When singer Daisy Jones meets Billy Dunne of the band The Six, the two rising 70s rock-and-roll artists are catapulted into stardom when a producer puts them together, a decision that is complicated by a pregnancy and the seductions of fame.
When he is asked to authenticate a newly discovered piece from famed 20th-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern Hendricks uncovers clues that indicate Delaney may have had help composing his most successful work, which makes him a target of a powerful organization who will stop at nothing to keep their secret hidden.
With the talent for connecting customers to their music, Frank, the owner of a music shop in a suburban community, resists the chance of a relationship with a young woman who could heal the old wounds from his past.
The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing “Respect” or Bob Dylan performing “Blind Willie McTell,” have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. A book about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.
Leaving her pop star image in the past after one unforgettable night blows up her whole life, Katee Rose, when Cal Kirby, who destroyed her career, offers her the opportunity of her dreams, reluctantly agrees to star in his musical and finds their still-smoldering attraction taking center stage.
Ending her relationship with a man who turns out to be in love with a reclusive singer, Annie initiates an e-mail friendship with the musician that reveals their mutual loneliness, his concerns about his young son, and his plans to release an acoustic version of his most successful album.
The members of a music band in 1967 London navigate the era’s parties, drugs and politics as well as their own egos and tragedies while exploring transformative perspectives about youth, art and fame. Just Another Love Song / Kerry Winfrey
Two high school sweethearts get a second chance at their perfect ending. Sandy wanted to be an artist, Hank was the only boy in town who seemed destined for bigger things, and they both had dreams to escape town together. But when Sandy’s plans fell through, she stayed in their small town in Ohio while Hank went off to Boston to follow his dreams to be a musician, with the promise to stay together, but it might take fifteen years to happen. High Fidelity / Nick Hornby
A pop music junkie ponders life, love, and hangs out with the two offbeat clerks who work at his semi-failing record store.
Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.
Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can’t afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather’s fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise, until his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back.
This story of the world’s richest and most glamorous entertainer looks at her heroic stint during World War II as an Allied spy in occupied France and her efforts to combat Nazism.
A Cold War FBI intelligence officer joins an undercover task force to seduce a revolutionary African Communist president she secretly admires and comes to love.
Describes the true crime story of Ana Montes, a superstar of the US Intelligence community who had recently won a prestigious fellowship at the CIA was arrested and publicly exposed as a secret agent for Cuba.
In 1947, pregnant Charlie St. Clair, an American college girl banished from her family, arrives in London to find out what happened to her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, and meets a former spy who, torn apart by betrayal, agrees to help her on her mission.
A novel based on the real-life story of socialite-spy Nancy Wake features the astonishing woman who killed a Nazi with her bare hands and went on to become one of the most decorated women in WWII.
After crash-landing in France in 1943 and being captured by Nazis, a female wireless operator for the British (who goes by Queenie, Eva, Verity, and various other aliases) reveals bits of code in exchange for reprieve from torture…and to postpone her execution.
An international spy thriller about a former CIA agent who moves with her family to Luxembourg where everything is suspicious and nothing is as it seems.
After discovering an abandoned, photograph-filled suitcase in Grand Central Station in 1946 a young widow sets out to discover who the people in the pictures are.
When someone tries to kill her three decades after being trained as a spy, Sally Gilmartin, a respectable English widow living in a quiet Cotswold village, decides to reveal the truth about her past to her daughter, Ruth, a young single mother with a growing problem with alcohol, who is given the task of finding the man who recruited Sally for the secret service.
Joining the elite Bletchley Park codebreaking team during World War II, three women from very different walks of life uncover a spy’s dangerous agenda against a backdrop of the royal wedding of Elizabeth and Philip.
A tale of spycraft, love and sacrifice inspired by the true story of Doctor Zhivago follows the efforts of two CIA agents to help publish Boris Pasternak’s censored masterpiece against a backdrop of Cold War politics in Moscow.
During the Cold War in Britain, Serena Frome is recruited to work as an intelligence agent for MI5 and her first mission involves getting close to Tom Haley, a promising young writer. Despite her best intentions she starts falling for Tom, with potentially dangerous consequences.
Juliet Armstrong is a radio producer in a 1950s London that is recovering from the war as much as she is. During World War Two, Juliet transcribed conversations between an MI5 agent and a ring of suspected German sympathizers, which quickly plunged Juliet into a treacherous world of code words and secret meetings. Now her routine is upended by a meeting with a mysterious man from her past. Haunted by the actions of her past and a very real threat in the present, Juliet realizes she cannot escape the repercussions of her work for the government.
Navigating the underground gay scene of 1962 Greenwich Village, quick-witted Vera Kelly is recruited for the CIA and infiltrates a group of student activists in Buenos Aires before a coup leaves her stranded in hostile territory.
For forty years, in China and in San Francisco, Winnie Louie and Helen Kwong have kept certian confidences. Suddenly, those shattering secrets are about to be revealed. So begins a series of comic misunderstandings and heartbreaking realizations about luck, loss, and trust; about the things a mother cannot tell her daughter, the secrets daughters keep, and the miraculous resiliency of love.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: a novel / Ocean Vuong
A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read reveals the impact of the Vietnam War on their family history and provides a view into parts of the son’s life that his mother has never known.
What We Lose: a novel / Zinzi Clemmons
Raised in America, the multiracial daughter of a mother from Johannesburg struggles with her mother’s terminal cancer and her own need to find love and a place to belong, quests shaped by losses, changes in her sense of identity and unexpected motherhood.
1Q84 / Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
An ode to George Orwell’s “1984” told in alternating male and female voices relates the stories of Aomame, an assassin for a secret organization who discovers that she has been transported to an alternate reality, and Tengo, a mathematics lecturer and novice writer.
Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights: a novel / Salman Rushdie
A modern fairy tale by the award-winning author of Midnight’s Children is set in a world of religious dominance where mystical acts and supernatural abilities shape a war over control of Fairyland.
All Our Wrong Todays: a novel / Elan Mastai
Living in an alternate world of flying cars, moon bases and plentiful food, aimless Tom Barren is blindsided by an accident of fate that leads to a time-travel mishap that lands him in our less-than-ideal 2016, where he discovers wonderful, unexpected versions of his own life.
What My Bones Know: a memoir of healing from complex trauma / Stephanie Foo
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as a radio producer at This American Life and had won an Emmy. But behind her office door she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk. After years of questioning what was wrong with her, she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD-a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Stephanie’s parents had abandoned her as a teenager after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d overcome her trauma, but her diagnosis illuminated the ways in which her past continued to threaten her health, her relationships, and her career. Finding few resources to help her heal, Stephanie set out to map her experience onto the scarce scientific research on C-PTSD.
The Space Between Worlds / Micaiah Johnson
A cross-dimensional examination of identity, privilege and belonging follows the adventures of a rare survivor whose counterparts in other realities have died and who stumbles on a dangerous secret threatening her new home and fragile place in it.
Dark Matter: a novel / Blake Crouch
A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious–and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew.
Bestiary: a novel / K-Ming Chang
Transforming into a manifestation of a tiger character from her Taiwanese heritage, Daughter falls in love with an equally remarkable girl while translating mysterious letters from female relatives who embody mythical archetypes.
The Midnight Library / Matt Haig
Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, or realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe / Charles Yu
Charles Yu, time travel technician, helps save people from themselves in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction. When he’s not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog named Ed, and using a book titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” as his guide, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory.
An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village southeast of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it.
Crimson Snow: a Hilda Johansson mystery / Jeanne M. Dams
Crimson Snow brings together a dozen vintage crime stories set in winter. Welcome to a world of Father Christmases behaving oddly, a famous fictional detective in a Yuletide drama, mysterious tracks in the snow, and some very unpleasant carol singers. There’s no denying that the supposed season of goodwill is a time of year that lends itself to detective fiction.
Never Alone / Elizabeth Haynes
Sarah Carpenter lives with her two dogs in a farmhouse, high on the North Yorkshire moors. She isn’t exactly lonely, though when an old friend, Aiden Beck, needs a place to stay she welcomes him into her home. But Aiden has secrets, and as the weather closes in, and snowfall blocks the roads, Sarah realizes that there are far worse things than being alone.
Winter Street: a novel / Elin Hilderbrand Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket’s Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four, all of them grown and living in varying states of disarray. Patrick, the eldest, is a hedge fund manager with a guilty conscience. Kevin, a bartender, is secretly sleeping with a French housekeeper named Isabelle. Ava, a school teacher, is finally dating the perfect guy but can’t get him to commit. And Bart, the youngest and only child of Kelley’s second marriage to Mitzi, has recently shocked everyone by joining the Marines.
Tell me, Pretty Maiden / Rhys Bowen
With her turn-of-the-twentieth-century detective agency busier than ever, Molly Murphy finds her life further complicated when she and her beau, police captain Daniel Sullivan, stumble upon a young woman lying unconscious in the snow in Central Park.
When We Get There / Shauna Seliy
In the coal-mining town of Banning, Pennsylvania, over the course of the winter of 1974, thirteen-year-old Lucas, the youngest member of an Eastern European family, embarks on a search to find his missing mother, who vanished without explanation.
Winter Solstice / Rosamunde Pilcher
Five people buffeted by life’s difficulties come together at a rundown estate house in Northern Scotland during a revelatory Winter Solstice.
The family you Make: a novel / Jill Shalvis
During the snowstorm of the century, Levi Cutler is stranded on a ski lift with a beautiful stranger named Jane. After strong winds hurl the gondola in front of them down to the ground, Levi calls his parents to prepare them for the worst. Wanting to fulfill his mother’s lifelong wish, he impulsively tells her he’s happily settled and Jane is his girlfriend–right before his phone dies. Now Levi’s family is desperate to meet “The One.” Though Jane agrees to be his pretend girlfriend for just one dinner, she’s nervous.
The Net Beneath Us / Carol Dunbar In the aftermath of her husband’s logging accident, Elsa has more questions than answers about how to carry on while caring for their two small children in the unfinished house he was building for them in the woods of rural Wisconsin. To cope with the challenges of winter, she forges her own relationship with the land, learning from and taking comfort in the trees her husband had so loved. If she wants to stay in their home, she must discover her own capabilities, and accept help from the people and places she least expects.
A Christmas Deliverance: a novel / Anne Perry A courageous doctor and his apprentice fight to save London’s poor–and discover that the hearts of men can be colder than a winter chill–in this gripping holiday mystery. Scuff has come a long way from his time as a penniless orphan scraping together a living on the banks of the Thames. Now he’s studying medicine at a free clinic run by Dr. Crowe.
Death on a Winter Stroll / Francine Mathews
Nantucket Police Chief Meredith Folger is acutely conscious of the strain COVID-19 has placed on the community she loves. Although the island has proved a refuge for many during the pandemic, the cost to Nantucket has been high. Merry hopes that Christmas Stroll, one of Nantucket’s favorite traditions, in which Main Street is transformed into a winter wonderland for tourists and locals to enjoy, will lift the island’s spirits. But the arrival of a large-scale TV production, and the Secretary of State with her family, complicates matters significantly.
If I ever get out of here: a novel with paintings / by Eric Gansworth
Seventh-grader Lewis “Shoe” Blake from the Tuscarora Reservation has a new friend, George Haddonfield from the local Air Force base, but in 1975 upstate New York there is a lot of tension and hatred between Native Americans and Whites–and Lewis is not sure that he can rely on friendship.
Crossings: a doctor-soldier’s story / Jon Kerstetter
In Iraq, as a combat physician and officer, Jon Kerstetter balanced two impossibly conflicting imperatives – to heal and to kill. When he suffered an injury and then a stroke during his third tour, he wound up back home in Iowa, no longer able to be either a doctor or a soldier. In this gorgeous memoir that moves from his impoverished upbringing on an Oneida reservation, to his harrowing stints as a volunteer medic in Kosovo and Bosnia, through the madness of Iraq.
There there / Tommy Orange
Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle’s memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions–intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path.
Calling for a Blanket Dance: a novel / by Oscar Hokeah
A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.
Where the Dead Sit Talking / Brandon Hobson
A spare, lyrical Native American coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface–that is, until he meets the seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American backgrounds and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both
The Night Watchman: a novel / Louise Erdrich
Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new ’emancipation’ bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a ‘termination’ that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans ‘for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run’?
Prudence / David Treuer
In August 1942, Frankie Washburn revisits his Minnesota family before joining the war effort, saying good-bye to family, friends, and the Native American caretaker he held dear. Then a German POW escapes from a nearby camp. August 1942. Frankie Washburn returns to his family’s Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are his hovering mother; the distant father to whom he’s been a disappointment; the Indian caretaker who’s been more of a father to him than his own; and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence.
Ridgeline: a novel / Michael Punke
In December 1866, tensions were rising in Wyoming, between the Native American tribes who had lived on the land for generations and the settlers who would destroy their home. Crazy Horse and his fellow Lakota hunters had been watching for months as Colonel Carrington and his army set up camp on one of the most crucial swaths of hunting ground in hundreds of miles, and began to build forts. More disconcertingly, the settlers had brought women and children, which meant they planned to stay. As the Lakota and neighboring tribes set forth with repeated attacks to discourage the settlers, Captain William J. Fetterman, anxious and arrogant, claimed that he could take offense and rid the area of Native American people with only a small army of 80 men. And he would–unless Crazy Horse could find a way to lure the army to their doom. A story of protection and betrayal, of courage, wit, and perseverance against unfathomable odds.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the present / David Treuer
Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes’ distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don’t know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk: a novel / James Welch
Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, is recruited by Buffalo Bill Cody to join his Wild West show, which creates a sensation in Europe, until he is left behind–because of illness and a bureaucratic mix-up–in the unfamiliar world of Marseilles.
Cherokee America / Margaret Verble
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maud’s Line, an epic novel that follows a web of complex family alliances and culture clashes in the Cherokee Nation during the aftermath of the Civil War, and the unforgettable woman at its center.
The Painted Drum / Louise Erdrich
Discovering a cache of valuable Native American artifacts while appraising a family estate in New Hampshire, Faye Travers investigates the history of a ceremonial drum, which possesses spiritual powers and changes the lives of people who encounter it.
A moving and unforgettable exploration of the powerful bond between mother and daughter set on the breathtaking Amalfi Coast. “When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn’t just Katy’s mom, but her best friend. To make matters worse, the mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: two weeks in Positano. Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking on the adventure alone. But as soon as she steps foot on the beautiful Amalfi Coast, Katy begins to feel her mother’s spirit.
How can a nation that spawned the Renaissance have produced the Mafia? How could people concerned with bella figura (keeping up appearances) have elected Silvio Berlusconi as their leader-not once, but three times? Italy is a country of seemingly unsolvable riddles. Even readers who think they know Italy well will be surprised, challenged, and delighted by The Italians.
The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.
Two star-crossed lovers–Enza and Ciro–meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Set during the years preceding and during World War I.
Puzo pulls us inside the violent society of the Mafia and its gang wars. The leader, Vito Corleone, is The Godfather. He is a benevolent despot who stops at nothing to gain and hold power. His command post is a fortress on Long Island from which he presides over a vast underground empire that includes the rackets, gambling, bookmaking, and unions. His influence runs through all levels of American society, from the cop on the beat to the nation’s mighty.
Elizabeth Street is both a fascinating immigrant story and an intimate portrait of how a first-generation American–and the author’s own great-grandmother–outwits one of the most brutal crime organizations of the early 20th century.
When she receives personal threats and an associate is murdered, young lawyer Mary DiNunzio realizes that her latest case, involving a World War II internment camp suicide, may have deadly modern-day ties.
The American-born daughter of an immigrant plots to bring her entire family back to Santa Cecilia, Italy, so that her grandmother can make amends with her estranged sister.
Talese here asks the simple question: How did his father, Joseph, a tailor trained in his small village in southern Italy, end up plying his trade in an equally remote town on the New Jersey shore? The answer is anything but simple and demands a look into the historical background of the great migrations of our century.
The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, straddles these two perspectives to link his family’s dramatic story to Italy’s north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.
July is Disability Pride Month which commemorates the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. It is a time to acknowledge and honor how disability is a natural part of human diversity in which those living with disabilities can take pride.
Demystifying Disability / Emily Ladau A guide for how to be a thoughtful, informed ally to disabled people, with actionable steps for what to say and do (and what not to do) and how you can help make the world a more accessible place
Disability Visibility / edited by Alice Wong Collects 17 thought-provoking essays written by disabled people that offer keen insight into the complex and rich disability experience, and ask readers to think of them as members of a community with its own history, culture and movements.
True Biz / Sara Nović Taking readers into a residential school for the deaf, this coming-of-age novel follows three people—a rebellious transfer student, the school’s golden boy and the headmistress—as they each deal with personal and political crises and find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.
Sitting Pretty / Rebekah Taussig The disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty offers an honest look at disability and its effects on identity, love, money and self-worth by processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful portrait of a body that looks and moves differently.
Haben / Haben Girma Documents the incredible story of the first deaf and blind graduate of Harvard Law School, tracing her refugee parents’ harrowing experiences in the Eritrea-Ethiopian war and her development of innovations that enabled her remarkable achievements
Act Your Age, Eve Brown / Talia Hibbert When his life is taken over by a purple-haired tornado of a woman named Eve Brown, B&B owner Jacob Wayne tries to fight his attraction to this sunny, chaotic woman who is his natural-born enemy.
The Collected Schizophrenias / Esmé Weijun Wang Using examples from her own diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, the author discusses some of the misconceptions about the illness, the disagreements within the medical community, and her experiences of the dangers of institutionalization and mistreatment.
About Us / edited and introduced by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson ; foreword by Andrew Solomon Based on the New York Times series, About Us captures the voices of a community that has been stereotyped and misrepresented. Speaking The authors in About Us offer intimate stories of how they navigate a world not built for them…. the stories here reveal the range of responses, and the variety of consequences, to being labeled as disabled by the broader public.
The sound of a wild snail eating / Elisabeth Tova Bailey Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is celebrated every June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, the tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States.1
The Once and Future Witches / Alix E. Harrow. In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in a Hugo award-winning author’s novel of magic amid the suffragette movement.
Manhunt / Gretchen Felker-Martin Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs…Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe. After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat…all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons
Malice / Heather Walter In this darkly magical retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Alyce, an evil sorceress, finds an ally in Princess Aurora and wonders if she can lift Aurora’s curse so that together they can forge a new world.
The Charm Offensive / Alison Cochrun Successful producer on the long-running reality dating show Ever After, Dev Deshpande, with his own love life in complete disarray, falls for contestant Charlie Winshaw who has better chemistry with him than any of his female co-stars.
Love & Other Disasters / Anita Kelly While competing on a popular cooking show, Dahlia Woodson stirs up trouble when she gets involved with a nonbinary contestant, and as their relationship heats up both in and out of the kitchen, she wonders if they have the right ingredients for a happily ever after
Chef’s Kiss / TJ Alexander A perfectionist pastry chef working at a cookbook publisher must learn how to deal with the obnoxiously chipper new kitchen manager who begins softening her heart and comes out as nonbinary to mixed reactions at work.
Boyfriend Material / Alexis Hall Fabricating a respectable relationship with a man with whom he shares nothing in common when his rock-star father’s comeback leads to unwanted attention, Luc stages publicity-friendly dates that become complicated by all-too-real feelings.
A Marvellous Light / Freya Marske Robin Blyth is accidentally named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society and is forced to contend with the beauty and danger operating beneath normal reality while uncovering what happened to his predecessor.
Light from Uncommon Stars / Ryka Aoki To reclaim her damned soul, a gifted, but cursed violinist must take on seven students and try to entice each to trade their soul for fame while a starship captain races to stop the end of existence.
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care / Ashley Herring Blake Pressured into photographing her estranged step-sister’s wedding, Delilah Green reluctantly returns home to Bright Falls where she finds herself falling for one of the stuck-up bridesmaids after the pair are forced together during party preparations.
We Do What We Do in the Dark / Michelle Hart Long after the end of an affair with an older, married woman, Mallory retreats into herself and must decide whether to stay safely in isolation or step fully into the world to confront how much the woman altered her life, for better or worse.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty / Akwaeke Emezi Learning how to feel joy while healing from loss, Feyi Adekola starts dating the perfect guy, but discovers she has feelings for someone else who is off limits and must decide just how far she is willing to go for a second chance at love.
Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington / James Kirchick Drawing on declassified documents, interviews and materials unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, this chronicle of American politics illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the 20th century.
To Paradise / Hanya Yanagihara Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human—fear, love, shame, need and loneliness
Real Easy / Marie Rutkoski In 1999, Georgia, a dancer at the Lovely Lady strip club, is drawn into the investigation of two fellow dancers—one dead and one missing—as she tries to assist a Harvard-educated detective with a complicated story of her own.
Perpetual West / by Mesha Maren When her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, has fallen in love with a lucha libra fighter, goes missing, Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or was kidnapped, forcing her to face who she really is.
Celebrate your furry loved ones with these great tales!
Dewey: The Small-town Library Cat Who Touched the World / Vicki Myron with Bret Witter. Dewey was left abandoned as a kitten on the coldest night of the year stuffed in the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library in Iowa. He won the heart of Vicki Myron, the librarian who found him, and for the next 19 years he charmed the people of Spencer.
All Creatures Great and Small / James Herriot. A country veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire describes the joys and trials of his profession and recalls his early career and experiences with his unique clientele.
The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood / Sy Montgomery. An ardent nature lover and author of Journey of the Pink Dolphins describes her unique friendship with a pig named Christopher Hogwood, a once sickly piglet who helped her develop a new relationship with neighbors in her small-town community that gave her an anchor to family and home.
How Dogs Love Us / Gregory Berns. A media-cited Emory University neuroscientist recounts his painstaking efforts to overcome administrative and behavioral hurdles to train his dogs to sit still during an MRI scan and gain insights into the active canine brain, an effort that produced compelling evidence about canine empathy and the human-dog bond.
