Displaying books 625-672 of 11101 in total

Tremor

2023

by Teju Cole

Tremor, a novel by award-winning author Teju Cole, is a profound exploration of the essence of a meaningful existence within the context of a world marred by violence. The story invites readers to delve into the life of Tunde, a West African man who teaches photography at a prestigious New England campus. Tunde, an avid reader, listener, and traveler, navigates through a tapestry of narratives—ranging from historical epics, personal anecdotes, to tales he encounters in literature and cinema.

Through Tunde's perspective, we experience a series of events that shape his daily life. From a weekend marred by the shadows of colonial atrocities to an evening walk disrupted by casual racism, and the intricate dynamics of a loving marriage, the novel presents a diverse spectrum of experiences. These stories, collectively, form the days that constitute Tunde's life and, in turn, create a composite of what it means to live.

Tremor is an arresting fusion of realism and creativity, engaging with themes of literature, music, race, and history. It scrutinizes the passage of time and the various ways we commemorate it. The novel confronts the harshness of history, which often lacks symmetry and comfort, yet it also stands as a testament to the enduring potential of happiness. Echoing the narrative prowess showcased in his debut, Open City, Teju Cole presents a narration that is fully aware, striking, and crucial to the contemporary literary scene.

Vengeance Is Mine

2023

by Marie NDiaye

From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer's childhood.

The heroine of Marie NDiaye's new novel is a quiet middle-aged lawyer, living a modest existence in Bordeaux. She has been so effectively consumed by her job she is known to all simply as Maître Susane. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack.

She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can't quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for the most important trial of his life?

While this mystery preoccupies Maître Susane, at home she is greeted by Sharon, her faithful but peculiar housekeeper. Sharon arrived from Mauritius with her husband and children, and she lacks legal residency in France. And while Maître Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the young maid always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Maître Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Maître Susane, or is something more sinister going on?

Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmith's work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories, tortured uncertainty, and an unreliability that frightens her.

Dying to Give

2023

by Gary B. Shelly

From award-winning author, Gary Shelly, comes a story that simply must be told…

The phone call informing Sarah Nealle that her six-year-old daughter, Amy, has been in a school bus accident sends her on a journey she could never have imagined nor planned for. Doctors. The ICU. An epidural hematoma. Respirators. Apnea tests. Nationwide publicity. A mogul who wants to buy her daughter's heart. The grieving mother on television begging for a liver to save her son. Hospitals that fight over a first-grader's body. Relatives seeking revenge. A conspiracy to end organ transplants. The hero who can't save his own son.

A ninety-two-year old who brings wisdom and peace, together with a reporter who reveals her own story. Then, the lonely decision of how to let her daughter die with dignity and perhaps fulfill a mission Amy would've volunteered for.

Will her family provide support? Might those who wait for organs applaud? Can someone who faces this impossible choice in the future learn from her? Would Amy be proud? How does one measure what is best and what is not when nothing makes sense?

Be Useful

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is an inspirational guide that outlines the seven key rules for discovering and realizing one's true purpose in life. Schwarzenegger shares the tools he developed on his journey to becoming the world's greatest bodybuilder, highest-paid movie star, and a prominent political leader.

Arnold's father instilled in him the profound lesson to always be useful, a principle that Arnold has carried throughout his varied and successful career. In this book, Schwarzenegger speaks with a voice that is both earnest and powerful as he recounts personal stories of success and failure, some of which are being shared for the first time.

This book is not just about Arnold's achievements, but also about the mental tools he created to escape the confines of his rural Austrian upbringing. He emphasizes the importance of self-reliance and shares his wisdom, encouraging readers to apply these tools in pursuit of their own dreams and purposes. Arnold's message is clear: nobody will come to your rescue, but the good news is that you have all you need within yourself.

Blackouts

2023

by Justin Torres

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried.

The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time.

The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.

A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

Roman Stories

2023

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories. This collection marks the first short story compilation by the Pulitzer Prize–winning master since the number one New York Times bestseller Unaccustomed Earth, and is heralded as a major literary event.

In “The Boundary,” a family vacations in the Roman countryside, yet we glimpse their lives through the perspective of the caretaker’s daughter, who harbors a scar from her family’s immigrant history. “P’s Parties” recounts how a Roman couple, now without children at home, discover solace and fellowship with internationals at their friend’s annual birthday celebration—until the husband oversteps a boundary. “The Steps” introduces us to a public staircase bridging two communities and the individuals traversing it, showcasing Italy’s capital in its full social and cultural spectrum, brimming with the dynamics of an evolving city: visibility and invisibility, spontaneous acts of aggression, the dilemma of navigating different worlds and cultures, and the essence of home.

