are ready to have The Talk.

A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.

Christina Sharpe begins by writing about her mother and grandmother in Ordinary Notes. This singular achievement explores profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. A series of 248 brief and urgent notes gather meaning as we read them, skillfully weaving artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.

Themes and tones echo throughout the pages, sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature—but always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. Sharpe writes, "I learned to see in my mother's house," and "My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, she steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method," collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a "Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness," and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt’s secrets in this sweeping debut, confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.

In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.

Decades later, Betty returns to Aunt Nuha’s gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she’s ever known, or should she follow her heart and the woman she loves, perpetuating her family’s cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt’s complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family immigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that.

The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us—and wield even the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller.

The Great Reclamation is a sweeping novel set against the backdrop of a changing Singapore, exploring the life of a boy named Ah Boon with unique gifts that impact the fate of his community and country.

Ah Boon is born in a fishing village during the last years of British rule in twentieth-century coastal Singapore. He is more interested in playing with his neighbor, Siok Mei, than in fishing. His discovery of the ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can see brings a sense of duty and potential—especially to impress Siok Mei, whom he loves.

Their teenage years are overshadowed by historical turmoil as the Japanese army invades, resistance grows, and their fishing village's future is at stake. With their nation on the brink of transformation, Ah Boon and Siok Mei face tough choices about their identities and what they must sacrifice.

At its core, The Great Reclamation is an aching love story and a powerful coming-of-age tale. It delves into the legacy of British colonialism, the World War II Japanese occupation, and the drive for modernity, highlighting the pain of progress, the cost of love, and the struggle to define home amidst the literal shifting of land.

From the visionary author of Sudden Death, You Dreamed Of Empires is a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story. One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma – who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods – the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace.

Soon, one of Cortés's captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. You Dreamed Of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise, undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world, when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather's heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.

Growing up Black in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian's life is already mapped out. But Ray has a gift and a dream—he's determined to become a world-class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way. Not his mother, who wants him to stop making such a racket; not the fact that he can't afford a violin suitable to his talents; not even the racism inherent in the world of classical music.

When he discovers that his beat-up, family fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, all his dreams suddenly seem within reach, and together, Ray and his violin take the world by storm. But on the eve of the renowned and cutthroat Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—the violin is stolen, a ransom note for five million dollars left in its place. Without it, Ray feels like he's lost a piece of himself. As the competition approaches, Ray must not only reclaim his precious violin, but prove to himself—and the world—that no matter the outcome, there has always been a truly great musician within him.

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanfani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature.

The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah—an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations.

Named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, the book makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

Crying in H Mart is an exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance. Michelle Zauner, known as the indie rock sensation Japanese Breakfast, proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up as one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; and of a painful adolescence.

Zauner shares 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, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

In 1901, the word 'Bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the 'Scriptorium', a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word 'bondmaid' flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

Over time, Esme realizes that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Set when the women's suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It's a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

What had happened to the ever so confident Dhani? Why wasn't she sure of herself anymore? She wondered if she would be the same Dhani ever again. Dhani, a girl who thought her life was finally perfect, was now seeing it fall apart. But she was too proud to accept in front of the world about how defeated she felt. Dhruv had braved every hurdle that life had thrown at him; and when he finally felt complete with Dhani by his side, destiny showed him its ugliest face ever.

Embark on a journey of love in its purest form. Love between a father and daughter, a brother and sister, a man and woman; and the love above any other… love for one's motherland, and the urge to protect it at any cost. Diya Aur Baati Hum tells us the story of a love so potent, it changes lives and destinies. A beautiful story of love, friendship, faith, acceptance, hope and courage.

Siglo XIV. La ciudad de Barcelona se encuentra en su momento de mayor prosperidad; ha crecido hacia la Ribera, el humilde barrio de los pescadores, cuyos habitantes deciden construir, con el dinero de unos y el esfuerzo de otros, el mayor templo mariano jamás conocido: Santa María de la Mar.

Una construcción que es paralela a la azarosa historia de Arnau, un siervo de la tierra que huye de los abusos de su señor feudal y se refugia en Barcelona, donde se convierte en ciudadano y, con ello, en hombre libre.