Alex & Me/ Irene M. Pepperberg. The story of a famous African Grey parrot documents his thirty-year relationship with his trainer and the ways in which his life has changed scientific understanding about language and thought.
When Harry met Minnie / Martha Teichner. The Emmy Award-winning CBS Sunday Morning correspondent describes how she adopted a dying friend’s Bull Terrier as a companion to her own, forging unexpected heartwarming and heartbreaking bonds along the way.
Pit bull / Bronwen Dickey. Describes how the loyal and affectionate dog breed that once earned presidential recognition for their roles on the battlefields of Gettysburg and the Marne and appeared in films and TV, became demonized and stigmatized through urban dog-fighting rings.
Catwise / Pam Johnson-Bennett. Top feline behavior expert (and author of Penguin’s bestselling Think Like a Cat and Cat vs. Cat) answers the 150 questions most often asked by puzzled cat owners.
The Dragon Behind the Glass / Emily Voigt. A tour of the world of the endangered Asian arowana, or “dragon fish,” describes the violence, expense, cultural beliefs, and sophisticated smuggling operations surrounding its illegal possession, tracing the author’s years-long quest in search of surviving populations
When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.
Travels with Charley / John Steinbeck. Author John Steinbeck was 58 when he set out to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With his elderly French poodle, Charley, he embarked on a quest across America, from the northermost tip of Maine to California’s Monterey Peninsula. Traveling the interstates and the country roads, they stopped to smell America: trucker and strangers, old friends and new acquaintances. Steinbeck’s poignant, perceptive reflections reveal the American character: a blend of unexpected kindnesses and racial hostilities, loneliness and humor.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating / Elisabeth Tova Bailey. Bedridden and suffering from a neurological disorder, the author recounts the profound effect on her life caused by a gift of a snail in a potted plant and shares the lessons learned from her new companion about her the meaning of her life and the life of the small creature.
Anxious People / Fredrik Backman ; translated by Neil Smith. Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers—including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages and a plucky octogenarian—discover their unexpected common traits.
The Eyre Affair / Jasper Fforde. In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world’s Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch / by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch,” the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies written in 1655. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing and everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except that a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist.
Hyperbole and a Half / Allie Brosh. Collects autobiographical, illustrated essays and cartoons from the author’s popular blog and related new material that humorously and candidly deals with her own idiosyncrasies and battles with depression.
Lessons in Chemistry / Bonnie Garmus. In the early 1960s, chemist and single mother Elizabeth Zott, the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show due to her revolutionary skills in the kitchen, uses this opportunity to dare women to change the status quo.
My Sister, the Serial Killer / Oyinkan Braithwaite. Slasher meets satire, in this darkly comic novel set in Nigeria about a woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends.
Postcards from the Edge / Carrie Fisher. In a stunning literary debut, Carrie Fisher chronicles the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale – young film star and drug addict, who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we’re left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands.
Tales of the City / Armistead Maupin. A naive young secretary, fresh out of Cleveland, tumbles headlong into a brave new world of laundromat Lotharios, pot-growing landladies, cut throat debutantes, and Jockey Shorts dance contests. The saga that ensues is manic, romantic, tawdry, touching, and outrageous.
The Thursday Murder Club / Richard Osman. In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club
Where’d You Go, Bernadette / Maria Semple. When her notorious, hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled, and agoraphobic mother goes missing, teenage Bee begins a trip that takes her to the ends of the earth to find her.
Eisner Week is held every March in honor of Will Eisner, one of the most influential graphic novel writers and artists, his legacy, celebrating comics, graphic novels, graphic literacy, and free speech.
Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America / Box Brown. A graphic-novel history of the inextricable link between racism and cannabis legislation in America explores how lawmakers decried and intentionally misclassified cannabis as a dangerous vice of “inferior races.”
Invisible Kingdom. Volume 1, Walking the path / writer, G. Willow Wilson ; artist, Christian Ward ; letterer, Sal Cipriano. In a small solar system in a far-flung galaxy, two women — one a young religious acolyte and the other a hard-bitten freighter pilot –uncover a conspiracy between the leaders of the most dominant religion and an all-consuming mega-corporation. On the run from reprisals on both sides, this unlikely pair must decide where their loyalties lie — and risk plunging the world into anarchy if they reveal the truth
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio / Derf Backderf. A commemorative 50th anniversary graphic-novel account of the May 4, 1970 shootings of Vietnam War college student protesters by the Ohio National Guard draws on in-depth interviews to profile the tragedy’s four victims.
Lore Olympus. Volume one / Rachel Smythe. Persephone, young goddess of spring, was raised her in the mortal realm, but after Persephone promises to train as a sacred virgin, her mother allows her to live in the fast-moving, glamorous world of the gods. When her roommate, Artemis, takes her to a party, her entire life changes: she ends up meeting Hades and feels an immediate spark with the charming yet misunderstood ruler of the Underworld. Now Persephone must navigate the confusing politics and relationships that rule Olympus, while also figuring out her own place–and her own power.
Sabrina / by Nick Drnaso When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens.
The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes / Neil Gaiman. An occultist attempting to summon and imprison Death instead traps her younger brother Morpheus, the Sandman, who, after eventually escaping imprisonment, must regain his lost objects of power while on an arduous journey.
Seek You: A Journey through American Loneliness / Kristen Radtke. When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody–anybody–who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into a piercing exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another. She looks at the very real current crisis of loneliness through the lenses of gender, violence, technology, and art. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to Instagram to Harry Harlow’s experiments in which infant monkeys were given inanimate surrogate mothers, Radtke uncovers all she can about how we engage with friends, family, and strangers alike, and what happens–to us and to them–when we disengage.
Stone fruit / Lee Lai. An exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore.
Check out these romances just in time for Valentine’s Day!
A Princess in Theory / Alyssa Cole Mistaken by his betrothed as a pauper instead of a prince, Prince Thabiso, the sole heir to the throne of Thesolo, decides to keep his real identity a secret as he experiences life and love with Naledi Smith—until the truth comes out, which changes everything.
The proposal / Jasmine Guillory After a handsome doctor helps Nikole escape a ridiculous, public proposal, she starts having a series of hookups with him, but when things begin to get out of hand, one of them has to put the brakes on things.
Get a life, Chloe Brown: a novel / Talia Hibbert Emerging from a life-threatening illness, a fiercely organized but unfulfilled computer geek recruits a mysterious artist to help her establish meaning in her life, before finding herself engaged in reckless but thrilling activities.
Tempest / Beverly Jenkins When Regan Carmichael, his mail-order bride, arrives, widower Dr. Colton Lee, who is in need of someone to care for his daughter, gets more than he expected in this independent beauty who makes him believe in second chances.
Intercepted / Alexa Martin Resolving never to date athletes again after an exploitative relationship ends in infidelity, Marlee resists the attention of a quarterback former flame while navigating spiteful rivals who would eliminate her from the competition.
The boyfriend project / Farrah Rochon When a live tweet of a horrific date reveals the unscrupulous dealings of an internet catfisher, three duped women make a pact to invest in themselves for six months, prompting one to pursue a dream career.
Not the girl you marry / Andie J. Christopher To prove to her boss that she’s not scared of feelings, Hannah Mayfield decides Jack Nolan is the perfect man to date for a couple of weeks, but, unbeknownst to her, Jack has chosen her for an article called “How to Lose a Girl.”
The worst best man : a novel / Mia Sosa The top wedding coordinator in Washington, D.C., Carolina Santos is offered an opportunity of a lifetime, but there is just one hitch—she has to collaborate with the best man from her own failed nuptials—and decides to dish out a little payback of her own until the unexpected happens
Finding home again / Brenda Jackson Set in the small town of Catalina Cove, a town on the bayou, this heart-stirring novel follows the reunion romance between high school sweethearts and the secret that tore them apart all those years ago,
Rafe / Rebekah Weatherspoon All Dr. Sloan Copeland needed was someone to watch her kids. What she found was the man of her dreams…Enter Rafe Whitcomb. Just as quickly, both Sloan and Rafe find themselves succumbing to a heady mutual attraction, neither of them wants to deny. With every minute they spend under the same roof, this working mom can’t help but wonder if Rafe can handle all her needs.
Read about these titles about the First and Second Ages of Middle-Earth before Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres in the Fall!
The Silmarillion / J.R.R. Tolkien ; edited by Christopher Tolkien Beginning with the Music of the Ainur, The Silmarillion tells a tale of the Elder Days, when Elves and Men became estranged by the Dark Lord Morgoth’s lust for the Silmarils, pure and powerful magic jewels. Even the love between a human warrior and the daughter of the Elven king cannot defeat Morgoth, but the War of Wrath finally brings down the Dark Lord.
The Book of Lost Tales/ J.R.R. Tolkien; edited by Christopher TolkienPart I | Part II A collection of Tolkien’s early tales offers the original accounts of the characters and world of Middle-earth and is accompanied by extensive commentary by Tolkien’s son.
The Fall of Gondolin / by J.R.R. Tolkien ; edited by Christopher Tolkien ; with illustrations by Alan Lee Following his presentation of Beren and Luthien, Christopher Tolkien has used the same ‘history in sequence’ mode in the writing of this edition of The Fall of Gondolin. In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, it was ‘the first real story of this imaginary world’ and, together with Beren and Luthien and The Children of Hurin, he regarded it as one of the three ‘Great Tales’ of the Elder Days.
The Hobbit : or, There and Back Again / by J.R.R. Tolkien Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.
The Two Towers / by J.R.R. Tolkien Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom.
The Return of the King / by J. R. R. Tolkien The little hobbit and his trusty companion make a terrible journey to the heart of the land of the Shadow in a final reckoning with the power of Sauron.
Celebrate the history, culture, and traditions of Native Americans in a special collection of both fiction and nonfiction books below.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States / by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.
Love Medicine: A Novel / by Louise Erdrich The first book in the tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace follows the lives of two native American families and is enhanced by four previously unpublished chapters.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI / by David Grann Presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Where the Dead Sit talking / by Brandon HobsonLiterally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Cherokee teen Sequoyah is placed in foster care with the Troutt family, and bonds with fellow foster child Rosemary, who shares his Native American background and tumultuous past.
Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary / by Joe Jackson Chronicles the life of the Native American healer and holy man, known for his testimonial “Black Elk Speaks,” who fought at the Little Bighorn, traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and became swept up in the Ghost Dance movement.
The Only Good Indians: A Novel by Stephen Graham Jones A novel that blends classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives.
Heart Berries: A Memoir / by Terese Marie Mailhot The author recounts her coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest where she survived a dysfunctional childhood and found herself hospitalized with a dual diagnosis of PTSD and bipolar II disorder.
There There by Tommy Orange A novel—which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans; with an inheritance of profound spirituality; and with a plague of addiction, abuse and suicide—follows 12 characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk / by James Welch A witness to the battle of Little Big Horn as a child, Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, is recruited by Buffalo Bill Cody to join his Wild West show, which creates a sensation in the capital cities of Europe, until he is left behind–because of illness and a bureaucractic mix-up–in the strange, unfamiliar world of Marseille.
Plain Bad Heroines / by Emily Danforth A century after the macabre deaths of several students at a New England girls’ boarding school, the release of a sensational book on the school’s history inspires a horror film adaptation that renews suspicions of a curse when the cast and crew arrive at the long-abandoned building.
The Unheard / by Nicci French When her young daughter returns from her ex’s house with a violent crayon drawing and the words “He did kill her,” Tess searches for the truth, which sets off an explosive chain of events where more than one life may be at stake.
The Final Girl Support Group / by Grady Hendrix A real-life “final girl”— the one girl always left standing at the end of a horror movie — Lynette Tarkington, who survived a massacre 22 years ago, along with five other final girls, works to overcome her past until someone becomes determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill When Charles Talent Manx, an unstoppable monster who transforms children into his own terrifying likeness, kidnaps her son, Victoria McQueen, the only person to ever escape his unmitigated evil, must engage in a life-and-death battle of wills to get her son back.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth / by Cassandra Khaw A Heian-era mansion resting on the bonds of a bride, the perfect venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends, brought back together to celebrate a wedding, find a night of revelry turning into a bloody nightmare.
You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann While spending seven days with his wife and young daughter in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany, the narrator, eager to finish a screenplay for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, records the unexplainable events happening around him that are undermining his convictions and confidence.
The Drowning Kind / by Jennifer McMahon Investigating an estranged sibling’s suspicious drowning at their grandmother’s estate, a social worker connects the tragedy to the unsolved case of a housewife who in 1929 allegedly succumbed to the consequences of a wish-granting spring
Mexican Gothic / by Silvia Moreno-Garcia A reimagining of the classic gothic suspense novel follows the experiences of a courageous socialite in 1950s Mexico who is drawn into the treacherous secrets of an isolated mansion.
A Touch of Jen / by Beth Morgan A funny and terrifying debut novel looks at a love triangle so toxic that it breaks the order of the universe and unleashes a literal monster.
The Whisper Man / by Alex NorthMourning the death of his wife, a father and his young son move to Featherbank for a fresh start but find their new town has a dark past involving a serial killer named “The Whisper Man.”
The Only Good Indians / by Stephen Graham Norton A novel that blends classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives.
White is for Witching / by Helen Oyeyemi Suffering from pica, a malady that causes her to eat nonedible items, sixteen-year-old Miranda helps to run the family bed-and-breakfast while witnessing her community’s hostilities toward outsiders, a malice that erupts in violent and destructive ways.
Survive the Night / by Riley Sager When her best friend is the third victim of a serial killer targeting college students, Charlie, deciding to leave campus, accepts a ride home from Josh Baxter and, realizing his true identity too late, must win a twisted game of cat and mouse by surviving the night.
The Death of Jane Lawrence / by Caitlin Starling Embarking on a marriage of convenience with bold, courageous surgeon Augustine Lawrence in post-war England, practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield instead finds a terrified, paranoid man who cannot tell reality from a nightmare and realizes something is deeply wrong with this man she is bound to.
The Last House on Needless Street / by Catriona WardWhen a neighbor moves in next door, a family of three—a teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, a man with memory loss and a house cat who reads the bible—are terrified that the unspeakable secret that binds them together will be exposed.
The Book of Accidents / by Chuck Wendig Haunted by their tragic pasts, Nate and Maddie Graves move back to their hometown with their son, Oliver, who becomes involved with a strange boy who has a taste for dark magic that puts them at the heart of a battle of good vs evil.
Harvard Square / by André Aciman An Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student trying to assimilate into American culture in 1977 befriends an impetuous, loud Arab cab driver and must choose between his dream or his friend.
Lucky Jim / by Kingsley Amis A hilarious satire of British university life. Jim has accidentally fallen into a job at one of the new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons as long as Jim can keep in with eccentric Professor Welch, survive a madrigal-singing weekend, deliver a lecture on ‘Merrie England’ and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch’s awful son, Bertrand.
The Idiot / by Elif Batuman Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.
Wonder Boys / by Michael Chabon Grady Tripp, an obese, aging writer who has lost his way, struggles with debauched editor Terry Crabtree to renew friendship, a sense of adventure, and a sense of purpose to life.
My Education / by Susan Choi Warned about the womanizing activities of Professor Nicholas Brodeur before her arrival at his prestigious university, graduate student Regina Gottlieb is nevertheless captured by his charisma and good looks before falling prey to his volatile wife.
The Virgins / by Pamela Erens Two students at a private boarding school, Aviva, who seeks liberation from the memory of an unhappy childhood, and Seung, who wants to rebel from demanding parents, enter into an intense relationship which intrigues everyone around them.
The Marriage Plot / by Jeffrey Eugenides Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.
The Secret Place / by Tana FrenchInvestigating a photograph of a boy whose murder was never solved, aspiring Murder Squad member Stephen Moran partners with detective Antoinette Conway to search for answers in the cliques and rivalries at a Dublin boarding school.
The Art of Fielding / by Chad Harbach A baseball star at a small college near Lake Michigan launches a routine throw that goes disastrously off course and inadvertently changes the lives of five people, including the college president, a gay teammate, and the president’s daughter.
A Separate Peace / by John Knowles Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II. What happens between two boys, Phineas and Gene, one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
Admission / by Jean Hanff Korelitz Thirty-eight-year old Portia Nathan, a Princeton University admissions officer, must decide whether or not to confront the truth when a life-altering decision from her past resurfaces.
Galatea / by Richard Powers Richard Powers, a Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Scientific Research, gets involved with a project to train a machine to pass a comprehensive exam in English literature–and with the degree candidate against whom the machine is competing.
Normal People / by Sally Rooney The unconventional secret childhood bond between popular Connell and lonely, intensely private Marianne is tested by character reversals in their first year at a Dublin college that render Connell introspective and Marianne social, but self-destructive.
Prep / by Curtis Sittenfeld Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding schools glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
On Beauty / by Zadie Smith Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son’s engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon.
The Secret History / by Donna Tartt Richard Papen, a relatively impoverished student at a New England college, falls in with an exclusive clique of rich, worldly Greek scholars and soon learns the dreadful secret that keeps them together.
Stoner / by John Williams Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life.
Old School / by Tobias WolffDuring his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to fit in with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling due to the school’s obsession with literary figures and their work.
Sleepwalking / by Meg Wolitzer A story of three college students with shared fascination with poetry and death, and how one of them must face difficult truths in order to leave her obsession behind.
The Reading List / by Sara Nisha Adams Working at the local library, Aleisha reads every book on a secret list she found, which transports her from the painful realities she’s facing at home, and decides to pass the list on to a lonely widower desperate to connect with his bookworm granddaughter.
Black Buck / by Mateo Askaripour An unambitious college graduate accepts a job at Sumwun, the hottest NYC startup, and reimagines himself as “Buck” a ruthless salesman and begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force.
Just One Look / by Lindsay Cameron After taking a thankless job as a temp at a law firm, Cassie Woodson begins reading the personal emails between a partner and his enchanting wife and becomes so obsessed with the pair, she plots to take her place.
It Had to Be You / by Georgia Clark When her late husband leaves his half of their wedding planning business to his girlfriend, Liv Goldenhorn, who never saw this coming, finds herself shackled to her polar opposite in every way, whose inexperience may be just what the company needs.
We Were Never Here / by Andrea Bartz After a backpacking trip in Chile with her best friend Kristen goes horribly wrong, Emily is forced to confront their violent past and wonders if she can outrun the secrets they share or if they will destroy her relationship, freedom and even her life.
The Other Black Girl / by Zakiya Dalila Harris Tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books, 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel is hired until she after a string uncomfortable events, is elevated to Office Darling, leaving Nella in the dust.
A Slow Fire Burning / by Paula Hawkins Three women unknown to each other are each questioned in connection with the gruesome murder of a young man found on a London houseboat.
The Paper Palace / by Miranda Cowley Heller While staying at “The Paper Palace” — the family summer place she has visited every summer of her life, 50-year-old Elle must decide between the life she has built with her husband and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love.
People We Meet on Vacation / by Emily Henry Best friends Alex and Poppy try to repair their relationship two years after a disastrous vacation together by planning another vacation together.
Golden Girl / by Elin Hilderbrand Entering the afterlife due to a hit and run accident, a successful author learns she can observe the earthly lives of her nearly grown children and is also permitted three “nudges” to alter the outcome of events.
Summer on the Bluffs / by Sunny Hostin In the exclusive black beach community of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, the three unofficial “goddaughters” of Amelia Vaux Tanner, successful women from different backgrounds, gather for one last summer together before Amelia moves to the south of France and gives her home to one of them.
Dream Girl / by Laura Lippman Bedridden after a freak accident, a novelist begins to question his own sanity as he moves through dreamlike memories of his own fictional characters.
Skye Falling / by Mia McKenzie When a 12-year-old girl tracks her down during one of her brief visits to Philadelphia, claiming to be “her egg,” Skye, a loner and egg donor, decides that it might be time to actually have a meaningful relationship with another human being, which is easier said than done.
God Spare the Girls / by Kelsey McKinney The discovery that their father, the head pastor of an evangelical Texas megachurch, has been having an affair causes sisters Abigail and Caroline to flee to the ranch they inherited from their grandmother to discuss their family.
One Last Stop / by Casey McQuinston Cynical August starts to believe in the impossible when meets Jane on the subway, a mysterious punk rocker she forms a crush on, who is literally displaced in time from the 1970s and is trying to find her way back.
Outlawed / by Anna North Forced to flee from a community that hangs barren women as witches, 17-year-old Ada joins a gang of outlaws under a charismatic former preacher who hatches a treacherous plan that risks all of their lives.
The Therapist / by B.A. Paris When a mysterious man turns up on her doorstep, claiming that a murder took place 18 months before in her new home, Alice becomes obsessed with finding the truth.
Malibu Rising / by Taylor Jenkins Reid Four famous siblings throw an epic end-of-summer party that goes dangerously out of control as secrets and loves that shaped this family’s generations come to light, changing their lives forever.
The Guncle / by Steven Rowley When Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP) for short, takes on the role of primary guardian for his young niece and nephew, he sets “Guncle Rules,” but soon learns that parenting isn’t solved with treats or jokes as his eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility.
Second First Impressions / by Sally Thorne A spoiled, tattooed rich man reluctantly agrees to become an assistant to two casually exploitative nonagenarians before unexpectedly catching the eye of the property’s serious-minded manager.
Impostor Syndrome / by Kathy Wang This Silicon Valley satire follows Alice, a first generation Chinese American who discovers suspicious activity on her company’s server which violates the company’s privacy policies and may lead back to the chief operating officer.
Seven Days in June / by Tia Williams Running into reclusive author Shane Hall at a literary event, bestselling erotica writer Eva Mercy, over the next seven days, reconnects with this man who broke her heart 20 years earlier until he disappears again, leaving more questions than answers.
Who Is Maud Dixon? / by Alexandra AndrewsWorking for a mysterious novelist known as Maud Dixon, Florence Darrow accompanies her to Morocco where her new novel is set – and where she, after a terrible accident and no sign of Maud, decides to become Maud, claiming the life she’s always wanted.
