Heroes are often defined as ordinary characters who get thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and through courage and a dash of luck, cement their place in history. Chosen as FDR’s fourth-term vice president for his well-praised work ethic, good judgment, and lack of enemies, Harry S. Truman was the prototypical ordinary man, still considered an obscure Missouri politician.
\nThat is, until he was shockingly thrust in over his head after FDR's sudden death. At the climactic moments of the Second World War, Truman had to play judge and jury during the founding of the United Nations, the Potsdam Conference, the Manhattan Project, the Nazi surrender, the liberation of concentration camps, and the decision to drop the bomb and end World War II.
\nTightly focused, meticulously researched, and using documents not available to previous biographers, The Accidental President escorts readers into the situation room with Truman during this tumultuous, history-making 120 days, when the stakes were high and the challenges even higher.
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Mason, a Gen Z adrenaline junkie, and Mann, an ex-con, ex-actress, and lawyer turned sleuth, have already solved one murder together. United by their commitment to sarcasm and general disappointment with the human race, they now face a second crime that’s way too close to home. Alexa Rousso keeps having accidents, and no one but her thinks it’s a coincidence.
\nCould her checkered past be coming back to get her? Mason and Mann’s investigation takes them to the Bay Area, to the Central Coast, and - of course - to the hippest spots in Los Angeles. Will the Berkeley boho vibe convert Mann from vintage couture? Will the wine snobs of Ojai drive Mason to drink (or to vinicide, which isn’t even a thing)?
\nMore importantly, will they solve the mystery before the murderer’s sights settle on the detectives themselves, or will this new challenge also be their last?
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In the solar cities of the future, the humans relax in the sun and the animals work in the shadows. Genetically engineered Little Helpers, serving humanity - unseen, unheard.
\nMeet Skotch. Racoon, P.I. - Yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn't too illegal, whatever that means.
\nA mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn't raise any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is.
\nThe fee is good - perhaps too good. Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down.
\nIf only Skotch can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he's hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.
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Just outside Washington D.C. sits Eastbrook, Bethesda - a leafy suburb with top schools, manicured lawns, and friendly neighbors. It’s not the kind of place where nannies are shot during robberies gone wrong. But like any picture-perfect neighborhood, it’s been easy to cover up the shadows and move on.
\nA year after the unsolved neighborhood murder, Caren, nearing fifty and staring down an empty nest, has one too many drinks at a graduation party and blacks out on her way home. At least, that’s what everyone says happened. Caren suspects she was drugged by someone. But who?
\nWhen Caren teams up with a new neighbor who is desperate to figure out who murdered his best friend last year, they start to uncover what Eastbrook has tried to forget. But in a place where appearances are everything, their search for the truth means not only shattering carefully built façades - but putting themselves squarely in the crosshairs of a killer.
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If you have the opportunity to give up humanity for efficiency, mechanical invincibility, and to surpass human limitations . . . would you?
\nAi is a cyborg, under the guise of an AI writing program, who struggles to keep up with the never-blinking city of Emit as it threatens to leave all those like her behind.
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It's been three years since Hena Mirza saw her family. Three years since her fiancé mysteriously vanished on their wedding day. Three years since everyone decided she was to blame.
\nWhen her younger sister, Lulu, calls with shocking news - she’s getting married in forty-eight hours and their mother is dying - Hena’s plan is simple: fly home, say goodbye, and leave before she reopens old wounds. But nothing about the trip is simple. This isn’t a one-day event. It’s an eight-day desi wedding with a guest list that eerily mirrors the one from her own failed nuptials. And though Hena feels unexpected sparks fly with two men in the wedding party - a childhood friend and a newcomer unfamiliar with her history - the remaining guests quickly make it clear: No one is happy she’s back.
\nThen Lulu’s carefully planned itinerary goes awry. Hena initially dismisses the strange incidents, but as days pass and the sabotage escalates, it becomes clear that someone is determined to destroy the wedding, just as Hena’s was destroyed years ago. To survive this week, she’ll have to uncover the culprit behind these attacks . . . before the past she’s tried to outrun finally catches up to her.
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Audrey Lane is perfectly fine. Really. So what if she left her high-powered job as a Very Important Journalist - and her even higher-powered long-term girlfriend - to live a quiet life as a reporter for the second-biggest newspaper in Shropshire? And so what if she keeps hearing the voice of that same higher-powered long-term now-ex-girlfriend in her head night and day, constantly judging just how small Audrey's allowed her life to become?
\nShe's fine. She's happy. She's perfectly within her groove. Do not-in-their-groove people get weekday drunk and impulsively apply for the UK's most beloved baking show?
\nAll right, so maybe she's not completely fine, but being on Bake Expectations is opening her world again in ways she never anticipated. First through fellow contestant Doris, whose personal story of queer love during WW2 captures Audrey's heart, imagination, and journalistic interest like nothing has in ages. Then through Jennifer Hallet, the most foul-tempered (and fouler-mouthed) producer, woman, and menace Audrey has ever met.
\nJennifer should be off-limits, but her fire lights something unexpected inside of Audrey, making her want to burn back a million times brighter. A million times hotter. A million times more herself than she's been in a long, long time.
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Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn’t remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can’t forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she’s Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it’s only a fling - one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.