El joven Arnau trabaja como palafrenero, estibador, soldado y cambista. Una vida extenuante, siempre al amparo de la catedral de la mar, que le iba a llevar de la miseria del fugitivo a la nobleza y la riqueza. Pero con esta posición privilegiada también le llega la envidia de sus pares, que urden una sórdida conjura que pone su vida en manos de la Inquisición...

La catedral del mar es una trama en la que se entrecruzan lealtad y venganza, traición y amor, guerra y peste, en un mundo marcado por la intolerancia religiosa, la ambición material y la segregación social. Todo ello convierte esta obra no sólo en una novela absorbente, sino también en la más fascinante y ambiciosa recreación de las luces y sombras de la época feudal.

Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.

Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good. Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers and her growing feelings for an enemy.

Aednan marks the American debut of Sweden's esteemed literary figure Linnea Axelsson with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse that delves deep into the lives of two Sámi families. This groundbreaking work explores their enduring bond through a century marked by migration, violence, and the scars of colonial trauma.

This sweeping Scandinavian epic, reminiscent of classics such as Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, begins in the 1910s. We follow Ristin and her family as they migrate their reindeer herd to summer pastures. Amidst this journey, a tragedy strikes, etching a path of sorrow that echoes throughout the novel.

In the 1970s, we meet Lise, a member of a new Sámi generation confronting her identity and legacy. Her reflections on a childhood marred by forced separation from her family and the loss of her ancestral language at a Nomad School paint a vivid picture of the struggles faced by her people.

The narrative then carries us to the 2010s, introducing Sandra, Lise’s daughter. Sandra stands as a symbol of Indigenous resilience, an activist demanding justice in a landmark land rights trial during a time when the Sámi language teeters on the brink of extinction.

Through the interwoven voices of characters spanning generations, Axelsson crafts a poignant family saga centered around the fallout of colonial settlement. Ædnan serves as a testament to the tenacity of language, even when adopted, to encapsulate memories of what has been lost. The verse of one character to another resonates beyond mortality: "I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave," and the haunting call, "There will be rain / there will be rain."

In America’s Daughter, the second book of the trilogy, the author arrives in the United States in the company of Catherine Murray, an American high-school teacher. Her adjustment to a new culture includes shocking doses of American-style racial discrimination and Nhambu’s discovery that she must learn to be a Black American. She graduates from college, thus fulfilling her dream of becoming a teacher, and teaches high school in the inner city. She marries, has two children, and establishes herself in the American way of life.

Then a visit to Africa, and especially to Tanzania, reawakens the drumbeats and dancing that she carries in her soul. On her return home, she teaches Swahili and African Studies, performs African dance at schools, and creates Aerobics With Soul®, a fitness workout based on African dance. She both finds and creates the family she longed for as a child and connects with her unknown background.

The first book of the trilogy, Africa’s Child, was released in 2016. The final book of her memoir series—Drum Beats, Heart Beats—reveals more of Nhambu’s life as she searches for her father.

In this humorous coming-of-age story, Bridget Flagherty, a student at St. Michael’s Catholic school outside Boston in the 60s and 70s, takes refuge in her wacky misunderstandings of Bible Stories and Catholic beliefs to avoid the problems of her Irish/Italian family life. Her musings on sadistic nuns, domestic violence, emerging sexuality, and God the Father’s romantic life will delight readers.

Bridget creates glorious supernatural worlds—with exorcisms, bird relics, Virgin Martyrs, time travel, Biblical plagues, even the ‘holy’ in holy water—to cope with a family where leather handbags and even garlic can cause explosions. An avid Bible reader who innocently believes everything the nuns tell her, Bridget’s saints, martyrs, and boney Christs become alive and audible within her. While the nuns chide her sinful ‘mathematical pride’ and slow eating habits, God answers her prayers instantly by day, but the devil visits nightly in the dark.

Scenes run the gamut from laugh-out-loud Catholic brainwashing of children, to heart-wrenching abuse, to riveting teenage excursions toward sex. Young Bridget tries to make sense of a world of raging men and domestically subjugated women and carve a future for herself, wrestling with how God and men treat women. Her Italian female relatives—glamorous Santa Anna, black-and-blue Aunt Maria, sophisticated Eleanor with a New York ‘Fellini pageboy’—offer sensual alternatives to the repression of her immediate family.