Appleseed / by Matt Bell Two supernatural brothers who plant an apple orchard in eighteenth-century Ohio reel from the unforeseen circumstances after climate change ravages the earth and centuries later leaves the company they founded unfairly owning all the world’s resources.
Let Me Tell You What I Mean / by Joan Didion A volume of 12 previously uncollected early pieces shares insights into the author’s evolving literary style and includes reflections on such topics as a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a Vegas WWI veteran reunion and a visit to San Simeon.
On Juneteenth / by Annette Gordon-Reed In this intricately woven tapestry of American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us.
Libertie / by Kaitlyn Greenidge Coming of age as a free-born Black woman in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson struggles against her mother’s medical aspirations for her when she finds herself more drawn to a musical career that could compromise her autonomy.
The Other Black Girl / by Zakiya Dalila Harris Tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books, 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel is hired until she after a string uncomfortable events, is elevated to Office Darling, leaving Nella in the dust.
Early Morning Riser / by Katherine HeinyFalling in love with Duncan, the world’s most prolific seducer of women, Jane finds herself part of an unconventional family, which includes his best friend and ex-wife, when one terrible car crash permanently intertwines her life with Duncan’s.
Klara and the Sun / by Kazuo Ishiguro Waiting to be chosen by a customer, an Artificial Friend programmed with high perception observes the activities of shoppers while exploring fundamental questions about what it means to love.
Empire of Pain / by Patrick Radden Keefe Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis.
No One Is Talking About This / by Patricia LockwoodElevated to prominence for her social-media posts, a woman begins suffering from existential anxieties while learning the languages, customs and fears of her fans throughout the world, before an urgent text from home transforms her virtual perspectives.
Milk Blood Heat / by Dantiel W. Moniz A debut collection explores such topics as human connections, race, womanhood, inheritance and inner darkness in a series of intergenerational tales featuring protagonists in the sultry cities and suburbs of Florida.
Aftershocks / by Nadia Owusu An award-winning essayist combines literary memoir and cultural history to examine her personal struggles with her mixed-heritage identity and the emotional trauma of her mother’s abandonment and father’s dark secrets.
Detransition, Baby / by Torrey PetersA trans woman, her detransitioned ex, and his cisgender lover build an unconventional family together in the wake of heartbreak and an unplanned pregnancy.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain / by George Saunders The award-winning author of Tenth of December pairs scholarly essays based on his Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program with seven classic Russian stories to explain the essential literary processes of narrative, story immersion and perspective.
How the Word Is Passed / by Clint Smith A look at how the legacy of slavery is preserved in monuments and landmarks such as Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that houses Black men working the fields for virtually no pay.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev / by Dawnie Walton Accepting a contract from a fledgling record company, a talented music artist in early 1970s New York endures racist responses to her activism, before a reunion interview decades later reveals explosive secrets.
The Man Who Lived Underground / by Richard Wright Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.
Crying in H Mart / by Michelle ZaunerThe Japanese Breakfast indie pop star presents a full-length account of her viral New Yorker essay to share poignant reflections on her experiences of growing up Korean-American, becoming a professional musician and caring for her terminally ill mother.
Call Me By Your Name / by Andre Aciman The story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliff side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
Mostly Dead Things / by Kristen ArnettTaking over her family’s failing taxidermy shop in the wake of her father’s suicide, grief-stricken Jessa-Lynn Morton pursues less-than-legal ways of generating income while struggling to figure out her place among her eccentric loved ones.
Giovanni’s Room / by James Baldwin Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic / by Alison Bechdel A memoir done in the form of a graphic novel by a cult favorite comic artist offers a darkly funny family portrait that details her relationship with her father–a funeral home director, high school English teacher, and closeted homosexual.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies / by John BoyneAdopted by a well-to-do, if eccentric, Dublin couple that remind him that he is not a real member of their family, Cyril embarks on a journey to find himself and where he came from, discovering his identity, a home, a country and much more throughout a long lifetime.
A Queer History of the United States / by Michael Bronski An examination about how American culture has shaped the LGBT experience, while simultaneously arguing that LGBT people not only shaped but were pivotal in creating this country.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home / by Carol Rifka Brunt Her world upended by the death of a beloved artist uncle who was the only person who understood her, 14-year-old June is mailed a teapot by her uncle’s grieving friend, with whom June forges a poignant relationship. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.
Boy Erased / by Garrard Conley A survivor of a church-supported sexual orientation conversion therapy facility that claimed to “cure” homosexuality describes its institutionalized, intense Bible study program and the daily threats of his abandonment by family, friends, and God.
The Hours / by Michael Cunningham In a novel of love, family inheritance, and desperation, the author of Flesh and Blood offers a fictional account of Virginia Woolf’s last days and her friendship with a poet living in his mother’s shadow.
Untamed / by Glennon Doyle An activist, speaker and philanthropist offers a memoir wrapped in a wake-up call that reveals how women can reclaim their true, untamed selves by breaking free of the restrictive expectations and cultural conditioning that leaves them feeling dissatisfied and lost.
Middlesex / by Jeffrey Eugenides Calliope’s friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents’ desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
The Prophets / by Robert Jones Jr. A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
Her Body and Other Parties / by Carmen Maria Machado Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.She bends genres to shape startling stories that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
The Great Believers / by Rebecca Makkai A novel set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris follows the director of a Chicago art gallery and a woman looking for her estranged daughter in Paris who both struggle to come to terms with the ways AIDS has affected their lives.
All My Mother’s Lovers / by Illana Masad Shattered by revelations about the recently deceased mother who never entirely accepted her sexuality, a gay woman tracks down the men in her mother’s hidden second life while coming to terms with new understandings about monogamy.
Tales of the City / by Armistead Maupin A naive young secretary forsakes Cleveland for San Francisco, tumbling headlong into a brave new world of laundromat lotharios and cutthroat debutantes.
Red, White, and Royal Blue / by Casey McQuistonA big-hearted romantic comedy in which the First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales after an incident of international proportions forces them to pretend to be best friends.
Outlawed / by Anna North Forced to flee from a community that hangs barren women as witches, 17-year-old Ada joins a gang of outlaws under a charismatic former preacher who hatches a treacherous plan that risks all of their lives.
Confessions of the Fox / by Jordy Rosenberg Discovering a mysterious manuscript from the 18th century, a recently jilted academic uncovers the story of the London underworld’s most notorious thief, escaped convict and lover, in a bold reimagining of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
Real Life / by Brandon Taylor Keeping his head down at a lakeside Midwestern university where the culture is in sharp contrast to his Alabama upbringing, an introverted African-American biochem student endures unexpected encounters that bring his orientation and defenses into question.
The Knockout Queen / by Rufi Thorpe In a novel of love, violence and friendship in the California suburbs, privileged teen Bunny Lampert befriends in-the-closet rebel Michael, who lives on the other side of the tracks.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous / by Ocean Vuong A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read reveals the impact of the Vietnam War on their family history and provides a view into parts of the son’s life that his mother has never known.
Lot / by Bryan Washington Coming of age in his family’s Houston restaurant, a mixed-heritage teen navigates bullying, his newly discovered sexual orientation and the ripple effects of a disadvantaged community impacted by an affair, a youth baseball season and displaced hurricane survivors.
The Paying Guests / by Sarah Waters It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
The Stonewall Reader / by Edmund White A collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines, and newspapers chronicling the years leading up to and the years following the Stonewall uprising.A Little Life / by Hanya Yanagihara Moving to New York to pursue creative ambitions, four former classmates share decades marked by love, loss, addiction, and haunting elements from a brutal childhood.
America Is Not the Heart / by Elaine Castillo Hero De Vera arrives in the United States from the Philippines to stay with her uncle Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a promise not to ask about her past during the violent political history of their home country.
Yolk / by Mary H.K. Choi Struggling with emotional problems and an eating disorder, Jayne, a Korean American college student living in New York City, is estranged from her accomplished older sister June, until June gets cancer.
The Night Tiger / by Yangsze Choo A vivacious dance-hall girl in 1930s colonial Malaysia is drawn into unexpected danger by the discovery of a severed finger that is being sought by a young houseboy in order to protect his late master’s soul.
All You Can Ever Know / by Nicole Chung A Korean adoptee who grew up with a white family in Oregon discusses her journey to find her identity as an Asian American woman and a writer after becoming curious about her true origins.
The Vegetarian / by Kang Han Deciding to renounce eating meat in the wake of violent dreams, Yeong-hye, a woman from a culture of strict societal mores, is denounced as a subversive as she spirals into extreme rebelliousness that causes her to splinter from her true nature and risk her life.
The Kiss Quotient / by Helen Hoang When mathematician Stella Lane decides to improve her love life, she hires Michael Phan, an escort, to help her gain knowledge and experience in dating.
Goodbye, Vitamin / by Rachel Khong Struggling with disillusionment in the aftermath of a broken engagement, Ruth moves back home with her parents to discover that her professor father’s erratic memory loss and her mother’s eccentricity are manifesting in near-comical ways that help Ruth transform her grief.
Crazy Rich Asians / by Kevin Kwan Envisioning a summer vacation in the humble Singapore home of a boy she hopes to marry, Chinese American Rachel Chu is unexpectedly introduced to a rich and scheming clan that strongly opposes their son’s relationship with an American girl.
The Leavers / by Lisa Ko When his undocumented immigrant mother disappears, eleven-year-old Deming Guo is adopted by a family that attempts to make him over as an American teen while he struggles to reconcile his new life with memories of the family he left behind.
The Incendiaries / by R.O. Kwan A young Korean-American woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea and then disappears, leading a fellow student into an obsessive search for her.
The Making of Asian America / by Erika Lee Describes the lasting impact and contributions Asian immigrants have had on America, beginning with sailors who crossed the Pacific in the 16th century, through the ordeal of internment during World War II and to their current status as “model minorities.”
Pachinko / by Min Jin Lee In early 1900s Korea, prized daughter Sunja finds herself pregnant and alone, bringing shame on her family until a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and move with her to Japan, in the saga of one family bound together as their faith and identity are called into question.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls / by T Kira Madden An acclaimed literary essayist presents this raw and redemptive debut memoir about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager in Boca Raton, Florida, where she, the only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, found loving friendships with fatherless girls.
Know My Name / Chanel Miller She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral–viewed by almost eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case.
A Place for Us / by Fatima Farheen Mirza As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best?
Little Fires Everywhere / by Celeste Ng When a custody battle divides her placid town, straitlaced family woman Elena Richardson finds herself pitted against her enigmatic tenant and becomes obsessed with exposing her past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both families.
The Sympathizer / by Viet Thanh Nguyen Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.
The Joy Luck Club / by Amy Tan Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughters’ memories and feelings.
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion / by Jia Tolentino A New Yorker writer presents nine original essays examining the fractures at the center of culture today, offering insights into the conflicts, contradictions, incentives and changes related to the rise of toxic social networking.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel / by Ocean Vuong A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read reveals the impact of the Vietnam War on their family history and provides a view into parts of the son’s life that his mother has never known.
The Collected Schizophrenias / by Esmé Weijun Wang Using examples from her own diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, the author discusses some of the misconceptions about the illness, the disagreements within the medical community, and her experiences of the dangers of institutionalization and mistreatment.
Crying in H Mart / by Michelle Zauner The Japanese Breakfast indie pop star presents a full-length account of her viral New Yorker essay to share poignant reflections on her experiences of growing up Korean-American, becoming a professional musician and caring for her terminally ill mother.
Sour Heart / by Jenny Zhang A debut collection of stories that plunge readers into the tender and chaotic hearts of adolescent girls growing up in New York City, from celebrated poet and National Magazine Award nominee Jenny Zhang.
Combines ethics, history, law, and science with a personal narrative to describe how to move beyond the awareness of racism and contribute to making society just and equitable.
In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences.
Coates takes readers along on his journey through America’s history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings–moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago’s South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America’s ‘long war on black people,’ or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.
Noah tells his coming of age story with his larger-than-life mother during the last gasps of apartheid-era South Africa. Noah was born illegal–the son of a white, Dutch father and a black Xhosa mother, who had to pretend to be his nanny or his father’s servant in the brief moments when the family came together.
A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests.
A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today’s racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide.
Du Bois dares as no one has before to describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it. He draws on his own life for illustration, from his early experiences teaching in the hills of Tennessee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
A timeless love story set in early 1970s Harlem involving newly engaged nineteen-year- old Tish and her fiancé Fonny who have a beautiful future ahead. But their plans are derailed when Fonny is arrested for a crime he did not commit. Now the pair and their families must fight for justice in the name of love and the promise of the American dream.
Master documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and a flood of rich archival material. A journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historical struggle to secure voting rights for all people. A dangerous and terrifying campaign that culminated with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1964.
Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Now, facing pressures from all sides of the community, Starr tries to find her voice in order to stand up for what’s right.
A sharp and funny comedy about a group of African-American students as they navigate campus life and racial boundaries at a predominately white college. A sly, provocative satire about being a black face in a white place.
Slavery by Another Name M-H
Slavery By Another Name challenges one of America’s most cherished assumptions – the belief that slavery in the US ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – by telling the harrowing story of how in the South, a new system of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force.
King: Man of Peace in a Time of War M-H
A rare and candid TV interview with Martin Luther King – unseen in 40 years – is the centerpiece of this timely tribute, featuring exclusive interviews with such notables as Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell that provide fresh insight into the life and personality of the late civil rights leader.
Based on the true story of Solomon Northup. It is 1841, and Northup, an accomplished, free citizen of New York, is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Stripped of his identity and deprived of all dignity, Northup is ultimately purchased by ruthless plantation owner Edwin Epps and must find the strength within to survive. Filled with powerful performances by an astonishing cast, 12 Years a Slave is both an unflinching account of slavery in American history and a celebration of the indomitable power of hope.
Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado, successfully managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan and became the head of the local chapter.
An artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of the acclaimed novelist. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to ’70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics, and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition as seen through the prism of her own literature.
As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes.
The dramatized story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia who married in 1958 at a time when interracial marriage was not only considered to be immoral but was also illegal. The two are arrested, and they decide to take their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to fight for their love.
History was made in 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the professional baseball race barrier to become the first black MLB player of the modern era. 42 tells the life story of Robinson and his history-making signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers under the guidance of team executive Branch Rickey.
Chronicles the journey of Professor Melvin Tolson, a debate team coach who turns a group of underdog students from a small African-American college into a historically elite debate team. Inspired by a true story.
Based on the thrilling and inspirational life of an iconic American freedom fighter, the movie tells the extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes. Her courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.
Just Mercy DVD + Blu Ray A powerful and thought-provoking true story follows young lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan had his pick of lucrative jobs. Instead, he heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or who were not afforded proper representation, with the support of local advocate Eva Ansley. One of his first and most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian.
Black Enough: stories of being young & black in America A, E, P
Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more–because there are countless way to be Black enough. Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and featuring some of the most acclaimed, bestselling Black authors writing for teens today, this is an essential collection of captivating coming-of-age stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America.
A Phoenix First Must Burn: sixteen stories of black girl magic, resistance and hope / edited by Patrice Caldwell A, E, P
Black girls, including gender non-conforming individuals, star in this collection of sixteen stories of fantasy, science fiction, and magic.
Tyler Johnson was Here / Jay Coles A, E, P
When Marvin Johnson’s twin brother, Tyler, is shot and killed by a police office, Marvin must fight injustice to learn the true meaning of freedom.
Pet / Akwaeke Emezi A, E, P
In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam’s mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.
Bright Lights, Dark Nights / Stephen Emond E, P
Walter Wilcox’s first love, Naomi, happens to be African American, so when Walter’s policeman father is caught in a racial profiling scandal, the teens’ bond and mutual love of the Foo Fighters may not be enough to keep them together through the pressures they face at school, at home, and online.
Bone by Bone by Bone / Tony Johnston P
In 1950s Tennessee, ten-year-old David’s racist father refuses to let him associate with his best friend Malcolm, an African American boy.
I’m not Dying With you Tonight / Kimberly Jones A, E, P
Told from two viewpoints, Atlanta high school seniors Lena and Campbell, one black, one white, must rely on each other to survive after a football rivalry escalates into a riot.
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: a graphic history of women’s fights for their rights / Mikki Kendall E, P
Covering the key figures and events that have advanced women’s rights from antiquity to the modern era, this fascinating graphic novel-style primer illuminates stories of notable women throughout history and the progressive movements led by women that have shaped history.
Light it up / Kekla Magoon E, P
Told from multiple viewpoints, Shae Tatum, an unarmed, thirteen-year-old black girl, is shot by a white police officer, throwing their community into upheaval and making it a target of demonstrators.
All American Boys / Jason Reynolds, Brendan Kiely A, E, P
When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. Told through Rashad and Quinn’s alternating viewpoints.
Stamped: racism, antiracism, and you / a remix of the National Book Award-winning “Stamped from the beginning” written by Jason Reynolds E, P
A history of racist and antiracist ideas in America, from their roots in Europe until today, adapted from the National Book Award winner Stampedfrom the Beginning
Just Mercy: adapted for young adults: a true story of the fight for justice / Bryan Stevenson. P
Bryan Stevenson recounts many and varied stories of his work as a lawyer in the U.S. criminal justice system on behalf of those in society who have experienced some type of discrimination and/or have been wrongly accused of a crime and who deserve a powerful advocate and due justice under the law.
Dear Martin / Nic Stone A, E, P
Writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., seventeen-year-old college-bound Justyce McAllister struggles to face the reality of race relations today and how they are shaping him.
Lies we Tell Ourselves / Robin Talley P
In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent’s daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.
The Hate U give / Angie Thomas A, E, P After witnessing her friend’s death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter’s life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died.
On the Come up / Angie Thomas A, E, P
Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least win her first battle. As the daughter of an underground hip-hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri’s got massive shoes to fill. But it’s hard to get your come up when you’re labeled a hoodlum at school and your fridge at home is empty after your mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral—for all the wrong reasons. Bri soon finds herself at the center of a controversy, portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. But with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri doesn’t just want to make it—she has to. Even if it means becoming the very thing the public made her out to be.
Black and White / Paul Volponi P
Two star high school basketball players, one black and one white, experience the justice system differently after committing a crime together and getting caught.
Black Boy / White School / Brian F. Walker E, P
When fourteen-year-old Anthony “Ant” Jones from the ghetto of East Cleveland, Ohio, gets a scholarship to a prep school in Maine, he finds that he must change his image and adapt to a world that never fully accepts him, but when he goes home he discovers that he no longer truly belongs there either.
The Robber Bride / by Margaret Atwood Set in contemporary Toronto, The Robber Bride revolves around the lives of three fascinating women. Classmates from university, Roz, Charis, and Tony all shared the seductive and destructive experience of a past friendship with the flashy, sensuous, smart, irresisible Zenia. As the novel opens they are twenty years past their college days and have met at Zenia’s funeral. At lunch, after the funeral, they spot Zenia – not dead at all and up to no good.
Jaws / by Peter BenchleyAs a great white shark terrorizes a small Long Island town, marine biologist Matt Hooper and Police Chief Martin Brody must find a way to stop the shark before more people are killed.
Jane Eyre / by Charlotte Brontë Orphaned Jane Eyre endures an unhappy childhood, hated by her aunt and cousins and then sent to comfortless Lowood School. But life there improves and Jane stays on as a teacher, though she still longs for love and friendship. At Mr. Rochester’s house, where she goes to work as a governess, she hopes she might have found them.
The Witches / by Roald Dahl A throwback for adults – A young boy and his Norwegian grandmother, who is an expert on witches, together foil a witch’s plot to destroy the world’s children by turning them into mice.
David Copperfield / by Charles Dickens A young orphan deals with hardship in his early life at a boarding school and living with a controlling aunt, until he finds friendship and love as he pursues his ambition of being a writer.
Rebecca / by Daphne du MaurierA classic novel of romantic suspense finds the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter entering the home of her mysterious and enigmatic new husband and learning the story of the house’s first mistress, to whom the sinister housekeeper is unnaturally devoted.
Geek Love / by Katherine DunnOlympia, an albino hunchback dwarf, tells of a carnival family who breeds and trains their children for their freak show.
American Psycho / by Bret Easton EllisIn a black satire of the eighties, a decade of naked greed and unparalleled callousness, a successful Wall Street yuppie cannot get enough of anything – including murder.
Red Dragon / by Thomas HarrisWill Graham’s unusual, fearful ability to project himself into the minds of psychopaths puts him on the trail of Francis Dolorhyde, whose bizarre and bloody murders of two suburban families have been triggered by his viewing of a William Blake watercolor
The Talented Mr. Ripley / by Patricia HighsmithIn order to convince his son to come home, Herbert Greenleaf, a rich shipbuilder, sends Tom Ripley to Italy, but is unaware of his son’s friend’s criminal activities.
The Children of Men / by P. D. James In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest / by Ken KeseyMcMurphy, a criminal who feigns insanity, is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse.
Misery / by Stephen KingPaul Sheldon, author of a series of historical romances, wakes up in a secluded farmhouse in Colorado with broken legs and Annie Wilkes, a disappointed fan, hovering over him with drugs, ax, and blowtorch and demanding he bring his heroine back to life.
Lolita / by Vladimir Nabokov A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him.
1984 / by George Orwell Portrays a terrifying vision of life in the future when a totalitarian government, considered a “Negative Utopia,” watches over all citizens and directs all activities, becoming more powerful as time goes by.
Frankenstein / by Mary Shelley Tells the story of a scientist who discovers the secret of generating life from lifeless matter, and puts this knowledge to use by creating a monster being.
East of Eden / by John Steinbeck This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California’s Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families–the Trasks and the Hamiltons–whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / by Robert Louis Stevenson Good and kind Dr. Jekyll concocts a formula to eradicate his evil nature but the result is a physical transformation into a murderous alter ego known as Mr. Hyde. This sinister side of his personality starts to take over his life and the chemical antidote Jekyll uses to switch personalities gradually becomes less effective.