These are magnificent, inquisitive tales, penned in Jhumpa Lahiri’s chosen language of Italian and impeccably translated by the author alongside Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. The stories are imbued with the atmospheres of Italian virtuoso Alberto Moravia and in the final narrative, are led by the unavoidable spirit of Dante Alighieri, whose verses steer the protagonist towards an altered path of life.

The Hive and the Honey

2023

by Paul Yoon

The Hive and the Honey is a spectacular collection of unique stories from the beloved author Paul Yoon. Each story in this collection confronts themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family.

The Hive and the Honey portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. From a North Korean defector connecting with the child she once left behind to the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia, Paul Yoon's stories are laced with beauty and cruelty, marking the work of an author writing at the very height of his powers.

An Old-Fashioned Girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl tells the story of Polly Milton, a young girl from the countryside who goes to visit her wealthy and sophisticated friends in the city. The novel is structured in two parts, with the first part focusing on Polly's childhood visit and the second part on her experiences as a young woman.

In the first part, Polly stays with the Shaw family, including Tom, Maud, and Fanny. She is initially seen as old-fashioned and unsophisticated compared to her more fashionable city friends. However, her kindness, honesty, and good-hearted nature soon win over the Shaw family, and she becomes a beloved member of their household.

The novel explores the contrast between Polly's simple, virtuous upbringing and the more worldly values of her city friends. Polly's influence on the Shaws and her ability to maintain her integrity in the face of societal pressures serve as central themes.

In the second part of the book, Polly returns to the city as a young woman, and the story follows her experiences as she navigates the challenges of adulthood, including romance, career aspirations, and the importance of staying true to oneself. Polly's character development is a central focus as she matures and finds her place in the world.

An Old-Fashioned Girl is known for its moral and ethical themes, as well as its portrayal of the importance of character and virtue. It contrasts the values of simplicity and authenticity with the superficiality of social conventions. The novel also explores themes of friendship, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl is a charming and heartwarming coming-of-age story that continues to resonate with readers for its timeless lessons and the enduring appeal of its characters.

The Postcard

2023

by Anne Berest

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.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States offers an unflinching examination of the history of the United States from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. This profound work radically reframes over 400 years of history, centering the voices of Native Americans and their resistance to settler-colonialism and genocide.


This 10th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Raoul Peck and a new introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The book delves into the brutal realities of the nation’s founding and its ongoing legacy, exploring events from the war in Afghanistan to the Charlottesville rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden.


Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the perseverance of Indigenous peoples over four centuries, challenging myths such as America's founding as a revolution against tyranny, the passivity of Native peoples, and the narrative of the US as a "nation of immigrants."


Today, more than 500 federally recognized Indigenous nations exist in the United States, comprising nearly three million people. This classic bottom-up history aims to break the silences that have haunted the nation's narrative and brings to light the stories of those who have been marginalized.

Death Valley

2023

by Melissa Broder

In Melissa Broder’s astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening.

What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike. Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it.

What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant. Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative and universal.

Eve

2023

by Cat Bohannon

Eve is an ambitious, eye-opening, myth-busting and groundbreaking history of the evolution of the female body, by a brilliant new researcher and writer, Cat Bohannon. This book delves into questions scientists should have been addressing for decades, such as:

  • Why do women live longer than men?

  • Why do women have menopause?

  • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?

  • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?

  • Does the female brain really exist?

With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.

How To Say Babylon

2023

by Safiya Sinclair

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.

Pearl

Heartbreaking and redeeming, Pearl is the story of a young woman in a small English village who is struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago. Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.

As time passes, Marianne finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem's course. But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction.

Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?

The Maniac

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. In The Maniac, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata.

Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The Maniac places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The Maniac confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

End Times

In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose, they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first - nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus - they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse.

Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz - now a science historian and an engineer - are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake.

End Times interweaves the stories of these two periods in Rebecca's life, both of which have at heart a sleepless fear of the end of the world. Along the way she asks: Why do people hold on to some ideas but reject others? How do you engage with someone whose beliefs are wildly different from your own? And where can we find hope when it sometimes feels as if we all live on a fault line that could rupture at any moment?