She prays fervently that “despite God’s bizarre treatment of married women... some [girls] might still discover ways to have a great time without being a nun.” Dodging Satan is the flip-side of l'Histoire d'une Âme by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux authored by a twentieth century American girl chomping on a blue-gum cigar while she talks to a confidant about God and sex.

Look into the past and you can change the future. In Memories Of My Future, Dr. Avinash Singh is the type of surgeon that other physicians envy, and has the world in his hands. That is until tragedy strikes—and it's a tragedy that puts him on the ropes, forcing him to revisit his greatest nightmares. It makes him realize that the successful life he had been living has been a façade. To overcome this, he will have to take a glimpse into the past and begin a journey that will teach him where true strength comes from. Along the way, he will see the heroism in his bloodline. He will witness the story of the first nation to defeat Genghis Khan's army. He will walk alongside the revolutionary whose love for his wife was so strong that even the mighty British Empire could not break it. But the true message Avinash will realize is that the greatest gift Man has is their mind. And once the mind is unlocked, all the answers to Man's problems will be right before their eyes.

Homegoing is a novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

In September of the year 9 A.D., the young Germanic warrior known as Armin to his friends and Arminius to his Roman enemies, successfully took on and defeated three entire Roman legions. This resulted in the deaths of over twenty thousand Roman soldiers. This in turn resulted in the Roman emperor called Tiberius recalling all Roman military units from Germania. The Germanic tribes would associate for their common good, often meeting and forming up for offensive or defensive war, but they were always separate and very independent.

Armin knew that the best way to ensure that his country was not bothered by outside invaders again was to become a single country complete with it own army and navy. In this he crossed swords with the independent temper of his own people. They did not want any king from anywhere telling them what to do. In due course, this resulted in even the members of his own family taking up arms against him in order to make sure that the tribes of Germania remained independent and free. Such was the concern of the ancient Germanic tribesmen that this might not be the case, that Armin was murdered by the members of his own family.

Seattle's waterfront has served as a central hub for people, transportation, and commerce since time immemorial. A low natural shoreline provided the Duwamish-Suquamish people with excellent canoe access to permanent villages and seasonal fishing camps. High bluffs served as a sacred place for tribal members' final journey to the spirit world.

When the first settlers arrived in the 1850s, Seattle's shoreline began to change drastically. Emerald hills covered with dense forests were logged for timber to make way for the new city. As time passed, Seattle constructed a log seawall, wooden sidewalks, wharfs, buildings, streets, railroad trestles, and eventually, a massive concrete viaduct over the original aquatic lands, changing the natural environment to a built environment.

Today, Seattle's shoreline continues to change as the city demolishes the viaduct, rebuilds the seawall, and creates an inviting new waterfront that all will enjoy for generations to come.

Zeina Abirached, author of the graphic novel A Game for Swallows, returns with a powerful collection of wartime memories. Abirached was born in Lebanon in 1981. She grew up in Beirut as fighting between Christians and Muslims divided the city streets.

Follow her past cars riddled with bullet holes, into taxi cabs that travel where buses refuse to go, and on outings to collect shrapnel from the sidewalk. With striking black-and-white artwork, Abirached recalls the details of ordinary life inside a war zone.

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

The Chronicle of Sapta Sindhu is perhaps, India's first proto-historical novel and tells us the tale of the people of Indus Valley and its adjoining cities. It narrates a story of how the people of Sapta Sindhu unite to face the challenges of natural disasters and the Greek invasion, in the year 950BC. A wonderful tale of valor, adventure, faith, love, romance, wars, peace, Rudreeshwar, the discovery of Sanjivini, Wars at Zahaden, Zarang and Zabol (all in Afghanistan).

It also helps us understand the political development of our nation. Moreover, the Rig Veda and Avesta (Zoroastrian holy book) find a prominent place in this book. In times of wars and strife, it speaks of peace and culture, highlighting the places like Iraq (Mesopotamia), Iran (Arianna), Plains of River Helmand (Afghanistan), Syria, Jordan, which were once the cradle of civilization and are now termed as rogue nations.