The Secret History / by Donna Tartt Richard Papen, a relatively impoverished student at a New England college, falls in with an exclusive clique of rich, worldly Greek scholars and soon learns the dreadful secret that keeps them together.
Vanity Fair / by William Makepeace Thackeray Two heroines–one humble, the other scheming–meet in boarding school and embark on very different lives, both experiencing affairs of love and war and the rise and fall of fortune, in a classic study of the dogged pursuit of wealth and status.The Picture of Dorian Gray / by Oscar Wilde The handsome appearance of dissolute young Dorian Gray remains unchanged while the features in his portrait become distorted as his degeneration progresses.
Red Comet / by Heather Clark Focuses on Sylvia Plath’s remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
Marie Antoinette / by Antonia Fraser Describes the life of Marie Antionette from her betrothal as a fourteen-year-old girl to the future King Louis XVI, through her life in the French court, to her courage in the face of revolutionaries who sent her to the guillotine.
My Own Words / by Ruth Bader GinsbergOffers a collection of engaging, serious, and playful writings and speeches from the Supreme Court justice on topics ranging from gender equality and the workings of the Court to Judaism and the value of looking beyond U.S. shores when interpreting the Constitution.
The Truths We Hold / by Kamala Harris The civil rights leader, senator, and former attorney general of California draws on the lessons of her activist immigrant family to make recommendations for the universal issues of today, including economic inequality, health care, and national security.
Rise of the Rocket Girls / by Nathalia Holt Traces the pivotal achievements of the elite female science recruits at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where in the mid-twentieth century they transformed rocket design and enabled the creation of the first American satellites.
Catherine the Great / by Robert Massie Presents a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century empress’s life that covers her efforts to engage Russia in the cultural life of Europe, her creation of the Hermitage, and her numerous scandal-free romantic affairs.
Know My Name / by Chanel Miller She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. He had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral–viewed by almost eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case. Thousands wrote to say that she had given them the courage to share their own experiences of assault for the first time. Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.
Code Girls / by Liza Mundy Documents the pivotal contributions of more than 10,000 American women who served as codebreakers during World War II, detailing how their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives and enabled their subsequent careers, in an account that also reveals the strict practice of secrecy that nearly erased their efforts from history.
Reading Lolita in Tehran / by Azar Nafisi Describes growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the group of young women who came together at her home in secret every Thursday to read and discuss great books of Western literature.
Becoming / by Michelle ObamaAn intimate memoir by the former First Lady chronicles the experiences that have shaped her remarkable life, from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago through her setbacks and achievements in the White House.
Fly Girls / by Keith O’Brien The untold story of five women, including Amelia Earhart, who successfully fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s.
D-Day Girls / by Sarah RoseThe award-winning author of For All the Tea in China documents the lesser-known story of the extraordinary women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to sabotage the Nazis and help pave the way for Allied victory during World War II.
Cleopatra / by Stacy SchiffSeparates fact from fiction to reconstruct the life of the most influential woman of her era, revealing Cleopatra as a complex woman and shrewd monarch whose life and death reshaped the ancient world.
Hidden Figures / by Margot Lee ShetterlyAn account of the previously unheralded but pivotal contributions of NASA’s African-American women mathematicians to America’s space program describes how they were segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws in spite of their groundbreaking successes.
My Beloved World / by Sonia Sotomayor The first Hispanic-American on the U.S. Supreme Court shares the story of her life before becoming a judge, describing such experiences as her youth in a Bronx housing project, her relationship with a passionately spiritual grandparent, the ambition that fueled her ivy-league education and the individuals who helped shaped her career.
Behind Every Great Man / by Marlene Wagman-GellerDetails the lives of forty women who stood behind their famous husbands and supported them, including such figures as Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and Malcolm X.
I Am Malala / by Malala Yousafzai Describes the life of the young Pakistani student who advocated for women’s rights and education in the Taliban-controlled Swat Valley, survived an assassination attempt, and became the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Celebrate Black History Month by reading about the varied creative expressions of the black experience.
Americanah / by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieA young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected.
The New Jim Crow / by Michelle Alexander Argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race.
The Fire Next Time / by James Baldwin The powerful evocation of a childhood in Harlem that helped to galvanize the early days of the civil rights movement examines the deep consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic.
The Vanishing Half / by Britt Bennett Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
Between the World and Me / by Ta-Nehisi CoatesTold through the author’s own evolving understanding of the subject over the course of his life comes a bold and personal investigation into America’s racial history and its contemporaryechoes.
The Invisible Man / by Ralph Ellison A Black man’s search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
Homegoing / by Yaa Gyassi Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations.
Sula / by Toni MorrisonThe intense friendship shared by two African American women raised in an Ohio town changes when one of them leaves to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.
How We Fight for Our Lives / by Saeed JonesThe co-host of BuzzFeed’s AM to DM, award-winning poet and author of Prelude to Bruise documents his coming-of-age as a young, gay, black man in an American South at a crossroads of sex, race and power.
An American Marriage / by Tayari Jones Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control.
Such a Fun Age / by Kiley ReidSeeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections.
The Color Purple / by Alice Walker The story of the lives of two sisters–Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates–are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years
Sing Unburied Sing / by Jesmyn Ward Living with his grandparents and sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his mother’s addictions and his grandmother’s cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
Lot: Stories / by Brian Washington Coming of age in his family’s Houston restaurant, a mixed-heritage teen navigates bullying, his newly discovered sexual orientation and the ripple effects of a disadvantaged community impacted by an affair, a youth baseball season and displaced hurricane survivors.
The Underground Railroad / by Colson WhiteheadAfter Cora, a slave in pre-Civil War Georgia, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South.
The Warmth of Other Suns / by Isabel WilkersonAn epic history covering the period from the end of World War I through the 1970s chronicles the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West through the stories of three individuals and their families.
These celebrity book club picks are the perfect compelling reads!
Stay with Me / by Ayobami AdebayoSecure in the love of her husband in spite of pressure for him to have a polygamous marriage, Yejide is overwhelmed by shock and pain when her inability to become pregnant compels her husband to take a second wife, sending her on a desperate quest to conceive a child. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Leave the World Behind / by Rumaan Alam Sheltering in a New York beach house with a couple that has taken refuge during a massive blackout, a family struggles for information about the power failure while wondering if the cut-off property is actually safe. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Whisper Network / by Chandler Baker Follows four women who speak out when their ill-reputed boss is slated to become CEO, a decision that triggers catastrophic shifts throughout every department of their company. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Immortalists / by Chloe Benjamin Sneaking out to get readings from a traveling psychic reputed to be able to tell customers when they will die, four adolescent siblings from New York City’s 1969 Lower East Side hide what they learn from each other before embarking on five decades of respective experiences shaped by their determination to control fate. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Vanishing Half / by Britt BennettSeparated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Dead Girls / by Alice BolinA collection of sharp, poignant essays that expertly blends the personal and political in an exploration of American culture through the lens of our obsession with dead women. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Braving the Wilderness / by Brene BrownThe influential TED speaker and best-selling author of The Gifts of Imperfection draws on new research to challenge conventional beliefs about fitting in to counsel readers on the skills required to achieve actual belonging while being true to oneself. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
I’m Still Here / by Austin Channing Brown From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Marlena / by Julie Buntin Struggling to adapt to a new home in rural Michigan, fifteen-year-old Cat bonds with a pill-popping, manic young neighbor with whom she renders their desolate community into a kind of playground until suffering a tragedy that she confronts decades later. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Night Tiger / by Yangsze ChooA vivacious dance-hall girl in 1930s colonial Malaysia is drawn into unexpected danger by the discovery of a severed finger that is being sought by a young houseboy in order to protect his late master’s soul. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Next Year in Havana / by Chanel Cleeton A freelance writer returns to her grandmother’s homeland to fulfill her last wish to have her ashes scattered in Havana and discovers her family history amidst Cuba’s tropical beauty and dangerous political environment. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Water Dancer / by Ta-Nehisi Coates A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. An Oprah’s book club pick.
The Last Romantics / by Tara Conklin When she is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, renowned poet Fiona Skinner recounts the summer her family spent in a middle-class Connecticut town. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Last Mrs. Parrish / by Liv Constantine A coolly manipulative woman worms her way into the lives of a wealthy golden couple from Connecticut as part of her plot to achieve a privileged life, unveiling dark secrets along the way. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
American Dirt / by Jeanine CumminsSelling two favorite books to an unexpectedly erudite drug-cartel boss, a bookstore manager is forced to flee Mexico in the wake of her journalist husband’s tell-all profile and finds her family among thousands of migrants seeking hope in America. An Oprah’s book club pick.
Everything Inside / by Edwidge Danticat A collection of short stories set in such locales as Miami, Port-au-Prince, and the Caribbean explores the forces that unite and divide. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Girl with the Louding Voice / by Abi DareAdunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who longs for an education, must find a way for her voice to be heard loud and clear in a world where she and other girls like her are taught to believe, through words and deeds, that they are nothing. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Patsy / by Nicole Dennis-Benn Receiving her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best friend had described. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
South and West / by Joan Didion Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author’s literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative “Rolling Stone” assignment. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Untamed / by Glennon Doyle An activist, speaker and philanthropist offers a memoir wrapped in a wake-up call that reveals how women can reclaim their true, untamed selves by breaking free of the restrictive expectations and cultural conditioning that leaves them feeling dissatisfied and lost. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
This Is How It Always Is / by Laurie FrankeA family reshapes their ideas about family, love and loyalty when youngest son Claude reveals increasingly determined preferences for girls’ clothing and accessories and refuses to stay silent. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Guest List / by Lucy Foley An expertly planned celebrity wedding between a rising television star and an ambitious magazine publisher is thrown into turmoil by petty jealousies, a college drinking game, the bride’s ruined dress, and an untimely murder. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Laura & Emma / by Kate Greathead Conceiving a child during a weekend fling, a 30-something product of progressive Manhattan old money raises her daughter in the same blue-blood world of her own upbringing before her daughter begins to question their environment in ways she never could herself. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Proposal / by Jasmine Guillory After a handsome doctor helps Nikole escape a ridiculous, public proposal, she starts having a series of hookups with him, but when things begin to get out of hand, one of them has to put the brakes on things. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Transcendent Kingdom / by Yaa GyasiA novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a sixth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Happiness / by Heather HarphamA California girl with wanderlust whose opposites-attract relationship with a homebody writer was significantly compromised by an unplanned pregnancy describes how their baby’s serious health disorder prompted the couple to reevaluate their views of family and what they were willing to risk for their child’s health. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Rules of Magic / by Alice Hoffman A prequel to the best-selling Practical Magic traces the story of the children of Susanna Owens, who, in spite of their mother’s fierce edicts against witchcraft, develop powerful abilities while struggling to escape the family curse that leads to tragedy if they fall in love. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Evvie Drake Stars Over/ by Linda HolmesYoung widow Evvie Drake and major league pitcher Dean Tenney, who has lost his game and needs a chance to reset his life, form an unlikely relationship when Dean moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine / by Gail Honeyman A socially awkward, routine-oriented loner teams up with a bumbling IT guy from her office to assist an elderly accident victim, forging a friendship that saves all three from lives of isolation and secret unhappiness. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Still Lives / by Maria HummelA young editor at a Los Angeles art museum is pulled into the disturbing and dangerous world of a famous artist who goes missing on the opening night of her exhibition. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The End We Start From / by Megan HunterIn an alternate-world modern London submerged below flood waters, a woman who has just given birth to her first child is forced to flee her home with her baby to seek refuge in a variety of locations while the baby thrives against all odds. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Other Woman / by Sandie JonesA blissful romance between Adam and Emily is challenged by Adam’s manipulative mother, who resorts to dire measures to keep all other women out of her son’s life. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
An American Marriage / by Tayari Jones Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) and Oprah’s book club pick.
Writers and Lovers / by Lily King The story of a former child golf prodigy-turned-unemployed writer whose determination to live a creative life is complicated by her relationships with two very different men. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Incendiaries / by R.O. KwanA young Korean-American woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea and then disappears, leading a fellow student into an obsessive search for her. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Searching for Sylvie Lee / by Jean KwokA poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women — two sisters and their mother — in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) and Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Answers / by Catherine Lacy A formerly paralyzed woman applies for a job on Craigslist to be the “Emotional Girlfriend” of an eccentric and narcissistic actor desperate to find the perfect relationship. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Godspeed / by Casey LeglerA coming-of-age memoir by a former Olympic swimmer describes the crippling loneliness that marked her athletic childhood and her struggles with addiction and self-destructiveness prior to her diagnosis with autism. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Luster / by Raven LeilaniA young black artist falls into an affair with a man in an open marriage before gradually befriending his wife and adopted daughter against a backdrop of dynamic racial politics. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Rules Do Not Apply / by Ariel LevyA “New Yorker” staff writer shares a hopeful memoir of her own experiences with devastating loss to council fellow survivors about the healing aspects of accepting difficult life challenges that are beyond one’s control. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
From Scratch / by Tembi Locke An African-American actress recounts her romance with a Sicilian chef whose traditional family disapproved of their marriage and how she sought solace in their close-knit community after his death. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Her Body and Other Stories / by Carmen Maria Machado Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. She bends genres to shape startling stories that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
A Burning / by Megha Majumdar An opportunistic gym teacher and a starry-eyed misfit find the realization of their ambitions tied to the downfall of an innocent Muslim girl who has been wrongly implicated in a terrorist attack. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Touch / by Courtney Maum A trend forecaster hired by a leading tech company suddenly finds herself in the position of wanting to overturn her own predictions when she senses the beginning of a movement against electronics in favor of compassion, empathy, and “in-personism.” An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
Behold the Dreamers / by Imbolo MbueIn the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Their situation only improves when Jende’s wife Neni is hired as household help. But in the course of their work, Jende and Neni begin to witness infidelities, skirmishes, and family secrets. Then, with the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, a tragedy changes all four lives forever, and the Jongas must decide whether to continue fighting to stay in a recession-ravaged America or give up and return home to Cameroon. An Oprah’s book club pick.
Deacon King Kong / by James McBrideIn the aftermath of a 1969 Brooklyn church deacon’s public shooting of a local drug dealer, the community’s African-American and Latinx witnesses find unexpected support from each other when they are targeted by violent mobsters. An Oprah’s book club pick.
His Only Wife / by Peace Adzo Medie An intelligent and funny debut about a relatable, indomitable heroine: a young seamstress in Ghana who agrees to an arranged marriage, only to realize that some compromises are too extreme to accept, illuminating what it means to be a woman in a rapidly changing world. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Conviction / by Denise Mina An upper-class Edinburgh housewife who enjoys listening to the sordid details of true-crime podcasts has her world turned upside down when a new podcast turns out to have connections to her own dark past. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Last House Guest / by Megan Miranda When her longtime best friend is found murdered, Avery Greer combs through her idyllic Maine tourist community to uncover local secrets and clear her name of suspicion. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Giver of Stars / by Jojo Moyes Volunteering for Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library in small-town Kentucky, an English bride joins a group of independent women whose commitment to their job transforms the community and their relationships. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Dear Edward / by Ann Napolitano A 12-year-old lone survivor of a plane crash investigates the stories of his less-fortunate fellow passengers before making a profound discovery about his life purpose in the face of transcendent losses. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Little Fires Everywhere / by Celeste Ng Fighting an ugly custody battle with an artistic tenant who has little regard for the strict rules of their progressive Cleveland suburb, a straitlaced family woman who is seeking to adopt a baby becomes obsessed with exposing the tenant’s past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both of their families. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Becoming / by Michelle Obama An intimate memoir by the former First Lady chronicles the experiences that have shaped her remarkable life, from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago through her setbacks and achievements in the White House. An Oprah’s book club pick.
Welcome to Lagos / by Chibundu Onuzo Resolving to abandon his post when he is ordered to kill innocent civilians, Nigerian army officer Chike Ameobi becomes the leader of a band of runaway rebels, each of whom imparts the difficult and remarkable experiences that drove them to seek better lives. An Emma Roberts (Belletrist) book club pick.
The Library Book / by Susan OrleanReopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, the 1986 Los Angeles Public Library fire, while exploring the crucial role that libraries play in modern American culture. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Where the Crawdads Sing / by Delia OwensViewed with suspicion in the aftermath of a murder, Kya Clark, who has survived alone for years in a marsh near the North Carolina coast, becomes targeted by unthinkable forces. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Dutch House / by Ann Patchett A tale set over the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia estate. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage / by Ann Patchett Inviting readers into her personal life, the New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto shares the stories of the people, places, ideals and art to which she has remained indelibly committed. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Secrets We Kept / by Lara Prescott A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice–inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Alice Network / by Kate Quinn When pregnant American student Charlie St. Clair is banished to Europe by her family to have her baby, she takes the opportunity to head for London to find her missing French cousin and teams up with Eve, a former spy from the Alice Network, to solve the mystery. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Such a Fun Age / by Kiley ReidSeeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Daisy Jones & the Six / by Taylor Jenkins Reid Two rising 70s rock-and-roll artists are catapulted into stardom when a producer puts them together, a decision that is complicated by a pregnancy and the seductions of fame. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Fair Play / by Eve Rodsky A first book by the founder of the Philanthropy Advisory Group and expert consultant for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine project outlines revolutionary, real-world solutions to the equal distribution of unpaid and unrecognized domestic labor typically performed by women. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
A Woman is No Man / by Etaf Rum Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy, and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Light We Lost / by Jill Santopolo Lucy and Gabe, two Columbia University students who meet as seniors, decide they want their lives to mean something, launching a thirteen-year journey of dreams, betrayals, and love that brings Lucy to a point where she must make a life-altering choice. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
One Day in December / by Josie SilverLaurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…and then her bus drives away. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
You Think It, I’ll Say It / by Curtis SittenfeldPresents a collection of ten short stories that feature both new and previously published pieces, including “The World Has Many Butterflies,” in which married acquaintances play an intimate game, with devastating consequences. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
Something in the Water / by Catherine SteadmanA successful banker and a rising filmmaker embark on a blissful paradise honeymoon in Bora Bora, where the discovery of a mysterious bag of riches triggers a sequence of events that indelibly marks their marriage and lives. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
All Adults Here / by Emma Straub A matriarch confronts the legacy of her parenting mistakes while her adult children navigate respective challenges in high standards and immaturity, before a teen granddaughter makes a courageous decision to tell the truth. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Dearly Beloved / by Cara Wall Set in the years 1950-1970 in a changing America and London, follow[s] two married couples – ministers and academics – whose intricate bonds of faith and friendship, jealousy and understanding, are tested by the birth of an autistic child. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Jetsetters / by Amanda Eyre Ward Winning the grand prize in an essay contest, a single mother reunites her estranged adult children on a 10-day cruise while confronting long-buried secrets from their dysfunctional shared past. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Lying Game / by Ruth WareIn the wake of a woman’s discovery of human remains, the members of a once-inseparable clique from a boarding school reflect on their participation in a dangerous game of deception that contributed to the death of a teacher. A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine book club pick.
The Underground Railroad / by Colson WhiteheadAfter Cora, a slave in pre-Civil War Georgia, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South. An Oprah’s book club pick.
Caste / by Isabel WilkersonThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns identifies the qualifying characteristics of historical caste systems to reveal how a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, enforced by religious views, heritage and stigma, impact everyday American lives. An Oprah’s book club pick.
Nothing to See Here / by Kevin WilsonAgreeing to help her former college roommate care for two stepchildren who possess the ability to spontaneously combust when agitated, Lillian endeavors to keep her young charges cool in the face of an astonishing revelation. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
The Unwinding of the Miracle / by Julie Yip-Williams An unconventional memoir by a young mother with Stage IV metastatic cancer describes her experiences as a blind Vietnamese political refugee-turned-Harvard-educated lawyer before terminal illness inspired her blog to share the real-world guidance she wished she had. A Read with Jenna book club pick.
Were you left bored after binging an entire series? Try one of these book pairings to fill the void!
If you liked The Big Bang Theory, try reading The Rosie Project
The Rosie Project / by Graeme Simsion Don Tillman, a profesor of genetics, sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along. Then he meets Rosie, who is everything he’s not looking for in a wife, but she ends up his friend as he helps her try and find her biological father.
If you liked The Boys, try reading Hench
Hench / by Natalie Zina Walschots A novel of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption follows a young woman as she discovers that the greatest superpower–for good or evil–is a properly executed spreadsheet.
If you liked Dublin Murders, try reading Bent Road
Bent Road / by Lori Roy Celia Scott and her family move back to her husband’s hometown in Kansas, where his sister died under mysterious circumstances twenty years before and where Celia and two of her children struggle to adjust–especially when a local girl disappears.
Did you also know the show was based on a series of books? In the Woods (book 1 of the Dublin Murder Squad Series) / by Tana French Twenty years after witnessing the violent disappearances of two companions from their small Dublin suburb, detective Rob Ryan investigates a chillingly similar murder that takes place in the same wooded area, a case that forces him to piece together his traumatic memories.
If you liked Emily in Paris, try reading Sex and the City
Sex and the City / by Candace Bushnell A columnist’s examination of the celebrity affairs and sexual liaisons indulged in by the members of the cultural elite is seen through the experiences of a troubled writer, a mega-businessman, a famous underwear model, and others.
If you liked The Haunting of Bly Manor, try reading The Turn of the Key
The Turn of the Key / by Ruth WareWhen a high-paying nanny job at a luxurious Scottish Highlands home culminates in her imprisonment for a child’s murder, a young woman struggles to untangle what really happened.
Did you also know the show was based on a book? The Turn of the Screw / by Henry James The classic ghost story about a high-strung governess and the two young children who may, or may not, be plotting with the diabolical Peter Quint.