Monica

2023

by Daniel Clowes

Monica is a dazzling, spectacular tapestry of interconnected narratives that together tell a life story. Clowes calls upon a lifetime of inspiration to create the most complex and personal graphic novel of his distinguished career. Rich with visual detail, an impeccable ear for language and dialogue, and thrilling twists, Monica is a multilayered masterpiece in comics form that alludes to many of the genres that have defined the medium — war, romance, horror, crime, the supernatural, and more — but in a mysterious, uncategorizable, and quintessentially Clowesian way that rewards multiple readings.

Five years in the making, Monica marks the apex of creativity from one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century.

Silence of the Wolves

2023

by Hannah Pole

Fate is calling...

After a strange encounter in a dark alley, journalist Tamriel’s life is turned upside down. She’s missing days, developing odd new abilities, and being followed by the mysterious Leyth. Dark, dangerous – and too gorgeous for his own good – Leyth is determined to teach Tamriel about her new life – as a werewolf! And he's just as intent on keeping their relationship strictly business.

But as their simmering bond grows, Tamriel and Leyth face a bigger challenge. Tam may be their kind’s strongest weapon against the Circle, a deadly group of paranormal creatures gone rogue. That is, if she’s ready to give in to her destiny and put up the fight of her life...

The Happy Spinster

2023

by Karena Marie

She’s smart, she’s sassy, and she’s sexy as hell - meet Tawny, aka “The Happy Spinster,” an auburn-haired siren whose seductive style has set many a male heart racing in old Montreal. While at her local one Friday night, she meets Troy, a Texas cowboy whose smoldering good looks immediately ignite Tawny’s sexual craving.

With a mutual attraction between them and a burning carnal desire within them, Tawny and Troy embark on an ardor-filled night of sensational sex and passionate lovemaking. But – will Tawny break the rules and fall in love with the handsome bronco buster? And is there a future for a woman from the city and a ranch hand from the Texas panhandle?

The Influence of Military Strategies to Business

2023

by M.D. White

Business Management and Leadership Expert, M.D. White, releases a groundbreaking book, “The Influence of Military Strategies to Business.” This military-based guide takes the best wartime tactics and practices and teaches you how you can apply them in your business—and your political or personal life—successfully.

As a Business Strategy and Psychological Warfare Consultant, M.D. White leverages his extensive experience to offer tested and trusted strategies for business owners, managers, executives, politicians, and public figures to manage high-stakes situations with great success.

This book provides a clear roadmap for unlocking, growing, and strengthening one's influence, presence, and abilities. Developed within a systematic and comprehensive framework, it utilizes the art of war in a revolutionary way, revealing that the path to smooth business victory and mutually beneficial dialogue can be found in unexpected but rewarding places.

The world of business is a battlefield. You must be prepared. As Sun Tzu said, “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him.” This book emphasizes the importance of preparation, because it's only a matter of time before challenges arise.

If you're involved in business or any environment where politics are at play, The Influence of Military Strategies to Business is the preparation you need to succeed.

Articulations

A well-known writer, activist, and disability rights advocate, Henrietta Bollinger's debut essay collection speaks to their experiences as a queer, disabled person, and as a twin. Articulations is a timely, personal, and poignant appraisal of life in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Soundtracked by the Topp Twins, Anika Moa, Woody Guthrie and more, Bollinger's essays take us on a journey from first crushes and first periods to parliamentary reform and Disability Pride. They challenge the norms of our ableist society, asking us to consider better ways of being with each other and ourselves.

Land of Milk and Honey

2023

by C Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey is a rapturous and revelatory novel from the award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold. It tells the story of a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world.

Amidst a backdrop where smog has spread and food crops are rapidly disappearing, a chef flees her dying career in a bleak city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony, a place seemingly untouched by the world's troubles. Here, the sky is once again clear, and rare ingredients are in abundance.

Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have created a lush new existence for the global elite, rekindling the chef's senses to the joys of taste, touch, and her own body. In this realm filled with hidden splendors and a cool, seductive violence, the chef experiences a thrilling dissolution of her boundaries.

She soon finds herself at the heart of a shocking endeavor to transform the world far beyond culinary delights. Land of Milk and Honey is a sensuous and surprising tale, joyful yet bitingly sharp. It's a daringly imaginative journey through desire and deception, privilege and faith, survival, and the roles we assume. Above all, it is an ode to food, to unbridled delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own voracious appetite.