If you liked The Haunting of Hill House, try reading Home before Dark
Home Before Dark / by Riley Sager Twenty-five years after her father published a wildly popular nonfiction book based on her family’s rushed exit from a haunted Victorian estate, naysayer Maggie inherits the house and begins renovations, only to make a number of disturbing discoveries.
Did you also know the show was based on a book? The Haunting of Hill House / by Shirley JacksonWhen four seekers arrive at a notorious old mansion, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena, but Hill House is gathering its powers and will soon choose one of them to make its own.
If you liked The Half of It, try reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous / by Ocean Vuong A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read reveals the impact of the Vietnam War on their family history and provides a view into parts of the son’s life that his mother has never known.
If you liked The Last Dance, try reading Basketball: Great Writing about America’s Game
If you liked Little Fires Everywhere, try reading Such a Fun Age
Such a Fun Age / by Kiley Reid Seeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections.
Did you also know that the show was based on a book? Little Fires Everywhere / by Celeste Ng Fighting an ugly custody battle with an artistic tenant who has little regard for the strict rules of their progressive Cleveland suburb, a straitlaced family woman who is seeking to adopt a baby becomes obsessed with exposing the tenant’s past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both of their families.
If you liked The Lovebirds, try reading Wow, No Thank You
Wow, No Thank You / by Samantha Irby A new collection of humorous and edgy essays from the author of Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life that highlight the ups and downs of aging, marriage and living with step-children in small-town Michigan.
If you liked Lovecraft Country, try reading The City We Became
The City We Became / by N.K. Jemison This first book of an exciting new series by a Hugo Award-winning author takes readers into the dark underbelly of New York City, where a roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars.
Did you know the show was based on a book? Lovecraft Country / by Matt Ruff In 1954, young Army veteran Atticus Turner travels to New England with his uncle and childhood friend to search for his missing father, only to encounter human and supernatural terrors at the estate of a descendant of slave owners.
If you liked Mad Men, try reading Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road / by Richard Yates The devastating effects of work, adultery, rebellion, and self-deception slowly destroy the once successful marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, a suburban American couple.
If you liked Mrs. America, try reading Sharp
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Option / by Michelle Dean An acclaimed, award-winning literary critic combines biography and cultural history to highlight the lives of brilliant, quick-witted women writers who became influential at a time where women were still second class citizens, including Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West and Susan Sontag.
If you liked Normal People, tryreading Exciting Times
Exciting Times / by Naoise Dolan An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer
Did you also know that the show was based on a book? Normal People / by Sally Rooney The unconventional secret childhood bond between a popular boy and a lonely, intensely private girl is tested by character reversals in their first year at a Dublin college that render one introspective and the other social, but self-destructive.
If you liked Ozark, try reading Night Boat to Tangier
Night Boat to Tangier / by Kevin Barry Two Irish drug-smuggling partners reevaluate a career marked by betrayal and exile during a vigil in a sketchy Spanish ferry terminal where one of them would reconnect with an estranged daughter.
If you liked Peaky Blinders, try reading The Wettest County in the World
The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story / by Matt Boudurant Running moonshine liquor during the prohibition years, a notorious trio of brothers continues their illicit business after prohibition and play a central role in a violent conspiracy trial–a story that is investigated in 1935 by a magazine journalist.
If you liked Queer Eye, try reading Old in Art School
Old in Art School / by Nell Irvin Painter A Princeton University historian describes her post-retirement decision to study art, a venture that compelled her to find relevance in the undervalued masters she loves, the obstacles faced by women artists, and the challenges of balancing art and life.
Naturally Tan: A Memoir / by Tan FranceThe Queer Eye star and designer recounts his complicated early life as a closeted gay youth from a traditional South Asian family in Yorkshire, sharing insights into his coming of age, emergence as an artist and happy marriage. Antoni in the Kitchen / by Antoni PorowskiA star of Netflix’s Queer Eye shows home cooks how to make delicious creations in the kitchen but still stay casual, in a full-color cookbook that includes such recipes as Bastardized Easy Ramen, Malaysian Chili Shrimp, Roasted Carrots With Carrot-Top Pesto, and Salty Lemon Squares. Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love / by Johnathan Van Ness The style-expert star of Queer Eye shares deeply personal stories from his Midwestern childhood, revealing how he channeled his passions and setbacks into the positive energy that shaped his signature brand.
If you liked Supernatural, try reading American Gods
American Gods / by Neil Gaiman Just released from prison, Shadow encounters Mr. Wednesday, an enigmatic stranger who seems to know a lot about him, and when Mr. Wednesday offers him a job as his bodyguard, Shadow accepts and is plunged into a dark and perilous world.
If you liked the Tiger King, try reading No Beast So Fierce
No Beast So Fierce / by Dane Huckelbridge A true account of the deadliest animal of all time, the Champawat Tiger–responsible for killing more than four hundred humans in northern India and Nepal in the first decade of the twentieth century–and the hunter who finally brought it down.
If you liked Twin Peaks, try reading Still Life with Woodpecker
Still Life with Woodpecker / by Tom Robbins A love story that takes place inside a pack of cigarettes reveals the moon’s purpose, differentiates between outlaws and criminals, and presents portraits of powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders.
If you liked You, try reading The Book of You
The Book of You / by Claire Kendal While serving jury duty, university administrator Clarissa realizes that the disturbingly violent crime unfolding in front of her parallels to recent events in her own life as she becomes the obsession of her colleague who has crossed the line between fantasy and reality, love and compulsion.
Did you also know the show was based on a book? You / by Caroline Kepnes Meeting at an East Village bookstore, aspiring writer Guinevere Beck and store employee Joe embark on an intimate relationship, only to suffer deadly consequences when their passion spirals out of control.
A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.
In D.C. to shoot a film, adored film star Chris MacNeil finds her stay turning into a nightmare when her young daughter, Regan, is possessed by the devil and must endure a brutal exorcism.
An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival.
A little girl who is detained by the military, restrained in a wheelchair, and goes to school while heavily guarded doesn’t truly understand why she is special until it is up to her to save the world.
Discover a terrifying world in the woods in this collection of five hauntingly beautiful graphic stories that includes the online webcomic sensation “His Face All Red.”
Leading a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a traditional weekend camping trip, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs encounters a disturbing, voraciously hungry intruder in the woods who infects the troop with a bioengineered disease.
A classic novel of romantic suspense finds the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter entering the home of her mysterious and enigmatic new husband and learning the story of the house’s first mistress, to whom the sinister housekeeper is unnaturally devoted.
Becoming a best-selling novelist and wealthy celebrity while still in college, only to have his fame disintegrate in a sea of booze and drugs, the narrator gets a new chance at life, but his new life unravels after a series of grotesque murders.
When Coraline steps through the locked door in her family’s new flat, she finds a world which caters to her every whim. When she wants to leave, however, things rapidly change and she must fight a battle of good and evil to save herself.
Neil Gaiman’s chronicle of Death’s little brother Dream isn’t strictly horror (he is more a mopey Goth, annoying and still somehow compelling), but our judges agreed that vast swaths of his realm, the Dreaming, are pretty horrific. And then there is the 1989 story “24 Hours,” about a villain who steals an artifact from Dream and uses it to trap a group of people in an all-night diner and torture them — forcing them to confess their sickest secrets, worship him as a god and ultimately kill each other in gruesomely beastly ways.
When Charles Talent Manx, an unstoppable monster who transforms children into his own terrifying likeness, kidnaps her son, Victoria McQueen, the only person to ever escape his unmitigated evil, must engage in a life-and-death battle of wills to get her son back.
When four seekers arrive at a notorious old mansion, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena, but Hill House is gathering its powers and will soon choose one of them to make its own.
A seemingly ordinary village participates in a yearly lottery to determine a sacrificial victim.
The Turn of the Screw / by Henry James On a cold Christmas Eve night, guests at a holiday party share stories of phantoms and ghosts of Christmases past. Yet one guest delivers a tale of sheer fright: after losing both parents, a young boy and girl move into a large wooded estate to be held under the care of their uncle. Wanting nothing to do with raising the children, the uncle hires a young governess to attend to their care. The governess then witnesses the transformation of the two children into sinister beings who wreak unspoken horror and psychological terror.
A supernatural reimagining of the Donner Party story follows a group of wagon-train pioneers who navigate sanity-testing misfortunes, including the mysterious death of a little boy and a series of disappearances that cause a beautiful member of the group to be accused of witchcraft.
Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote… and more sinister. The only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.
The sole survivor of a homicidal sociopath’s latest killing spree, Chyna Shepherd unwittingly discovers the identity of the murderer’s intended next victim and confronts her own troubled past and overwhelming fear to protect herself and the life of a complete stranger from the ultimate evil.
The basis of the 1968 Oscar-winning film, a tale of the demonic follows a young couple who move into a Manhattan apartment and are haunted by their eccentric elderly neighbors.
Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
In an apocalyptic near-future world, a mother and her two small children must make their way down a river, blindfolded. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them–but is it man, animal, or monster?
A lone human survivor in a world that is overrun by vampires, Robert Neville leads a desperate life in which he must barricade himself in his home every night and hunt down the starving undead by day.
In a nightmarish, post-holocaust world, an ancient evil roams a devastated America, gathering the forces of human greed and madness, searching for a child named Swan who possesses the gift of life.
A collection of more than forty tales of horror and suspense begins with such nineteenth-century writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne and includes the works of Flannery O’Connor, Stephen King, Anne Rice, William Faulkner, E. B. White, and others.
A collection of stories written in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Edge of the World,” “At the Seminary,” “Four Summers,” “By the River,” and the title story.
Suffering an acute form of pica throughout her youth that is exacerbated by her mother’s death, sixteen-year-old Miranda helps to run the family bed-and-breakfast while witnessing her community’s hostilities toward outsiders, a malice that erupts in violent and destructive ways.
A selection of Poe’s poetry and sixteen of his best-known tales, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
Tapped from the oral traditions of American folklore, these ghost stories and tales of weird happenings, witches, and graveyards have startling, funny, or surprising endings.
Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of creating life and fashions an eight-foot monster, only to bring danger and destruction to the lives of those he loves.
Captain Crozier must find a way for his crew to survive the deadly attacks of a mysterious and insatiable sea monster that is stalking the men trapped in the Arctic ice, in a novel loosely based on the mid-nineteenth-century Arctic expedition originally led by Sir John Franklin.
In Cancún, Mexico, for a peaceful vacation, a group of tourists sets off in search of one of their group who disappeared during an excursion to some nearby Mayan ruins, only to come face to face with an insidious evil that threatens their lives.
Having deduced the double identity of Count Dracula, a wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.
An intriguing historical study of libraries and books, their preservation, and destruction, from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, from medieval monasteries and Vatican collections to the ever-changing information highway of today.
A perfect companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.
Featuring contributions from Isaac Babel, Jorge Luis Borge, Ray Bradbury, Francine Prose, and Nikki Giovanni, a noted librarian presents a magnificent collection of stories that celebrates the library–a realm filled with endless possibilities, excitement, romance, and adventure.
An investigator tries to connect unexplained events to an underground library of the past, where lonely citizens had met to read one another’s dairies, an endeavor that had led to nighttime massacres and the library’s erasure from history.
The author shares personal essays on diverse topics ranging from literary pets and cursive writing to book inscriptions and the pleasures of science fiction conventions.
Assigned to watch the restless characters of books left unfinished by their authors, a head librarian of Hell’s neutral Unwritten Wing tracks an escaped Hero before an angel attack reveals the existence of a powerful literary weapon.
A head librarian trying to forget the painful realities of her suburban past unexpectedly bonds with a teenager performing community service, a disgruntled former Wall Street high flyer, and other offbeat regulars who encourage her out of her self-imposed isolation.
Describes how a group of Timbuktu librarians enacted a daring plan to smuggle the city’s great collection of rare Islamic manuscripts away from the threat of destruction at the hands of Al Quaeda militants to the safety of southern Mali.
A mesmerizing fusion of the mystical and the everyday, The Book Charmer is a heartwarming story about the magic of books that feels more than a little magical itself
After she and a dozen other children found them being raised by “Father,” a cruel man with mysterious powers, Carolyn and her “siblings” begin to think he might be God; so when he dies, they square off against each other to determine who will inherit his library, which they believe holds the power to all Creation.
A glimpse into the deep friendship between two women at an early twentieth-century rehabilitation home for cast-out single mothers, and the reclusive librarian who discovers their story a century later.
Moving into Ivy Cottage with the two Miss Groves, impoverished gentlewoman Rachel Ashford resolves to earn her own livelihood and discovers mysteries among her inherited library that she investigates at the side of a former love.
Investigating the thefts of rare book pages from a prestigious Venetian library, Commissario Guido Brunetti is stymied by numerous possible suspects and the murder of a seemingly harmless theologian.
When her favorite patron, a book-loving ten-year-old, runs away from overbearing parents, children’s librarian Lucy Hull flees with the boy and discovers that they are being pursued by an anonymous adversary.
Discovering a mysterious book of prisoner tales, a Vermont graduate student recognizes a story from his own life before following clues to a magical underground library that is being targeted for destruction.
An illustrated love letter to all things bookish includes a tour of some of the world’s most beautiful bookstores, quizzes for testing one’s literary knowledge, and recipes for famous fictional meals.
Contains inspiring, funny, and heartwarming stories about cats told from the perspective of Dewey’s Mom, librarian Myron. Includes never-before-told stories about Dewey, along with other touching cat tales.
Susan Orlean reopens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history, and delivers a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution: our libraries.
Including contributions from Al Roker, Carl Hiaasen, Gillian Flynn, Liev Schreiber, Tim Gunn, Margaret Atwood, Mayim Bialik and many others, 100 of today’s most prominent literary and cultural icons share the books that changed their life, why they love them and their passion with readers everywhere.
A shy librarian whose kind heart is often exploited receives a mysterious book of fairy tales from the beloved grandmother she believed dead and embarks on a perspective-changing journey of astonishing family secrets.
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author’s works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
A Harvard graduate and lapsed Orthodox Jew chronicles his stint as a librarian in a tough Boston prison, where he met such inmates as a pimp who enlisted his help writing a memoir and a gangster who dreamed of hosting a cooking show.
Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, finds a mysterious book that holds the key to a curse that has haunted a family of traveling circus performers for generations.
As young children, we are taught to read, but soon go on to forget just how miraculous a process it is, this turning of scratches and dots into understanding, unease and inspiration. Perhaps we need to stop and remember, stop and learn again how to read better. Damon Young shows us how to do exactly this, walking alongside some of the greatest readers who light a path for us.
The last long days of summer call for long, profound reads! Check out these books with 450 pages or more.
Americanah / by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (477 pages) A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected.
Life After Life / by Kate Atkinson (529 pages) On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. Ursula dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war. Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can — will she?
The Robber Bride / by Margaret Atwood (466 pages) Set in contemporary Toronto, The Robber Bride revolves around the lives of three fascinating women. Classmates from university, Roz, Charis, and Tony all shared the seductive and destructive experience of a past friendship with the flashy, sensuous, smart, irresistible Zenia. As the novel opens they are twenty years past their college days and have met at Zenia’s funeral. At lunch, after the funeral, they spot Zenia – not dead at all and up to no good.
The Luminaries / by Eleanor Catton (834 pages) Arriving in New Zealand in 1866 to seek his fortune in the goldfields, Walter Moody finds himself drawn into a series of unsolved crimes and complex mysteries.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay / by Michael Chabon (639 pages) In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler’s Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell / by Susanna Clarke (782 pages) The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and it is hundreds of years since practical magic faded into the nation’s past. But scholars of this glorious history suddenly discover that one practicing magician still remains: the reclusive Mr. Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey.
Underworld / by Don DeLillo (827 pages) A work combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years gives readers a glimpse into the realities upon which America’s modern culture is based and explores the complex relationship between “waste analyst” Nick Shay and artist Klara Sax.
All the Light We Cannot See / by Anthony Doerr (531 pages) A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
The Name of the Rose / by Umberto Eco (579 pages) In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate charges of heresy against Franciscan monks at a wealthy Italian abbey but finds his mission overshadowed by seven bizarre murders.
Middlesex / by Jeffrey Eugenides (529 pages) Calliope’s friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents’ desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
The Corrections / by Jonathan Franzen (567 pages) Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson’s disease.
The Witch Elm / by Tana French (509 pages) Left for dead by burglars while partying with friends, a happy-go-lucky charmer takes refuge at his dilapidated ancestral home before a grisly discovery reveals an unsuspected family history.
The Pillars of the Earth / by Ken Follett (982 pages) During the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, the ambitions of three men merge, conflict and collide through 40 years of social and political upheaval as internal church politics affect the progress of the cathedral and the fortunes of the protagonists.
American Gods / by Neil Gaiman (625 pages) The story of ex-con Shadow Moon, who emerges from prison and is recruited to be bodyguard, driver, and errand boy for the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday.
The Parisian / by Isabella Hammad (566 pages) Studying medicine and falling in love in 1914 France, the son of a wealthy Palestinian textile merchant returns home to find his loyalties tested by conflicts between the British government and the independence-minded nationalists of his community.
Winter’s Tale / by Mark Helprin (673 pages) Peter Lake – orphan, thief, mechanic extraordinaire – and Athansor, a flying Brooklyn milk horse, establish a reign of love and justice in New York City in the year 2000.
A Brief History of Seven Killings / by Marlon James (688 pages) A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers, and ghosts against a backdrop of social and political turmoil.
The Fifth Season / by N. K. Jemisin (498 pages) Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world’s sole continent, a great red rift has been been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries. But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes — those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon — are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back. She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.
Tree of Smoke / by Denis Johnson (614 pages) The lives of Skip Sands, a spy-in-training engaged in psychological operations against the Vietcong, and brothers Bill and James Houston, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war, intertwine in a novel of America during the Vietnam War.
The Stand / by Stephen King (1,141 pages) A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, in a desert world, experience dreams of good and evil in confrontation and, through their choices, move toward an actual confrontation.
Pachinko / by Min Jin Lee (490 pages) In early 1900s Korea, prized daughter Sunja finds herself pregnant and alone, bringing shame on her family until a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and move with her to Japan, in the saga of one family bound together as their faith and identity are called into question.
Wolf Hall / by Hilary Mantel (532 pages) Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter’s efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome and many of his people, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.
Lonesome Dove / by Larry McMurtry (857 pages) Chronicles a cattle drive in the nineteenth century from Texas to Montana, and follows the lives of Gus and Call, the cowboys heading the drive, Gus’s woman, Lorena, and Blue Duck, a sinister Indian renegade.
Cloud Atlas / by David Mitchell(514 pages) A novel that recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle / by Haruki Murakami (611 pages) The saga of a mysteriously disintegrating marriage, suppressed memories of the tragedies of war, and a young man’s search for his personal and national identity is set against the turbulent backdrop of twentieth-century Japan.
Skippy Dies / by Paul Murray (661 pages) After 14-year-old Skippy ends up dead on the floor of a local donut shop, a number of suspects emerge at Skippy’s school in Dublin, in a hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence.
An Instance of the Fingerpost / by Ian Pears (691 pages) When a fellow of New College in seventeenth-century Oxford is found dead and a young woman is accused of his murder, four witnesses, each with his own agenda, tell what they saw, but only one speaks the truth.
The Overstory / by Richard Powers (502 pages) A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
Mason & Dixon / by Thomas Pynchon (773 pages) A novel that follows mismatched British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they make their way through frontier hardships, Native Americans, warfare, conspiracies, and other perils of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary America
Midnight’s Children / by Salman Rushdie (456 pages) The life of a man born at the moment of India’s independence becomes inextricably linked to that of his nation and is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror modern India’s course.
The Secret History / by Donna Tartt (559 pages) Richard Papen, a relatively impoverished student at a New England college, falls in with an exclusive clique of rich, worldly Greek scholars and soon learns the dreadful secret that keeps them together.
Fingersmith / by Sarah Waters (511 pages) Growing up as a foster child among a family of thieves, orphan Sue Trinder hopes to pay back that kindness by playing a key role in a swindle scheme devised by their leader, Gentleman, who is planning to con a fortune out of the naive Maud Lily, but Sue’s growing pity for their helpless victim could destroy the plot.
The Bonfire of the Vanities / by Tom Wolfe (685 pages) Sherman McCoy, a young investment banker in Manhattan, finds himself arrested following a freak accident and becomes involved with prosecutors, politicians, the press, and assorted hustlers.
A Little Life / by Hanya Yanagihara (720 pages) Moving to New York to pursue creative ambitions, four former classmates share decades marked by love, loss, addiction and haunting elements from a brutal childhood.
Surviving the accident that killed her friend, a young woman delves into the case of another victim from a decade earlier to identify a killer among her neighbors.
An elite young burglar stumbles upon a grisly triple homicide while stealing from a wealthy art dealer and must solve the crime to prevent becoming a next victim.
A day at the school fair takes a tragic turn for the worse for one mother when her best friend’s child goes missing on her watch, but when the police confront both women in trying to piece together the child’s fate, dark secrets begin to surface.
When a joint FBI-Seattle Police investigation into an international child pornography ring gets too close to powerful enemies, sex-crimes detective Livia Lone becomes the target of a hit that barely goes awry, and suspects that the FBI itself was behind it.
An unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor–the beautiful, famous actress. The unnamed narrator cannot help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, they are separated by a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment. When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a frightening and irretrievable madness.
A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do? Darby Thorne is a college student stranded by a blizzard at a highway rest stop in the middle of nowhere. She’s on the way home to see her sick mother. She’ll have to spend the night in the rest stop with four complete strangers. Then she stumbles across a little girl locked inside one of their parked cars. There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, no way out because of the snow, and she does not know which one of the other travelers is the kidnapper.
A legal drama that centers on Lee Isaacs, a female defense attorney on the cusp of turning 60, who, out of curiosity, determination, and desire for a big, even impossible, professional challenge, chooses to take on a tough murder case in which a largely uncooperative young man is accused of helping kill a gay gang member.
Haven’t we all wanted to pretend everything’s perfectly fine? Jane Campbell avoids confrontation at all costs. Given the choice, she’ll always let her husband, Leon–a bestselling thriller author–fight their battles. In Jane’s eyes, life is altogether sweeter than any individual bump in the road. But when Leon suffers a brutal attack in the driveway of their home, in front of their children, Jane has to finally face reality. Who would commit such a hateful offense in broad daylight?
Participating in a psychological study under the mysterious Dr. Shields, Jessica endures intense, invasive sessions and oppressive behavioral restrictions before she begins to lose her grasp on reality.
Criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber becomes dangerously obsessed with uncovering the truth about what prompted his client, an artist who refuses to speak, to violently murder her husband in a way that triggers mass public speculation.
Edie was once the shining star in her 20-something circle in New York’s coolest neighborhood. Like Andy Warhol’s muse, the seductive, beguiling, and mercurial party girl had the social world in her thrall. Every girl wanted to be Edie, every boy wanted her, and she and her clique treated their slice of the city like a playground. When Edie committed suicide at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could quite believe it. Ten years later a chilling chance reunion forces Edie’s best friend to wonder if there was more to her friend’s death.
Pursuing the story of two British teens who disappeared during a Bangkok hostel fire, journalist Kate Waters struggles to remain objective when her estranged son is declared a main suspect.
When a video call between friends captures a shocking incident, no one was supposed to see, the secrets it exposes threaten to change their lives forever.
A dramatic murder trial in the aftermath of an experimental medical treatment and a fatal explosion upends a rural Virginia community where personal secrets and private ambitions complicate efforts to uncover what happened.
The story of a husband and wife who don’t simply move into a haunted house, they start building one from scratch, without knowing it, until it’s too late… In 1924, a young mother, Hattie Breckenridge, is hanged from a tree in her yard by the town mob, accused of a crime that was actually committed by her daughter. Nearly a century later, a young married couple, Helen and Nate abandon the comforts of suburbia to begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams on the same forty-four acres of rural land where Hattie once lived. When they discover that this charming property has a dark and violent past.
The perfect home. The perfect family. The perfect lie. Jane Harris lives in a sparkling home in an oceanfront gated community in Orange County. It’s a place that seems too beautiful to be touched by sadness. But exactly one year ago, Jane’s oldest daughter, Mary, died in a tragic accident and Jane has been grief-stricken ever since. But does someone know more about Mary, and about her last day, than they’ve revealed?
Former US Marine Jess Winslow reenters civilian life a new widow, with little more to her name than a falling-down house, a medical discharge for PTSD, and a loyal dog named Lucy. When Jess’s late husband piloted his final “fishing” expedition, he stole and stashed a valuable package from his drug dealer associates. Now the package is gone, and the sheriff’s department has seized Jess’s dearest possession-her dog.
By Senior Day, on the cusp of graduation, Malin’s secrets — and those of her friends — are revealed. While she scrambles to maintain her artfully curated image, her missteps set in motion a devastating chain of events that ends in a murder. As their fragile relationships hang in the balance and close alliances start shifting, she will test the limits of what she’s capable of to stop the truth from coming out.
A dangerous young woman with a unique ability to detect lies sues for her emancipation from a secure children’s home, while the psychologist on her case finds himself in a battle of wits for survival.
Arriving in a remote mid-15th-century Exmoor village, a young priest discovers his late predecessor’s possibly fatal obsession with the ancient coins, glass and human bones strewn throughout the region.
Roger Calhoun and his young daughter Macey have been missing for months. In a town where everyone knows each other’s business, the bitterness of the Calhoun’s divorce and ensuing custody battle was public knowledge, and when the young girl’s skull is identified in the woods, along with the bones of her father nearby, her mother, a notorious addict and an old friend of Sadie’s, becomes a prime suspect.
Jules takes a job as an apartment sitter at a posh Manhattan building to escape heartbreak and earn some cash, but when a fellow apartment sitter disappears, Jules digs into the building’s past and what she finds sends her racing to unmask a killer.
When her longtime best friend is found murdered, Avery Greer combs through her idyllic Maine tourist community to uncover local secrets and clear her name of suspicion.
Could you hate your neighbor enough to plot to kill him?” Lowland Way is the suburban dream. The houses are beautiful, the neighbors get along, and the kids play together on weekends. But when Darren and Jodie move into the house on the corner, they don’t follow the rules. They blast music at all hours, begin an unsightly renovation, and run a used-car business from their yard. It doesn’t take long for an all-out war to start brewing. Then, early one Saturday, a horrific death shocks the street.
A veteran forensic psychiatrist assigned to the case of a wife and mother who committed an unforgiveable crime finds her professional and personal limits tested as she begins to feel sympathy for her.
In the lucrative world of Wall Street finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie and Sam are the ultimate high-flyers. Ruthlessly ambitious, they make billion-dollar deals and live lives of outrageous luxury. Getting rich is all that matters, and they’ll do anything to get ahead. When the four of them are ordered to participate in a corporate team-building exercise that requires them to escape from a locked elevator, things start to go horribly wrong.
Cityof Windows introduces LucasPage, a brilliant, reluctant investigator, matching wits with a skilled, invisible killer. To identify and hunt down this ruthless, seemingly unstoppable killer, Page must discover what hidden past connects the victims before he himself loses all that is dear to him.
For seven months of the year, the remote island of Lark is fogbound, cut off completely from the mainland. Three strangers arrive before the mists fall: Ben Hailey, a charismatic teacher looking to make his mark, teenager Viola Kendrick, and her mother, both seeking a place to hide from unspeakable tragedy. As the winter fog sets in, the presence of the newcomers looms large in this tight-knit community. They watch as their women fall under the teacher’s spell. And they watch as their daughters draw the mysterious Viola into their circle.
A woman’s search for her missing sister leads her into the world of contemporary sex work. Rona Leonard was only twenty years old when she walked out of her sister Fiona’s flat and disappeared. Six years later–worn down by a tedious job, childcare, and an aching absence in her life–Fiona’s mundane existence is blown apart by the revelation that Rona had been working as a prostitute before she vanished. Driven to discover the truth, Fiona embarks on an obsessive quest to investigate the sex industry that claimed her sister. However, as she is drawn into this complex world, Fiona finds herself seduced by the power it offers women in a society determined to see them only as victims.
a riveting novel that ripples with truth, exploring the depths of love and sacrifice in the face of a past that cannot be left dead and buried. A year ago, Naomi, the investigator with an uncanny ability for finding missing children, made a promise that she would not take another case until she finds the younger sister who has been missing for years.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What is the catch, and why her? Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.
FBI Special Agent Gideon Reynolds did not have a conventional upbringing. Raised in a cult in Northern California, his mother smuggled him out when he was thirteen, and he never saw her again. Daisy Dawson lived a sheltered childhood. Her father, a former military man, believed that the woman he loved, and her daughter were being hunted, so he took extreme measures to keep his family safe. But despite his best efforts, Daisy is done being scared. New to Sacramento, she is ready to jump headfirst into life–until she is attacked one night. Gideon is caught unawares by Daisy, who is unlike any victim he has ever met. But the attacker is far from finished and tracking him will threaten to pull Gideon back to the world he fought so hard to leave.
Recently elected President Richard Monroe–populist, controversial, and divisive–is at the center of an increasingly polarized Washington, DC. In the midst of contentious political turf wars, the White House chief of staff is found dead in his house. A tenacious intern discovers a single, ominous clue that suggests he died from something other than natural causes, and that a wide-ranging conspiracy is running beneath the surface of everyday events: powerful government figures are scheming to undermine the rule of law–and democracy itself.
A policewoman races to find her missing sister, a homeless addict, amid a vicious killing spree in a Philadelphia neighborhood, in a story that alternates between the investigation and memories of their shared childhood.
Driving home one night, Gabe is stuck behind a rusty old car. He sees a little girl’s face appear in its rear window. She mouths one word: Daddy. It is his five-year-old daughter, Izzy. He never sees her again. Three years later, Gabe spends his days and nights traveling up and down the highway, searching for the car that took his daughter, refusing to give up hope, even though most people believe she’s dead. When the car that he saw escape with his little girl is found abandoned with a body inside, Gabe must confront not just the day Izzy disappeared but the painful events from his past now dredged to the surface.
Criminal psychologist Seonkyeong receives an unexpected call one day. Yi Byeongdo, a serial killer whose gruesome murders shook the world, wants to be interviewed. Yi Byeongdo, who has refused to speak to anyone until now, asks specifically for her. Seonkyeong agrees out of curiosity. That same day Hayeong, her husband’s eleven-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, shows up at their door after her grandparents, with whom she lived after her mother passed away, die in a sudden fire. At work and at home, Seonkyeong starts to unravel the pasts of the two new arrivals in her life and begins to see startling similarities.
Nora Trier catches thieves. As a forensic accountant and partner in her downtown Minneapolis firm, she’s unearthed millions in every corner of the world. She prides herself on her independence, the most essential currency of accounting, until her firm is hired by Strike.
From Strand Critics Award winner Sheena Kamal, comes the third novel featuring the brilliant, fearless, deeply flawed Nora Watts whose vendetta against a triad enforcer escalates when he places a target on her daughter’s back.
People disappear when they most want to be seen. Jess Walker has come to a concrete campus under the flat grey skies of East Anglia for one reason: To be taught by the mesmerizing and rebellious Dr Lorna Clay, whose seminars soon transform Jess’s thinking on life, love, and Agatha Christie. Swept up in Lorna’s thrall, Jess falls in with a tightly-knit group of rule-breakers–Alec, a courageous South African journalist with a nihilistic streak; Georgie, a seductive, pill-popping aristocrat; and Nick, a handsome geologist with layers of his own. But when tragedy strikes the group, Jess turns to Lorna. Together, the two seek refuge on a remote Italian island, where Jess tastes the life she’s long dreamed of–and uncovers a shocking secret that will challenge everything she’s learned.
When a man is found on a British beach, drifting in and out of consciousness, with no identification and unable to speak, interest in him is sparked immediately. From the hospital staff who find themselves inexplicably drawn to him, to international medical experts who are baffled by him, to the national press who call him Mr.Nobody, everyone wants answers. Who is this man?
A breathless and highly charged political thriller: the story of a senator who is offered the VP slot by both parties’ presidential nominees and then gets ominous threats.
A video of Deputy Eve Ronin’s off-duty arrest of an abusive movie star goes viral, turning her into a popular hero at a time when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is plagued by scandal. The sheriff, desperate for more positive press, makes Eve the youngest female homicide detective in the department’s history. Eve… and her burned-out, soon-to-retire partner are called to the blood-splattered home of a missing single mother and her two kids. The horrific carnage screams multiple murder—but there are no corpses. Eve has to rely on her instincts and tenacity to find the bodies and capture the vicious killer.
Unnerved by her husband’s inheritance of a decrepit coastal property and the presence of a disturbed relative, community newcomer Sadie uncovers harrowing facts about her family’s possible role in a neighbor’s murder.
Years ago, bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw compiled a list of the genre’s most unsolvable murders, those that are almost impossible to crack–which he titled “EightPerfectMurders“–chosen from among the best of the best including Agatha Christie’s A. B. C. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and Ira Levin’s Death Trap. But no one is more surprised than Mal, now the owner of the Old Devils Bookstore in Boston, when an FBI agent comes knocking on his door. She’s looking for information about a series of unsolved murders that look eerily similar to the killings on Mal’s old list.
Marissa Dahl, a shy but successful film editor, travels to a small island off the coast of Delaware to work with the legendary–and legendarily demanding–director Tony Rees on a feature film with a familiar logline. Some girl dies. It’s not much to go on, but the specifics do not concern Marissa. Whatever the script is, her job is the same. She will spend her days in the editing room, doing what she does best: turning pictures into stories. But she soon discovers that on this set, nothing is as it’s supposed to be–or as it seems.
A strange man discovers our nameless narrator selling popcorn at a decrepit small-town movie theater and offers her an odd and lucrative position: she will forget her job, her acquaintances, even her name, and move to Los Angeles, where she will become the body double of the famous and troubled celebrity Rosanna Feld. A nervous breakdown has forced Rosanna out of the public eye, and she needs a look-alike to take her place in the tabloid media circus of Hollywood. Overseen by Max, who hired her for the job, our narrator spends her days locked up in a small apartment in the hills watching hidden camera footage of Rosanna, wearing Rosanna’s clothes, eating the food Rosanna likes, practicing her mannerisms, learning to become Rosanna in every way.
In 1850s London, the Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and, among the crowd watching the dazzling spectacle, two people meet by happenstance. For Iris, an arrestingly attractive aspiring artist, it is a brief and forgettable moment but for Silas, a curiosity collector enchanted by all things strange and beautiful, the meeting marks a new beginning. When Iris is asked to model for Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, she agrees on the condition that he will also teach her to paint. Suddenly, her world begins to expand beyond her wildest dreams—but she has no idea that evil is waiting in the shadows.
Your front door key is not unique. If a homicidal maniac walked from house to house for long enough, trying the same key in each front door, he might eventually open yours. Six-year-old Emilee finds this out the hard way when a smiling stranger coolly unlocks her suburban front door.
All it takes to unravel a life is one little secret… Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They are admired in their community and are a loving family-until their world falls apart the day their son Sebastian is taken. A year later, Marin is a shadow of herself. The FBI search has gone cold. The publicity has faded. She and her husband rarely speak. She hires a P.I. to pick up where the police left off, but instead of finding Sebastian, she learns that Derek is having an affair with a younger woman. This discovery sparks Marin back to life. She’s lost her son; she’s not about to lose her husband, too. Kenzie is an enemy with a face, which means this is a problem Marin can fix.
Cassandra Tipp is dead … or is she? After all, the notorious recluse and eccentric bestselling novelist has always been prone to flights of fancy–everyone in town remembers the shocking events leading up to Cassie’s infamous trial (she may have been acquitted, but the insanity defense only stretches so far). Cassandra Tipp has left behind no body–just her massive fortune, and one final manuscript. Then again, there are enough bodies in her past–her husband Tommy Tipp, whose mysterious disembowelment has never been solved, and a few years later, the shocking murder-suicide of her father and brother. Cassandra Tipp will tell you a story–but it will come with a terrible price.
Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when Drue Cavanaugh walks back into her life, looking as lovely and successful as ever, with a massive favor to ask. Daphne hasn’t spoken one word to Drue in all this time—she doesn’t even hate-follow her ex-best friend on social media—so when Drue asks if she will be her maid-of-honor at the society wedding of the summer, Daphne is rightfully speechless.
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Brynn Turner desperately wishes she had it together, but her personal life is like a ping-pong match that’s left her scared and hurt after so many attempts to get it right. In search of a place to lick her wounds and get a fresh start, she heads back home to Wildstone.
Conley Hawkins left her family’s small-town newspaper, The Silver Bay Beacon, in the rearview mirror years ago. Now a star reporter for a big-city paper, Conley is exactly where she wants to be and is about to take a fancy new position in Washington, D.C. When the new job goes up in smoke, Conley finds herself right back where she started, working for her sister, who is trying to keep The Silver Bay Beacon afloat. Soon Conley is assigned the local gossip column, “Hello, Summer.” But when she witnesses an accident that ends in the death of a local congressman, she finds a story worth digging in to, no matter how dangerous it gets.
A Sullivan’s Island beekeeper navigates her demanding hypochondriac mother and flamboyant rival sister while immersing herself in the lives of two young neighbor boys and their widowed father.
This story opens on Memorial Day weekend in a seaside town on Long Island, where Ruthie, her still-adored ex-husband Mike, and the couple’s sullen fifteen year old daughter Jem are packing up the last bits of their household, awaiting the yearly arrival of a wealthy renter from Manhattan. It is what Jem calls “the summer bummer”; her parents own a beautiful house that they have renovated by hand from top to bottom, but which they secretly can only afford to keep by leasing it out during the best part of the year. Every year they must do this and every year it gets harder, amassing a pile-up of low-grade resentments from everyone in the family. And thus begins the summer when every possible thing that can go wrong in Ruthie’s life seems to do so.
Bess Culpepper has long been sure of two things–that her group of college friends would stay close, and that love is worth the wait. At forty-two, she’s found the right man, and she’s celebrating her upcoming wedding by inviting her best friends to beautiful Kennebunkport.
The life Olivia Harper always dreamed of isn’t so dreamy these days. The 16-hour workdays are unfulfilling and so are things with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when she hears that her estranged mother, Juliet, has been seriously injured in a car accident, Liv has no choice but to pack up her life and head home to beautiful Cape Sanctuary on the Northern California coast.
Lisa Hudson feels more alive than she has in a long time after hiring hunky carpenter Mack Whitney to renovate her old Nantucket home. There’s no denying the spark growing between them, despite the fact that Mack is ten years her junior. But her twentysomething children, Juliet, and Theo, on the island for the summer, worry that the new relationship will only lead to Lisa’s heartbreak.
Committed: a skeptic makes peace with marriage / Elizabeth Gilbert
The author chronicles how the U.S. government gave her and her Brazilian-born lover, Felipe, an ultimatum–marry or Felipe cannot enter the country again–and how she tackled her fears through research and personal reflection on the enduring institution of marriage.
How to be Married: what I learned from real women on five continents about surviving my first (really hard) year of marriage / Jo Piazza
A lighthearted narrative on what it takes to make a great marriage traces the author’s haphazard first year as a newlywed and how it contrasted with traditional notions that rarely move past weddings, a journey marked by insights from married women of other cultures.
Drop the Ball: achieving more by doing less / Tiffany Dufu
An inspiring memoir by a leading figure in the women’s leadership movement counsels women on how to cultivate the essential skills of reevaluating expectations, setting realistic goals, and meaningfully engaging with others in order to thrive in personal and professional arenas.
Modern Love: true stories of love, loss, and redemption / edited by Daniel Jones
Edited by longtime “Modern Love” editor Daniel Jones—this is the perfect book for anyone who’s loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: In other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.
Something New: tales from a makeshift bride / by Lucy Knisley
In 2010, Lucy and her long-term boyfriend John broke up. Three long, lonely years later, John returned to New York, walked into Lucy’s apartment, and proposed. This is not that story. It is the story of what came after: The Wedding.
Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give / Ada Calhoun
In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which the first twenty years are the hardest..
The Commitment: love, sex, marriage, and my family / Dan Savage
Dan Savage recounts his family’s campaign to convince him and his boyfriend, Terry, to get married, and explores how his family’s attitudes towards gay marriage reflect those of contemporary American society.
The Story of a Brief Marriage / Anuk Arudpragasam
Set on a single day towards the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, a newlywed couple tries to balance love and intimacy in an evacuee camp which is constantly being bombarded by enemy shells.
The Bromance Book Club / Lyssa Kay Adams
When his wife asks for a divorce, Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville’s top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it’ll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.
Fates and Furies / Lauren Groff
Marrying in a glamorous whirlwind amid predictions of future greatness, Lotto and Mathilde are shaped throughout a subsequent shared decade by complications, secrets, and powerful creative drives.
An American Marriage: a novel / Tayari Jones
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control.
Stay with Me / Ayobami Adebayo
The story of what wanting a child can do to a person, a marriage, and a family.
Marriage of a Thousand Lies / SJ Sindu
A married man and woman in India who hide their gay orientations from their conservative families find their arrangement compromised when one of them returns home to care for a family member, only to reconnect with a beloved ex whose marriage to a heterosexual stranger has been arranged.
A curmudgeonly senior who would avoid a nursing home forges an unexpected bond with his estranged granddaughter, an abused child who is rapidly succumbing to the alcoholism that once painfully overshadowed his own life.
Four American women become unexpected friends during a magical year in Tuscany marked by a writer’s complicated relationship with the subject of her biography, long-postponed dreams, and shifting senses of adventure and bravery.
Living alone in her Stockholm apartment, a ninety-six-year-old woman reminisces through the pages of a long-kept address book before starting to write down stories from her past, unlocking family secrets in unexpectedly beneficial ways.
When Charlotte Rainsford is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message, a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true, an old-guard historian tries to recapture his youthful vigor with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life with the assistance of some new friends.
Given days to live and attended by a cast of well-wishers, Queenie Hennessy hides the existence of a long letter to Harold Fry revealing shocking and beautiful truths about her life.
Harold Fry is convinced that he must deliver a letter to an old love in order to save her, meeting various characters along the way and reminiscing about the events of his past and people he has known, as he tries to find peace and acceptance.
Major Pettigrew lives in a small village in the English countryside. After the death of his brother he forms a friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. They share a love of literature and loss of their spouses, and soon their friendship blossoms into something more.
Moving to a small country cabin, a once world-famous photographer bonds with a local man and begins to see the world around her in new, deeper dimensions while evaluating second chances at love, career, and self-understanding.
A curmudgeon hides a terrible personal loss beneath a cranky and short-tempered exterior while clashing with new neighbors, a boisterous family whose chattiness and habits lead to unexpected friendship.
A live news reader traveling the antebellum south is offered $50 to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, back to her family in San Antonio in this new novel from the author of Enemy Women.
An anxiety-riddled cub reporter for a small London paper is assigned to cover the closing of a local rec center and bonds with an 86-year-old widow who has swum in the community pool every day since childhood.
In this poignant, charming debut, 69-year-old Arthur Pepper stopped engaging with life a year ago, when his wife of 40 years died. But the discovery among her things of a charm bracelet he had never seen before prompts a quest to discover the origins of the bracelet and all of its charms. His adventures take him from his home in York through the English countryside, and on to Paris and India.
Hildy Good lives in a small town on Boston’s North Shore. She is a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. She is also a raging alcoholic. She has also fooled herself into thinking that moderation is the key to her drinking problem. As if battling her demons was not enough to keep her busy, Hildy soon finds herself embroiled in the underbelly of her New England town, a craggy little place that harbors secrets.
A novel set in England about eighty-four-year-old Florence, a resident in a nursing home, who has fallen in her apartment, leading her to think about her childhood friend and the secrets of their past that are about to come to light.