The Unsettled

2023

by Ayana Mathis

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, comes a searing multi-generational novel set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama, about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.

Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tongued, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better.

But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance.

As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.

Bright Young Women

2023

by Jessica Knoll

Bright Young Women is a riveting thriller by Jessica Knoll, author of the bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive and the writer behind the Netflix adaption starring Mila Kunis. This novel masterfully blends elements of psychological suspense and true crime, delivering an exhilarating reading experience.

The story opens on a fateful Saturday night in 1978, just hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house, resulting in deadly consequences. The narrative follows the lives of those who survive, including sorority president and key witness, Pamela Schumacher, whose life is forever altered by the events of that night.

Meanwhile, across the country, Tina Cannon is certain her missing friend was targeted by the man known as the All-American Sex Killer—and that he has struck again. As she seeks justice, her path intersects with Pamela's, leading them on a relentless pursuit for answers that culminates in a final, shocking confrontation.

Bright Young Women is an unflinching and evocative tale that delves deep into the cultural obsession with serial killers and true crime, offering a sharp critique while also highlighting the dynamic and brilliant women who have the real stories to tell.

North Woods

2023

by Daniel Mason

North Woods, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, is a sweeping tale that unfolds within the walls of a single house in the woods of New England. The narrative spans across centuries, weaving together the lives of its inhabitants—both human and nonhuman—in a genre-blurring display of storytelling magic.

The story begins with two young lovers who flee from a Puritan colony, unaware that their simple cabin in the woods is destined to become a nexus of remarkable lives. From an English soldier who forsakes the battlefields to cultivate apples, to spinster twins who navigate the trials of war and famine, the house witnesses an extraordinary array of characters. These include a crime reporter who stumbles upon an ancient mass grave, a lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a mysterious stalking panther, and even a lusty beetle.

As these inhabitants encounter the wonder and mystery of their surroundings, they come to understand that the vibrant past is not as distant as it seems. North Woods is not only a mesmerizing novel about secrets and destinies but also presents a unique perspective on the world. It poses the eternal question: How do we continue to exist, even after we are gone? With its deep exploration of history, nature, and the connections between us, North Woods is a work that truly captures the magical ways in which we are intertwined with our environment and each other.

The Book of (More) Delights: Essays

2023

by Ross Gay

The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is back with a new chronicle of small, daily wonders—and it is exactly the book we need in these unsettling times.


Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite,” “imperative,” and “brilliant.” Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.


For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren.


As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.


For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend. The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.

The Phoenix Crown

From bestselling authors Kate Quinn and Janie Chang, a thrilling and unforgettable narrative about the intertwined lives of two wronged women, spanning from the chaos of the San Francisco earthquake to the glittering palaces of Versailles.

San Francisco, 1906. In a city bustling with newly minted millionaires and scheming upstarts, two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano whose career desperately needs rekindling, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress who is determined to escape an arranged marriage. Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace.

His patronage offers Gemma and Suling the chance of a lifetime, but their lives are thrown into turmoil when a devastating earthquake rips San Francisco apart and Thornton disappears, leaving behind a mystery reaching further than anyone could have imagined. Until the Phoenix Crown reappears five years later at a sumptuous Paris costume ball, drawing Gemma and Suling together in one last desperate quest for justice.

The Wren

2023

by Anne Enright

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel's home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo's poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile "the poet" with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is "more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood." In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

Wellness

2023

by Nathan Hill

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nix, Nathan Hill presents Wellness, a witty and poignant new novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together.

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, they quickly become a duo, each finding a kindred spirit in one another. Together, they strive to make a mark in Chicago's thriving underground art scene. Two decades later, as they navigate the complexities of married life and parenting, they find themselves amidst cults posing as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous advances, social media conflicts, and the enigmatic Love Potion Number Nine.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth face a struggle to recognize each other amidst the chaos. They confront unfulfilled career dreams and the shadows of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, they must embark on personal journeys of self-discovery or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Wellness takes readers from the raw '90s Chicago art scene to a present-day suburbia rife with detox diets and renovation frenzies. It explores the absurdities of modern technology and modern love with depth and humor, offering profound insights into intimacy and connection. Nathan Hill reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

The Last Devil to Die

2023

by Richard Osman

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

As the gang springs into action, they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters, and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.