John and Ella Robina, a couple married 50+ years–she has stopped her cancer treatments, he has Alzheimer’s– kidnap themselves from the adult children and the doctors who seem to run their lives, and steal off on a forbidden vacation determined to prove that, when it comes to life, you can go back for seconds and sneak a little extra time.
Embarking on a walk across Manhattan on New Year’s Eve in 1984, eighty-five-year-old Lillian Boxfish recalls her long and eventful life, which included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America, whose career was cut short by marriage and loss.
Embarking on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise, septuagenarian Harriet reunites with her estranged daughter and confronts pivotal events from her life surrounding the true character of her husband, who died two years earlier.
A socially awkward, routine-oriented loner teams up with a bumbling IT guy from her office to assist an elderly accident victim, forging a friendship that saves all three from lives of isolation and secret unhappiness.
Betty Weissman loses her elegant New York apartment when her husband of nearly fifty years divorces her for what he says are irreconcilable differences but is in actuality another woman. She and her two grown daughters who quite unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home and whose own lives are in varying states of disrepair and confusion regroup in a small, run-down Westport, Connecticut, beach cottage.
Confined to a nursing home and about to turn 100, Allan Karlsson, who has a larger-than-life back story as an explosives expert, climbs out of the window in his slippers and embarks on an unforgettable adventure involving thugs, a murderous elephant and a very friendly hot dog stand operator.
Working as a lowly research assistant at MIT, Matt Fuller is working on a project to measure quantum forces related to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, when his calibrator is transformed into a time machine.
A grim story of a 21st century academic marooned in a 14th century English village being ravaged by the Black Death. Willis’ story is the greatest post-modern time travel story of them all, a novel that combines a genre work with all the required components and a tour de force piece of storytelling.
A scientist invents a machine that transports him far into the future where he discovers a changed world inhabited by two unusual races, the Eloi and the Morlocks.
Meg Murry and her friends become involved with unearthly strangers and a search for Meg’s father, who has disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government.
Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for Jamie Fraser, a young soldier.
When Richard Young discovers an experimental potion that can transport him back to the fourteenth century, he becomes involved in the lives of those in the past and the present, but his actions soon put his entire future in danger.
Ned Henry is shuttling between the 1940s and the 21st century, researching Coventry Cathedral for a patron who wants to rebuild it. But when the time continuum is disrupted, Ned must scramble to set things right.
Simon Morley is selected by a secret government agency to test Einstein’s theory of the past co-existing with the present and is transported back to 1880s New York.
1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend’s abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too. 2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change.
To save her boyfriend Frank from a deadly virus, Polly agrees to work as a bonded laborer twelve years in the future, but when she is re-routed five years after she was supposed to arrive, she is forced to navigate her new life alone while trying to discover if their love has endured.
The granddaughter of a noted time-travel scientist is alarmed when she receives a mysterious newspaper clipping from the future reporting the murder of a woman who just may be her.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hell bent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them.
Living in an alternate world of flying cars, moon bases and plentiful food, aimless Tom Barren is blindsided by an accident of fate that leads to a time-travel mishap that lands him in our less-than-ideal 2016, where he discovers wonderful unexpected versions of his own life.
Anne Gallagher travels to her grandfather’s childhood home in Ireland to spread his ashes, and finds herself pulled into the Ireland of 1921. There Anne meets Dr. Thomas Smith and his ward, a young boy whose mother is missing. Anne adopts her identity, convinced the woman’s disappearance is connected to her own. Caught between history and her heart, she must decide whether she’s willing to let go of the life she knew for a love she never thought she’d find. But in the end, is the choice actually hers to make?
Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future. Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women burning with potential whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a house in Depression-era Chicago that opens unto other times.
Convinced that “nothing is as it should be; everything is upside down,” Rebecca Wright struggles to explain her conviction to her husband, physicist Philip Steiner, who’s skeptical to say the least. Could the “wrongness” that Rebecca perceives have something to do with Philip’s work? Philip has spent the better part of ten years developing a causality violation device. The CVD is NOT a time machine, although the way it works (if it, in fact, works) seems remarkably similar to how a time machine might behave, disrupting the space-time continuum in subtle, yet powerful ways.
A best-selling author and time-travel enthusiast details the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, philosophy, facts and figures required for even the most clueless time traveler to build a civilization from the ground up.
A magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond, in the spirit of The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Nine brilliantly inventive stories capture the eccentricities of the residents of Manhattan’s West 89th Street.
Somewhere in Time / Richard Matheson
Matheson’s classic novel tells the moving, romantic story of a modern man whose love for a woman he has never met draws him back in time to a luxury hotel in San Diego in 1896, where he finds his soul mate in the form of a celebrated actress of the previous century.
“Most Blessed of the Patriarchs“: Thomas Jefferson and the empire of the imagination / Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter S. Onuf
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian clarifies philosophical questions about the Founding Father tracing his youth and development through theinconsistencies attributed to his character and his old age, sharing insights into his intellectual influences and formative experiences.
The United States was conceived in business, founded on business, and operated as a business—all because of the entrepreneurial mind of the greatest American businessman of any generation: George Washington.
Describes the uphill battle faced by the thirty-first president, who served his single term during the Great Depression, portraying the man as bright, well-meaning, and energetic but ultimately lacking inthe tools of leadership.
Drawing on Adams’ diary, letters, and writings, chronicles the diplomat and president’s numerous achievements and failures, revealing his unwavering moral convictions, brilliance, unyielding spirit, and political courage.
Profiles eight historical figures who demonstrated particular integrity in the face of opposition, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, and Robert A. Taft.
A former president shares his life in correspondence, diary entries, and memos, from a letter home as an eighteen-year-old Navy pilot during World War II to one written to his children during the eve of Desert Storm.
Traces Nixon‘s early political ambitions in his post-military years, his achievements as a senator and vice-president and his forward-thinking ideas in health care, poverty, civil rights, the environment, and foreign affairs.
Presents a portrait of the Civil War general and eighteenth president, challenging the views of his critics while sharing insights into his prowess as a military leader, the honor with which he conducted his administration, and the rise and fall of his fortunes.
A fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory.
Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the land of America / Douglas Brinkley
Chronicles FDRs essential yet under-sung legacy as the founder of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and premier protector of America’s public lands.
The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a lifetime of exploration, and the triumph of American natural history / Darrin Lunde
A biography of Theodore Roosevelt focusing on his career as a naturalist, his role as a pioneer for wilderness engagement, and an early advocate for museum building.
Draws on five decades of scholarship to offer an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership as demonstrated by Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.
Mitford’s most enduringly popular novel, The Pursuit of Love is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric.
The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home to care for their ailing mother, and to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. But the sisters soon discover that everything they’ve been running from might offer more than they ever expected.
London, 1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous artistic friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.
The author re-imagines her own childhood in this witty, often troubling autobiographical novel that follows the lives of members of the Aubrey family from the perspective of Rose, one of four siblings.
Set during the American Civil War, March tells the story of John March, known to us as the father away from his family of girls in Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s classic American novel.
A 150th anniversary tribute describes the cultural significance of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, exploring how its relatable themes and depictions of family resilience, community, and female resourcefulness have inspired generations of writers.
The author argues that Louisa’s “Marmee,” Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter’s world–exploding the myth that her outspoken idealist father was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.
While her sister Louisa crafts stories, May Alcott is a talented and dedicated artist, taking lessons in Boston, turning down a marriage proposal from a well-off suitor, and facing scorn for entering what is very much a man’s profession. When Louisa’s Little Women is published, its success eases the family’s financial burdens. But May is struck to the core by the portrayal of selfish, spoiled “Amy March.” Is this what her beloved sister really thinks of her? May embarks on a quest to discover her own true identity, as an artist and a woman.
A collection of gruesome and passionate short stories by Louisa May Alcott offers insight into her diversity as a writer and follows themes of suspense and psychological drama.
An Englishwoman falls for an older man who takes her to France where she discovers he is already married. When she leaves him, he pursues her and confines her to a lunatic asylum in Germany. But she will escape. The novel was written in 1866 and was rejected by the publisher as too sensational.
In 1858, orphan Susan Gray arrives in Concord, Massachusetts, to live with her cousin, Louisa May Alcott, and her family, traveling with Louisa to work as a volunteer nurse at the infamous Union Hospital in Washington, D.C., and later, after the war, joining Clara Barton on her crusading search for missing soldiers, in an evocative novel set against the turbulent backdrop of the Civil War years.
A heartwarming modern novel inspired by the timeless classic Little Women. The March sisters-reliable Meg, independent Jo, stylish Amy and shy Beth-have grown up to pursue their separate dreams. When Jo followed her ambitions to New York City, she never thought her career in journalism would come crashing down, leaving her struggling to stay afloat in a gig economy as a prep cook-slash-secret food blogger. Meg appears to have the life she always planned-the handsome husband, the adorable toddlers, the house in a charming subdivision. But sometimes getting everything you ever wanted isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott that explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical.
Little Women / Louisa May AlcottChronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young women in mid-nineteenth-century New England.
A novel about how one lie can change everything, when a teenaged girl’s scream, and the false assumption that comes from it, radiates through a street, a neighborhood, and a city, and turns lives upside down.
Sent
away to 1941 Paris when Berlin becomes too dangerous for Jewish families, a
young girl bonds with her protective mystical golem; while her friend, a
rabbi’s daughter, becomes a defender of their people.
A novel set during the Great
Depression following two estranged sisters and their mother–who has spent a
lifetime hiding a desperate secret that could dismantle the entire family.
Explores the impact of racism and interracial relationships between women through the story of an early 20th-century farmer and her unemployed single mother descendant.
A science fiction
love story that intertwines disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism,
artificial intelligence, queer love, and controversial experiments impacting
cryogenics and the sex trade.
The award-winning star of MarieTV and
host of “The Marie Forleo Podcast” outlines a simple mindset that significantly
increases the odds of pursuing goals successfully, sharing advice on how to
manage self-doubt, haters and making high-risk decisions.
A
geologist desperate to change the past and a teen rebel who has witnessed a
history-changing murder are swept up in a secret historical war in a
parallel-world America where time travel is possible.
When
Chris McDougall agreed to take in a donkey from an animal hoarder, he thought
it would be no harder than the rest of the adjustments he and his family had
made after moving from Philadelphia to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country.
But when he arrived, Sherman was in such bad shape he could barely move, and
his hair was coming out in clumps. Chris decided to undertake a radical
rehabilitation program designed not only to heal Sherman’s body but to heal his
mind as well. It turns out the best way to soothe a donkey is to give it a job,
and so Chris decided to teach Sherman how to run. He’d heard about burro
racing–a unique type of race where humans and donkeys run together in a call-back
to mining days–and decided he and Sherman would enter the World Championship
in Colorado.
A
confirmed introvert finds her simple life upended when the father she never
knew passes away, revealing an enormous extended family that overwhelms her
budding relationship with a fellow trivia buff.
Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who
traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she
arrives, however, she finds that Amy’s funeral has just ended. Luckily, the
townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist–even if they
don’t understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that’s
almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend’s memory.
All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel
and to convince them that reading is one of the great joys of life. But she
makes some unconventional choices that could force a lot of secrets into the
open and change things for everyone in town. Reminiscent of The Guernsey
Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
When his
most prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, is stolen, bookstore
owner A. J. Fikry begins isolating himself from his friends, family and
associates before receiving a mysterious package that compels him to remake his
life.
A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore.
When
eccentric novelist Robert Eady abruptly vanishes, he leaves behind his wife,
Leah, their daughters, and, hidden in an unexpected spot, plane tickets to
Paris.
An
anthology of essays, stories, and expressions of gratitude by dozens of famous
authors describes the pleasure, guidance, and support that their favorite
bookstores and booksellers have provided throughout their careers.
A secretly heartbroken woman who prefers
books to people finds her world upended by the arrivals of a poet, a lover and
three suspicious deliveries that reveal that someone has found out about her
mysterious past.
Follows the efforts of a bookstore clerk to unravel a
puzzle left behind by a patron who has committed suicide, an effort that is
complicated by memories of the clerk’s violent childhood.
A gorgeously written, tender, and wise novel about love and forgiveness in 1960s Australia, in which a lonely farmer finds his life turned upside down by the arrival of a vibrant librarian.
Teenagers
Rachel and Henry find their way back to each other while working in an old
bookstore full of secrets and crushes, love letters and memories, grief and
hope.
The funny
and fascinating memoir of Bythell’s experiences at the helm of The Bookshop,
Scotland’s largest second hand bookstore–and the delightfully unusual staff
members, eccentric customers, odd townsfolk and surreal buying trips that make
up his life there.
Monsieur
Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a
barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his
intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and
souls. The only person he can’t seem to heal through literature is himself;
he’s still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him
with only a letter, which he has never opened. After Perdu is finally tempted
to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of
France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story.
Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu
travels along the country’s rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books,
showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal
itself.
Ryan Kelly
spends plenty of time at The Bridge–the oldest bookstore in historic downtown
Franklin, Tennessee–remembering the times he and Molly Allen–who moved to
Portland–once spent there, and now, with the bookstore in deep financial
trouble, it will take a miracle to keep tragedy from unfolding.
Follows a kindhearted English widow’s struggle to open a
bookshop in a seaside town against the polite, but uncompromising opposition of
the town’s arbiters of culture.
Mitchell captured Esme’s heart with his stunning good looks and a penchant for all things erotic. Life seems truly glorious… but before she has a chance to tell Mitchell about her pregnancy, he suddenly declares their sex life is as exciting as a cup of tea, and ends it all. Esme starts work at a small West Side bookstore, finding solace in George, the laconic owner addicted to spirulina, and Luke, the taciturn, guitar-playing night manager. When Mitchell recants his criticism, his passion and promises are hard to resist. But if Esme gives him a second chance, will she lose more than she can handle?
Eighteen years old and completely alone,
Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than a love of
books and eagerness to explore the city she’s read so much about. She begins
her search for independence with appealing enthusiasm, and the moment she steps
into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr.
Pike, gives her a job sorting through piles of books and helping the rest of
the staff, a group as odd as the characters in a Dickens novel. But when a
letter arrives from someone seeking to “place” a lost manuscript by
Herman Melville, the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff rise
to a boiling point.
Starting his fifth school in five years, Osei
Kokote, a diplomat’s son, hoping to survive his first day becomes friends with
Dee, the most popular girl in school, but Ian is determined to destroy the
budding friendship. (Othello)
Describes the
horror classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the
perspective of the monster, through his hazy knowledge of the back streets of
Victorian London, the missing girls and the evidence that amounts against him.
In this modern
retelling of Austen’s classic, bookish minister’s daughter Cat Morland joins
her well-to-do friends in Edinburgh and falls for an up-and-coming lawyer who
may harbor unsettling secrets. (Northanger Abbey)
Follows Circe,
the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts
with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful
Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals. (The
Odyssey)
A modern
reimagining of the Snow White fairy tale follows the experiences of a
woman who marries a Massachusetts single father and succumbs to vanity when the
birth of her baby reveals her husband to be a light-skinned African American.
Returning with
her sister, Jane, to their Ohio hometown when their father falls ill, New York
magazine editor Lizzy Bennett confronts her younger sisters’ football fangirl
antics, a creepy cousin’s unwanted attentions, and the infuriating standoffish
manners of a handsome neurosurgeon. (Pride & Prejudice)
A modern
retelling of “The Taming of the Shrew” follows the experiences of a
preschool teacher who alienates others by speaking her mind and who is expected
by her eccentric father to marry his assistant to prevent the young man’s
deportation.
Arriving in Tangier with her new husband only
to encounter the estranged best friend she has not seen in more than a year,
Alice allows her friend to introduce her to the rhythms and culture of Morocco,
only to be quickly stifled by the woman’s controlling nature, a situation that
turns sinister when her husband goes missing. (The Talented Mr. Ripley)
A modern retelling of Macbeth is set in a
run-down industrial town in the 1970s and follows the efforts of a popular but
increasingly corrupt police officer and his calculating casino owner girlfriend
to work with a powerful local drug dealer to murder a professional rival and
set up his best friend. (Macbeth)
A reimagining of the classic fairy tale,
presented from the stepmother’s perspective, traces her escape from a life of
harsh servitude before single motherhood forces her to take a job as a
nursemaid to an otherworldly infant, who eventually becomes her stepdaughter
and a princess celebrated for her beauty. (Cinderella)
The awkward middle child of five, Mary Bennet,
who loses herself in the secret pleasures of reading and writing in
19th-century England, soon discovers that her fictional creations are no match
for the very real scandal, tragedy and romance that come into her life. (Pride
& Prejudice)
This sweeping
reimagining of Les Misérables tells the story of three teens from very
different backgrounds who are thrown together amidst the looming threat of
revolution on the French planet-colony of Laterre. (Les Misérables)
Larry Cook, an Iowan farmer who has worked a thousand-acre
plot owned by his family for generations, abruptly decides to leave his farm to
his three daughters and retire. His two eldest daughters are pleased with the decision,
but his youngest daughter has been cut out by her father and is angry. As the
daughters’ activity on the land progresses, they notice a change in their
father. Events begin to unfold that will threaten and destroy the family and
their farm. (King Lear)
When her widower father drowns at sea, Gemma Hardy
is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland to live with her kind uncle and
his family. But the death of her doting guardian leaves Gemma under the care of
her resentful aunt, and it soon becomes clear that she is nothing more than an
unwelcome guest at Yew House. (Jane Eyre)
A tale reminiscent of “Hamlet” that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father’s death. (Hamlet)
Daring Greatly: how the
courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead /
Brené Brown
Based on
twelve years of research, thought leader Dr. Brené Brown argues that
vulnerability is not weakness, but rather our clearest path to courage,
engagement, and meaningful connection.
Originals: how
non-conformists move the world / Adam Grant
The New York Times best-selling author of Give and Take examines how provocative
thought leaders can champion originality in their organizations, drawing on illustrative
studies and stories spanning a range of disciplines to explain how to recognize
a good idea, speak up, build allies, choose a time to act and manage doubts.
Drive: the
surprising truth about what motivates us / Daniel H. Pink
Drawing on
four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch
between what science knows and what business does. He argues that the secret to
high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to
direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by
ourselves and our world.
Big Magic: creative
living beyond fear / Elizabeth Gilbert
Shares the
author’s wisdom and thoughts on creativity, offering insight into inspiration
and discussing the attitudes, approaches, and habits needed to live a creative
life.
Start with
Why:
how great leaders inspire everyone to take action / Simon Sinek
Why are some people and organizations
more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater
loyalty? In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the
world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the
exact same way-and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does.
People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might
have little in common, but they all started withwhy. Drawing on a wide range
of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly
takes to lead and inspire.
The Happiness Project: or, why I spent a year trying to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun / Gretchen Rubin
Rubin
chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the
wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular
culture about how to be happier.
The
Culture of Fear: why Americans are afraid of the wrong things / Barry Glassner
A noted sociologist examines why Americans
are subject to misplaced fears, discussing the people and organizations who
manipulate common perceptions and raise anxieties for their own benefit.
Jumping at
Shadows: the triumph of fear and the end of the American dream / Sasha
Abramsky
An
analysis of Americans’ misconceptions about risks and threats and how their
brains interpret them, explains society’s deeply ingrained racisms, classism,
xenophobia and susceptibility to the toxic messages of demagogues.
Skin in
the Game: hidden asymmetries in daily life / Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The phrase
“skin in the game” is one we have often heard but have rarely stopped
to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an
astonishingly complex worldview that, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows in this
book, applies to literally all aspects of our lives. In his inimitable style,
Taleb pulls on everything from Antaeus the Giant to Hammurabi to Donald Trump
to Seneca to the ethics of disagreement to create a jaw-dropping tapestry for
understanding our world in a brand new way.
Becoming Superman: my journey from poverty to Hollywood, with stops along the way at murder, madness, mayhem, movie stars, cults, slums, sociopaths, and war crimes / J. Michael Straczynski
The acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5,
Sense 8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and Marvel’s Thor reveals how the power of
creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and
a dysfunctional family haunted by a violent truth.
The
Creative Curve: how to develop the right idea at the right time / Allen Gannett
Big data
entrepreneur Allen Gannett overturns the mythology around creative genius, and
reveals the science and secrets behind achieving breakout commercial success in
any field.
Imagine it
Forward: courage, creativity, and the power of change / Beth Comstock,
with Tahl Raz
A former vice chair of GE describes her personal journey over two decades at the top levels of the corporate world and discusses being initially ignored and treated as an outsider as a woman in a man’s world.
Based on the most recent studies from a wide range of fields, The Compassionate Achiever reveals the profound benefits of practicing compassion including more constructive relationships, improved intelligence, and increased resiliency. To help us achieve these benefits, Christopher L. Kukk, the founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation, shares his 4-step program for cultivating compassion.
The Hustle
Economy: transforming your creativity into a career / editor by Jason
Oberholtzer; illustrated by Jessica Hagy
To survive
in today’s gig economy, you must be a mover, a shaker, a doer, and a maker. In
The Hustle Economy, we give you 25 essays from founders, writers, producers,
game makers, artists, and creative types from every path who share one common
trait — they are all self-made hustlers who have managed to turn their
creativity into careers.
Creative Visualization: use the power of your imagination to create what you want in your life / Shakti Gawain This classic guide is filled with meditations, exercises, and techniques that can help you use the power of your imagination to create what you want in your life, change negative habit patterns, improve self-esteem, reach career goals, increase prosperity, develop creativity, increase vitality, improve your health, experience deep relaxation, and much more. This book can help you to increase your personal mastery of life.
A novel set in 1953 Tehran, against
the backdrop of the Iranian Coup, about a young couple in love who are
separated on the eve of their marriage, and who are reunited sixty years later,
after having moved on to live independent lives in America, to discover the
truth about what happened on that fateful day in the town square.
One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year old men convene on Martha’s Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn’t have been more different then, or even today–Lincoln’s a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin’ age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, forty-four years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives and that of a significant other are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery.
Two roommates at
Belmont College in 1962 become close friends until their growing awareness of
the South’s caste system causes them to question everything and one of them
veers towards radicalism.
A tale set over
the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and
back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia
estate.
Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the
brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with
big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the
tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each
other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in
the water. Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice: to speak out or
to protect their secret. After all, if no one else knows, who would be hurt?
Their decision will trigger a devastating chain of events.
Longing
to escape from the 18th-century music orphanage where she has lived her entire
life, a talented singer bonds with a gifted violinist who would find his
missing mother.
An adult debut by
the author of the High School Horror series follows four women who speak out
when their ill-reputed boss is slated to become CEO, a decision that triggers
catastrophic shifts throughout every department of their company.
An unexpected relationship
between a frontierswoman riding out the Arizona Territory drought of 1893 and a
former outlaw, who has the ability to see ghosts, inspires an epic journey
across the West.
Divorcing his hostile wife when he
concludes he could find genuine happiness elsewhere, Dr. Toby Fleishman is
astonished when his ex abruptly disappears, leaving him unable to move on
without acknowledging painful truths about his marriage.
Twenty-two-year-old
Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a
degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till
Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her
beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared
and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Overwhelmed
by new motherhood in spite of her love for her infant son, Rebecca, a white
woman, asks a kind black woman, Priscilla, to become her family’s nanny, only
to have her perspectives changed about her own life of privilege.
Securing lucrative summer jobs caring for the children of
wealthy vacationers, best friends Amy and Hayley navigate manipulative
employment situations and their own moral gray areas in ways that test their
bonds with their mothers and each other.
Jonathan Coe finally provides a sequel to The Winshaw
Legacy, the 1995 novel that introduced American readers to one of Britain’s
most exciting new writers — an acerbic, hilariously dark, and unflinching
portrait of modern society.
When a devastating accident befalls the family she
nannies for, a young composer faces a choice between her promising career and
the well-being of the two little boys she has come to love.
Chapel
Hill college student Maria finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at nineteen.
Still reeling from the fresh discovery of her mother’s diagnosis with cancer,
Maria’s decision to give her daughter up for adoption is one that seems to be in everyone’s best interest.
So when her mother proposes an extended trip to sleepy coastal town
Beaufort-the same town that the adoptive couple Maria chose for her daughter
just happens to live in.
She has kept close watch on the couple she chose to adopt her daughter, even
accepting a position as their nanny.
A
satirical glimpse into Manhattan’s upper class follows Nanny, a struggling NYU
student who takes a position caring for the son of the rich X family, as she
learns how to juggle various tasks so that a Park Avenue wife never has to lift
a well-manicured finger.
A sequel to “The Nanny Diaries” finds Nan
returning to New York after 10 years abroad and getting approached by a drunken
16-year-old Grayer X, who describes his parents’ brutal divorce and prompts her
re-entry into child care for the elite.
Determined to find another family that needs her since
her own children have moved away, widow Francesca Campanile becomes a nanny for
a single mom named Loretta, and, working her magic in the kitchen, brings this
struggling family together.
Hamptons
real estate agent Hope Collins-Calder can’t manage her own life, much less
those of her three children, four if you count husband No. 2. So, like many
other upwardly mobile women, she enlists the
services of a nanny.
When Nora Banks’ husband, Evan, is arrested for a white
collar crime, her privileged life renovating her 18th-century home is turned
upside down. The parents and classmates at her sons’ private school shun her
family. Nora’s only support comes from the family nanny, Beatrice. The two
women bond to raise the boys as smoothly as possible in the midst of so many
life changes while Nora starts her own business to support her family, a bakery
called the Summer Kitchen. Nora comes to change her way of thinking about life,
family, money, and romance.
In the Midwest just after the September 11 attacks,
twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin comes of age amid such challenges as racism, the
War on Terror, and cruelty in the name of love, as she leaves her family’s farm
to attend college and takes a part-time job as a nanny.
A group of new moms who all gave birth in the month of
May gather twice weekly at the park to offer support and companionship before
one of the babies is shatteringly abducted, subjecting his traumatized mother
to invasive questions and prompting the others to go to increasingly risky
lengths to help.
Follows the relationship between a working
French-Moroccan couple and their too-good-to-be-true nanny, whose devotion to
their children spirals into a psychologically charged cycle of jealousies,
resentments and violence.
Hiring a live-in nanny to attend her family’s needs while
she attempts to finish writing her book, Lady begins questioning the young
woman’s agenda when the latter instantly connects with the family and begins
acting in suspicious ways.
Seraphine Mayes and her twin brother Danny were born in the middle of summer at their family’s estate on the Norfolk coast. Within hours of their birth, their mother threw herself from the cliffs, the aupair fled, and the village thrilled with whispers of dark cloaks, changelings, and the aloof couple who drew a young nanny into their inner circle. Now an adult, and mourning the recent death of her father, Seraphine begins to go through his belongings, when she uncovers a family photograph that raises dangerous questions. It was taken on the day the twins were born, and in the photo, their mother, surrounded by her husband and her young son, is beautifully dressed, smiling serenely, and holding just one baby. Who is the child and what really happened that day? Someone knows the truth, if only Seraphine can find her.
Check our catalog, and place a hold, or ask a librarian to place a hold for you.
Defecting
to America at the height of the Cold War, the daughter of Joseph Stalin finds
her quiet existence upended by controversial associates, CIA suspicion and her
relationship with a young lawyer.
Believed
cursed in her rugged Italian village, a tough, intelligent teen protects her
younger sister during World War II, enduring challenges that transform her
views about survival and independence.
Ayaana
embarks from Pate, off the coast of Kenya, on a dramatic ship’s journey to the
Far East, where she will discover friends and enemies; be seduced by the
charming but unreliable scion of a powerful Turkish business family; reclaim
her devotion to the sea; and come to find her own tenuous place amid a
landscape of beauty and violence and surprising joy.
An American heiress and modern art collector offers safe passage to a resort in Mexico to European artists under threat from the Nazis, while her emotionally unstable daughter chronicles their wartime experiences.
A poignant and suspenseful drama that
untangles the complicated ties binding three women — two sisters and their
mother — in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the
eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge.
The
life of a controversial mid-20th-century photographer is chronicled through her
daughter’s memories, interviews with her intimates and excerpts from journals
and letters documenting her quest for artistic legitimacy in the face of public
notoriety.
Young widow EvvieDrake and major
league pitcher Dean Tenney, who has lost his game and needs a chance to reset
his life, form an unlikely relationship when Dean moves into an apartment at
the back of Evvie’s house.
Based
on true events, a tale set a generation before Lilac Girls traces the stories
of three women, including Caroline Ferriday’s mother, a Romanov cousin and a
fortune-teller’s daughter, against a backdrop of the Russian revolution and
World War I.
The
students and parents of a tight-knit community find their bonds nearly
destroyed by competitiveness when an exclusive school for gifted children opens
nearby, in a story told from both adult and child perspectives.
A talented baker
running a business out of her nursing home reconnects with her master brewer
sister at the same time her pregnant granddaughter launches an IPA brewpub.
Fall, or Dodge in
Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and
machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal.
A
German-American woman in 1989 New York City evaluates her relationship with her
late mother, whose childhood best friendship was shattered in the wake of a
betrayal involving the Hitler Youth movement and a family secret.
Invited
to join a popular clique at her university, a misfit artist with a dark
imagination is drawn into ritualistic activities that transform her
perspectives on reality.
The
award-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time presents a fantastical novel about the theft of female
agency by rapacious men and the ways in which archetypal stories can warp
history and the present.
Investigating a suicide, New York City
police officer Barry Sutton finds a connection to the outbreak of a
memory-altering disease and a controversial neuroscientist working to preserve
precious memories.
A
first novel by an award-winning playwright follows the experiences of two
American families, one black and one white, against a backdrop of historical
events from the 1950s through the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Receiving
her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica,
only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best
friend had described.
A multi-generational novel in which
the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple–still madly in love after forty
years–match wits, harbor grudges, and recklessly ignite old rivalries until a
long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they’ve built.
A modern Muslim
adaptation of Pride and Prejudice finds a reluctant teacher who would avoid an
arranged marriage setting aside her literary ambitions before falling in love
with her perpetually single cousin’s infuriatingly conservative fiancé.
A letter from a son to a mother who
cannot read reveals the impact of the Vietnam War on their family history and
provides a view into parts of the son’s life that his mother has never known.
A confirmed introvert finds her simple life
upended when the father she never knew passes away, revealing an enormous
extended family that overwhelms her budding relationship with a fellow trivia
buff.
A
magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand
Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond, in
the spirit of The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button.
The story
of the alliance formed at the end of World War II by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,
and Joseph Stalin to control the war in Europe and the Pacific, in the process
shaping the political landscape of the world.
Author,
Joseph J. Ellis asks, “What would the Founding Fathers think?” He
examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular
topics, using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and,
in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the
disturbing impasse of today’s political conflicts. He discusses Jefferson and
the issue of racism, Adams and the specter of economic inequality, Washington
and American imperialism, Madison and the doctrine of original intent.
Her palace
shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold but was richer still in political and
sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an
ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it
reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to
a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were
teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious
sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties.
A true-crime procedural documents
how Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became involved in the 1908
wrongful conviction case of an immigrant Jewish cardsharp whose innocence was
proven by Doyle’s use of reason and the scientific method.
A dramatic narrative account of
the 20th President’s political career offers insight into his distinguished
background as an impoverished wunderkind scholar and Civil War hero, his
battles against the corrupt establishment and Alexander Graham Bell’s failed
attempt to save him from an assassin’s bullet.
Based on years of original
research and new reporting, two acclaimed authors deliver the riveting and
emotionally wrenching full story of the worst sea disaster in United States
naval history: the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II–and the
fifty-year fight to exonerate the captain after a wrongful court martial.
A vibrant
and immersive account of NewOrleans‘
at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the
battlegrounds of the Crescent City. The remarkable story of NewOrleans‘
thirty-years’ war against itself, pitting the city’s elite ‘better half’
against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and
crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the
undisputed czar of the city’s Storyville vice district, who fights desperately
to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. With stories
of flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen,
ruthless Mafiosi, venal politicians, and one extremely violent serial killer,
all battling for primacy in a wild and wicked city unlike any other in the world.
In 1776,
an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s
bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to
Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading
up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor
of New York, William Tryon and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot
against the most important member of the military: George Washington himself.
This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed.
Presents a portrait of five
extraordinary figures–Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson–to illuminate how great leaders are
made in times of adversity and the diverse skills they summon in order to
prevail.
Based on years of original
research and new reporting, two acclaimed authors deliver the riveting and
emotionally wrenching full story of the worst sea disaster in United States
naval history: the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II–and the
fifty-year fight to exonerate the captain after a wrongful court martial.
Details
the campaign that ultimately won the Revolutionary War for the Americans, from
the Battle of the Chesapeake–fought without a single American ship–to the
victory at Yorktown.
When electric light innovator
Thomas Edison sues his only remaining rival for patent infringement, George
Westinghouse hires untested Columbia Law School graduate Paul Ravath for a case
fraught with lies, betrayals, and deception.
Recounts
the search for a long-lost masterpiece by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Caravaggio, following a young
graduate student across hundreds of years and four countries to uncover the
mystery of “The Taking of Christ.”
The
Pioneers: the heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal
west / David McCullough 977 MCC
Best-selling
author David McCullough tells the story of the settlers who began America’s
migration west, overcoming almost-unimaginable hardships to build in the Ohio
wilderness a town and a government that incorporated America’s highest ideals.
Charts the
controversial leadership, public reputations, and evolving political powers of American wartime presidents from the Warof 1812 through
Vietnam, including Lincoln, Wilson, and LBJ.
Two
award-winning authors and historians team up to present the story of Andrew
Jackson’s improbable ascent to the White House at the hands his closest
supporters who transformed this difficult and violent man into a paragon of
republican virtue.
A
stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and
its devastating repercussions. In December 1972, Jean McConville, a
thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by
masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again.
Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict
known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was
responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it.
In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern
Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville’s children
knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to
the dress.
To look at Seabiscuit one would never know that he had
the potential to become the most popular racehorse of the 20th century. But,
thanks to the efforts of his owner, his dedicated trainer, and his jockeys,
Seabiscuit made racing history despite his stunted legs and knobby knees. The
team’s road to unimaginable fame and success (even President Roosevelt halted
work to listen to the race between Seabiscuit and his foe, War Admiral) is the
subject of this wildly popular and hugely compelling bestseller.
Lepore traces the intertwined
histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the
colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio
to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act,
from the printing press to Facebook News.
On a May afternoon in 1943, an
Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving
only a spray of debris and a slick of oil and blood. Then, on the ocean
surface, a face appeared — Lt. Louis Zamperini … Ahead of Zamperini lay
thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a floundering raft, thirst
and starvation, enemy aircraft and beyond, a trial even greater. His fate,
whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.
A cultural
history of World War II-era New York explores how the city emerged as a world
capital and became the home of famed politicians, gangsters and celebrities.
Traces the
South Pole expedition of a decorated British special forces officer, an admirer
of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition and descendant of one of Shackleton’s crew,
who in 2015 risked his life to walk across Antarctica alone.
A portrait of the first American president’s early years shares insights into how his service in the British military and his stationing in the brutal wilderness of the Ohio Valley shaped his nascent leadership and indirectly fed the conflict that led to the French and Indian War.
Profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother, and a young scrap metal thief, illuminating how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by religious, caste, and economic tensions.
Author Jessica Bruder,
who teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism, spent several years traveling
with older Americans who have become itinerant workers in order to make ends
meet. In Nomadland,
she describes how they assume a “wheel estate” (instead of “real
estate”) existence as they travel from one seasonal job to the next,
exchanging information on safe camping sites and enjoying the camaraderie of
the road. Bruder vividly and sympathetically characterizes these
“workampers” as she critiques the financial systems that have led
them to adopt this solution.
A Harvard sociologist examines
the under-represented challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in
America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes
and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by
dysfunctional legal systems.
In an attempt to understand the lives of
Americans earning near-minimum wages, Ehrenreich works as a waitress in
Florida, a cleaning woman in Maine, and a sales clerk in Minnesota.
The co-founder of MBAs Across America describes
his upbringing in a black evangelical family, his football recruitment into
Yale and the brutal wealth gap that is forcing increasingly large numbers of
marginalized groups to redefine the American Dream.
A history of the class system in America from the
colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the
underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of
lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the
Republican Party.
A journalist describes the years she
worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the
privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked
laborers supporting them.
The author
describes the path she took to escape poverty, after being raised by a 16-year-old
single mother in 1970s Los Angeles, and examines the conditions that make it
nearly impossible for others to replicate her journey.
Chronicles
the experiences of a 1920s maid working in the great houses of England,
detailing the disparate lives of the upper class and their servants, the class
struggles inherent in the relationship, and daily life as a servant.
As the haves and have-nots grow more separate and
unequal in America, the working poor don’t get heard from much. Now they have a
voice—and it’s forthright, funny, and just a little bit furious. Here, Linda Tirado tells what it’s like, day after
day, to work, eat, shop, raise kids, and keep a roof over your head without
enough money. She also answers questions often asked about those who live on or
near minimum wage: Why don’t they get better jobs? Why don’t they make better
choices? Why do they smoke cigarettes and have ugly lawns? Why don’t they
borrow from their parents? Enlightening and
entertaining, Hand to Mouth opens up a new and much-needed
dialogue between the people who just don’t have it and the people who just
don’t get it.
Shares the story of the
author’s family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an
upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate,
while navigating the collective demons of the past.
The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric
artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing, during which she and
her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill
collectors and the authorities.
A memoir that traces the author’s experiences as a child born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, describing her participation in her family’s paranoid stockpiling activities and her resolve to educate herself well enough to earn acceptance into a prestigious university and the unfamiliar world beyond.
A
dramatic murder trial in the aftermath of an experimental medical treatment and
a fatal explosion upends a rural Virginia community where personal secrets and
private ambitions complicate efforts to uncover what happened.
Moving
to an English countryside university after witnessing an assault in London, a
young writer supervises an escalating debate about violence against women
before one of her male students writes a novel about her horrific murder.
A suspenseful new novel about an
idyllic town in Maine dealing with the suspicious death of one of their
own–and her best “summer” friend, who is trying to uncover the
truth…before fingers point her way.
Southern newlyweds honeymooning in
1957 Cape May are pulled into the dramas of a trio of sophisticated New England
urbanites who render the deserted beach community an intimate playground of
corruptive recklessness.
Ensconced within a Hudson Valley
retreat where expectant birth mothers are given luxurious accommodations and
lucrative rewards to produce perfect babies, a Filipino immigrant is forced to
choose between a life-changing payment and the outside world.
The bereaved matriarch of a powerful early-20th-century American family makes a fateful decision that reverberates throughout two subsequent generations further impacted by racism, reversed circumstances and disturbing revelations.
What if your sense of duty required
you to betray the man you love? One woman struggles to choose between her honor
and her heart in this enthralling espionage drama that deftly hops between New
York and West Africa.
On
the brink of losing the family home, a Midwestern college professor and widower
reaches out to his estranged children under the guise of a reconciliation, only
to unleash a maelstrom of age-old resentments.
The unconventional secret childhood
bond between popular Connell and lonely, intensely private Marianne is tested
by character reversals in their first year at a Dublin college that render
Connell introspective and Marianne social, but self-destructive.
Explores a century of American history through the lives of Chinese Americans, using the lives of four individuals to depict how an immigrant community survives and ultimately becomes American in the process.
Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, this debut novel tells the heartwarming story of widower Henry Lee, his father, and his first love Keiko Okabe.
A deeply reported analysis of the Chinese immigrant community in the United States offers revisionist insights into how their experiences in China and America have reflected and transformed the American dream.
Betrayed by the boss who is also the father of her unborn child, an undocumented Chinese factory worker is forced to flee and reinvent herself in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the desperate hopes of securing American citizenship for her baby.
A biography of cinematic hero Charlie Chan, based on the real-life Chinese immigrant detective, Chang Apana, whose bravado inspired mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers to depict his fictional sleuth as a wisecracking and wise investigator rather than a stereotype.
Decades after an interrupted visit to his mother’s home in 1979 India triggers a haunting series of events, brain surgeon Thomas Eapen begins having conversations with his dead relatives, prompting his career-beleaguered wife to investigate a painful family history.
One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, theLeavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.
Three aspiring Asian artists, a painter and two writers, meet in college and form a strong friendship after banding together against an act of racism that has lasting repercussions into their adult lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured ‘coolies’ who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a ‘despised minority,’ Asian Americans are now held up as America’s ‘model minorities’ in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States.
Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, the stories presented in “Drifting House” illuminate a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.
A story of the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family explores the fallout of the drowning death of Lydia Lee, the favorite daughter of a Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio.
Author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal, among other accolades; readers hungry for more will appreciate the eight stories collected here, written before The Sympathizer was published. While the stories, mostly set in the Vietnamese community in California, represent Vietnamese refugee experiences in the US, the topics they explore — relationships, grief, the desire for fulfillment — speak to the human experience. Check them out if you’re interested in sympathetic characters, cultural dislocation, or the experiences of refugees.
In a manga cafe in Tokyo’s Electric Town, Nao has decided there’s only one escape from the loneliness and pain of her life, as she’s uprooted from her U.S. home, bullied at school, and watching her parents spiral deeper into disaster. But before she ends it all, she wants to accomplish one thing: to recount the story of her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, in the pages of her secret diary. The diary, Nao’s only solace, is her cry for help to a reader whom she can only imagine.
In a boxy apartment building in an Illinois university town, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades letter, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother’s secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes.
In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives…until after the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.
When a personal tragedy compels a young woman to return to Boiling Springs, North Carolina, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family.
A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner’s name — and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the country’s.
Losing her love for her major when her graduate studies become subject to research failures and high pressure, a Boston University student contemplates a marriage proposal from a more successful fellow scientist while she pursues an entirely different kind of chemistry.
The mother of Iris Chang shares a portrait of her daughter that reveals the discoveries that inspired the writing of “The Rape of Nanking,” describes her daughter’s struggles with an autistic son and remembers her tragic suicide.
A compelling domestic thriller of secrets and revenge traces the psychologically charged perspectives of a husband and wife who are both the most perfect and the most dangerous match for each other.
When Heather Mackenzie discovers that the embroidered flowers among her grandmother’s possessions are the same pattern from Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding gown, she sets out to discover why they were in her possession.
After his friend, Iris, dies from a terminal illness at age thirty-three, PR genius Smith Simonyi teams up with Iris’ sister, Jade, to make Iris’ final request–to get her blog posts published as a book–a reality.
A life-changing encounter among Tennessee Williams, his lover Frank Merlo and a taciturn Swedish beauty at a 1953 Truman Capote party culminates in deathbed revelations about Williams’ final play a decade later.
Sent to oversee the completion of a highway that symbolizes an important armistice between two halves of a war-torn state, two foreign contractors are forced to confront the absurdities and dire consequences of their roles in forging peace.
Follows the relationship between a working French-Moroccan couple and their too-good-to-be-true nanny, whose devotion to their children spirals into a psychologically charged cycle of jealousies, resentments and violence.
Explores the imbalances that drive dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor’s relationship with a famous older writer during the early years of the Iraq War, and an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers in Heathrow.
A shy librarian whose kind heart is often exploited receives a mysterious book of fairy tales from the beloved grandmother she believed dead and embarks on a perspective-changing journey of astonishing family secrets.
The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Atonement presents the story of two lovers in an alternative 1980s London who construct a perfect synthetic human before finding themselves in a morally complex love triangle.
Criminal psychotherapist Theo Faber becomes dangerously obsessed with uncovering the truth about what prompted his client, an artist who refuses to speak, to violently murder her husband in a way that triggers mass public speculation.
Between the Lines 
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