With the body count rising, the package still missing, and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

Lessons

2023

by Ian McEwan

Set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world, Lessons is a sweeping and intimate novel from the Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan.

It follows the life of Roland Baines, whose world is forever altered by a chance encounter at school. The novel takes us through pivotal moments in Roland's life, from the Suez Crisis of 1956 to the COVID-19 pandemic, examining love, loss, and the passage of time. As Roland navigates the complexities of life, Lessons delves into the personal and political, creating a rich tapestry of human experience.

The narrative explores the intimate connections between the personal and the historical, as Roland's life intersects with the major events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. McEwan's masterful storytelling weaves a tale that is both deeply personal and universally resonant, reflecting on the lessons we learn and the ones we choose to ignore.

Doppelganger

2023

by Naomi Klein

From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein presents a revelatory analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world.

Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.

Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises.

Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a treatment of the way many of us think and feel now, offering an intellectual adventure story for our times.

Roaming

Spring break, 2009. High school best friends Zoe and Dani are now freshman college students, meeting in a place they've wanted to visit forever: New York City. Tagging along is Dani's classmate Fiona, a mercurial art student with an opinion on everything.

Together, the three cram in as much of the city as possible, gleefully falling into tourist traps, pondering so-called great works of art, sidestepping creeps, and eating lots and lots of pizza (folded in half, of course). Roaming is a ground-breaking graphic novel from the authors behind New York Times bestseller and Caldecott Honor Book This One Summer.

The Secret Hours

2023

by Mick Herron

The Secret Hours is a gripping standalone spy thriller from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Slow Horses, with a riveting reveal about a disastrous MI5 mission in Cold War Berlin—an absolute must-read for Slough House fans. New from the author of Slow Horses, now an Apple Original series from Apple TV+, starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating "historical over-reaching" by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.

But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.

Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history.

The Secret Hours is a dazzling entry point into Mick Herron’s body of work, a standalone spy thriller that is at once unnerving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny. It is also the breathtaking secret history that Slough House fans have been waiting for.

The Vaster Wilds

2023

by Lauren Groff

A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive.

A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.

Our Dark Duet

2023

by Victoria Schwab

The world is breaking. And so are they.

Kate Harker isn't afraid of monsters. She hunts them. And she's good at it.

August Flynn once yearned to be human. He has a part to play. And he will play it, no matter the cost.

The war has begun. The monsters are winning.

Kate will have to return to Verity. August will have to let her back in. And a new monster is waiting—one that feeds on chaos and brings out its victims' inner demons.

Which will be harder to conquer: the monsters they face, or the monsters within?

Nearly six months after Kate and August were first thrown together, the war between the monsters and the humans is a terrifying reality. In Verity, August has become the leader he never wished to be, and in Prosperity, Kate has become the ruthless hunter she knew she could be. When a new monster emerges from the shadows—one who feeds on chaos and brings out its victim’s inner demons—it lures Kate home, where she finds more than she bargained for. She’ll face a monster she thought she killed, a boy she thought she knew, and a demon all her own.

Dragonsinger

2023

by Anne McCaffrey

Dragonsinger follows the journey of Menolly as she realizes her dream of becoming a Harper in the world of Pern. Despite the obstacles posed by her gender, Menolly faces hostility from male peers and masters. With the support of new friends, teachers, and her nine tiny, colorful dragons, she discovers that her musical talents may be stronger than anyone could imagine.

This tale is set within the beloved and bestselling Dragonriders of Pern series by science fiction legend Anne McCaffrey. It vividly captures the power of music and the strength found in perseverance and friendship.

Holly

2023

by Stephen King

Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King's most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

"Sometimes the universe throws you a rope." — BILL HODGES

Stephen King's Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly's gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges's partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King's new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.

When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl's desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.

Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harboring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie's disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.

Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver the shockingly twisted professors in this chilling new masterwork from Stephen King.

The Fraud

2023

by Zadie Smith

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.”

The Long Game

2023

by Elena Armas

In The Long Game, a disgraced soccer exec, Adalyn Reyes, faces the challenge of her career when a viral video disrupts her meticulously crafted routine. Sent to redeem herself by turning around a struggling local soccer team in North Carolina, Adalyn's plans are further complicated by the team's unconventional practices and their fear of her.

Enter Cameron Caldani, a retired soccer star with a mysterious presence and a rocky first encounter with Adalyn. Despite the odds, Adalyn is determined to help this ragtag children's team succeed, with or without Cam's assistance. Her journey is a testament to resilience and the power of second chances in this heartwarming small-town love story reminiscent of Ted Lasso and It Happened One Summer.

The River We Remember

In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by the murder of its most powerful citizen, pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling standalone novel.

On Memorial Day, as the people of Jewel, Minnesota gather to remember and honor the sacrifice of so many sons in the wars of the past, the half-clothed body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. Investigation of the murder falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn’s murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past.

Caught up in the torrent of anger that sweeps through Jewel are a war widow and her adolescent son, the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom struggle with their own tragic histories and harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose.

Both a complex, spellbinding mystery and a masterful portrait of midcentury American life, The River We Remember is an unflinching look at the wounds left by the wars we fight abroad and at home, a moving exploration of the ways in which we seek to heal, and a testament to the enduring power of the stories we tell about the places we call home.

Wednesday's Child: Stories

2023

by Yiyun Li

A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

Happiness Falls

2023

by Angie Kim

Happiness Falls is a thrilling page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis. This riveting book about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia is upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. But as time progresses, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong. Eugene returns home bloody and alone, with their father nowhere to be found. The only witness to the father's disappearance is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the father's whereabouts and an emotionally rich exploration of family dynamics. Angie Kim turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must understand one another to uncover the truth.

Terrace Story

2023

by Hilary Leichter

From the author of the acclaimed novel Temporary, an intimate exploration of time, a fable about love, an epic daydream for a broken-hearted world.

Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.

Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it's looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?

Based on the National Magazine Award-winning story, Hilary Leichter's profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.

Prophet Song

2023

by Paul Lynch

Prophet Song is a fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author.


On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.


Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.


How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?


Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

The Book of Lies

The Book of Lies (full title: Which is also Falsely Called BREAKS. The Wanderings or Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo, which Thought is itself Untrue. Liber CCCXXXIII [Book 333]) was written by English occultist Aleister Crowley (using the pen name of Frater Perdurabo) and first published in 1912 or 1913.

The book consists of 93 chapters, each of which consists of one page of text. The chapters include a question mark, poems, rituals, instructions, and obscure allusions and cryptograms. The subject of each chapter is generally determined by its number and its corresponding qabalistic meaning.

Around 1921, Crowley wrote a short commentary about each chapter, assisting the reader in the qabalistic interpretation. Several chapters and a photograph in the book reference Leila Waddell, who Crowley called Laylah, and who, as Crowley's influential Scarlet Woman, acted as his muse during the writing process of this volume.

Immortal Rider

2023

by Larissa Ione

Sexy, powerful, and immortal, Limos is on a crash course with destiny. She’s been marked as Satan’s bride, and her jealous fiancé wants her all to himself. The only way this Horseman can keep herself—and everyone else—safe is to keep her distance. But not even Limos can save herself from the secrets she’s kept, or resist the seductive allure of one very brave human.

Arik Wagner knows the saying “love hurts” better than most, yet he never thought stealing a kiss from Limos would land him in Hell. Literally. It takes all his military training to survive the demon torture, but once he’s topside, Arik realizes that the agony has just begun. With the Apocalypse looming and Satan demanding his bride, will Arik and Limos surrender to the desire smoldering between them? Or will giving in to their passion unleash hell on earth?

Never Enough

Never Enough delves into the heart of the "toxic achievement culture" that has taken hold of students, parents, and educators across America. This compelling book offers a critical look at how the quest for success is driving unprecedented levels of pressure among today's youth, leading to alarming rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.

Award-winning reporter Jennifer Breheny Wallace takes us on a journey through the competitive landscape that demands ever more from our children, stretching family resources and time to their limits. Wallace's investigation reveals that this relentless drive for excellence is not simply a matter of personal choice but is deeply embedded in societal expectations, exacerbated by growing income inequality and shrinking opportunities.

Through extensive research, interviews, and a survey of nearly 6,000 parents, Never Enough uncovers the detrimental message being sent to children: that they are only as valuable as their achievements. Wallace highlights the necessity for a shift in adult attitudes towards children's success. By embracing the concept of 'mattering,' parents and educators can help children understand their intrinsic worth, independent of external accomplishments.

With a rich narrative and practical solutions, Never Enough provides a humane perspective on the crisis facing today's teens and lays out a framework for fostering resilience, self-confidence, and psychological security in our children, enabling them to thrive.

Are you sure you want to delete this?