\nThen a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai’i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .
\nIn prose that sparkles like sun on the water, Upano’s debut novel tells the unforgettable story of two young people as they come of age, fall in love, forge new families, and try to find their way back together, again and again. Everything to the Sea is a moving portrait of our ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies, when everything else is washed away.
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After the sudden death of her husband, Ellen McKenna is doing everything she can to keep her Texas farm afloat. She and her family hope to expand their operation, but times are tough and making ends meet is more expensive than she imagined, much less trying to grow. Many of their neighbors in Cooke County have thrown in the towel and agreed to sell their farms to a local businessman, but despite similar pressure, Ellen refuses to let her dreams die.
\nOn top of the usual hardships, a series of recent storms has left the region partly flooded, and as the heavy rain begins again one morning, all the members of the McKenna family jump into action to protect their land and animals. Ellen’s oldest son discovers an injured dog - and the dog leads him to a man barely clinging to life, the apparent victim of a brutal home invasion. Then, Ellen’s younger kids go to check on a nearby neighbor and walk into a threat none of them saw coming.
\nBefore anyone can figure out what’s really going on in their idyllic rural valley, the storm picks up again in intensity, and the McKenna kids find themselves in over their heads with no way to call for help. To protect her farm - and her family - Ellen must face down all the forces trying to tear them apart.
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Bird and Jessa don’t have much in common. Bird is an aspiring poet, still finding herself after a transformative summer away at writing camp. Jessa lives for the discovery of new music, using it to block out the dysfunction waiting for her at home. They would never have crossed paths if it weren’t for one shared problem: Their two best friends have started dating, and the relationship is threatening to ruin their senior year.
\nTired of coming second to their friends’ romance, the girls come to the only logical conclusion: they have to break up the new couple. But the more time Bird and Jessa spend scheming, the more they start to realise they might have more in common than they thought.
\nSet in the late ’90s in a world full of turbulent change as much as possibility, Jessa and Bird relearn what it means to love themselves and receive love in return, and to dream for a future they never imagined.
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Emily is unmoored as a new mother in Manhattan - exhausted, broke, and slipping away from her well-meaning husband. She becomes fixated on finding the one person who ever truly understood her: her college roommate Daisy who vanished years ago after dancing at a seedy strip club off campus.
\nIn her desperate search for Daisy, Emily tumbles from new-mom message boards into a world of porn, secrets, and a high-end escort service for global billionaires, hitting one dead end after another - until the unthinkable happens: Daisy suddenly reappears.
\nDaisy infuses Emily’s life with newfound purpose and community as the two launch a new mothers’ group in a vacant luxury skyscraper (matcha on tap, vibrators on offer). But the joy of their reunion soon fades, revealing deep cracks in their friendship. Is Daisy the key to Emily’s happiness - or is she unraveling her world? And where has Daisy really been all these years?
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1605, London. Beatrix lives a solitary life in the shadows, wandering the city streets looking for ways to forget. Forget that everyone she has ever loved has been dead for nearly a century. Forget that, for her, love can only ever mean loss. Because Beatrix has a secret: a lifetime ago her deathbed wish was granted, making her immortal.
\nUntil one day, while picking pockets amid the raucous crowds of Shakespeare's Globe, she meets Oliver. They spend a single, perfect day together before he tells her that he has to leave. She’s not surprised; eternity is a lonely place.
\nWhen Beatrix and Oliver meet again by chance a century later, recognition hits her like a bolt of lightning. It’s impossible. He’s impossible. Just like her. A chance for Beatrix to truly live - and love - again sparks into existence.
\nWoven between the biggest events in history and the quiet moments lost to it, from London in 1605 to Woodstock in 1969 and beyond, All We Have Is Time is an unforgettable love story for anyone who believes love can rewrite the rules of time.
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Months after the housing bubble bursts, newlywed Chicagoans Emma and Rachel move into a charming little house in a conservative Indiana college town, hoping for a fresh start after a painful miscarriage. As Rachel immerses herself in her new role as a tenure-track professor and bestselling novelist, adjunct Emma struggles in the shadow of her wife’s success.
\nDesperate to build something of her own, Emma secretly pursues IVF, even as Rachel insists they wait to have children. The house, initially a symbol of new beginnings, becomes a refuge for Emma from the town she’s convinced is set against her - until strange occurrences make her question whether she and her wife are truly alone.
\nThey aren’t.
\nCharlotte and Dirk, the former homeowners, are secretly living in the attic above Emma and Rachel’s attached garage. Dispossessed by the recession and anxious about her husband’s declining health, Charlotte listens to the interlopers below, and her resentment steadily grows. What starts as small acts of defiance - missing food, flipped breakers in the fuse box, subtle scratches in the furniture - soon becomes sabotage.
\nBut when her campaign to drive out the couple goes too far, Charlotte’s and Emma’s stories converge in an explosive climax that will reveal the lengths people will go to reclaim what they’ve lost.
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In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded - one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin.
\nWith unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivete in an endless boom led to disaster. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world - where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again.
\nThis is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming - only to be dismissed until it was too late.
\nHailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told. Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time - with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.
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Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common threads - both Korean American teenagers, raised by single mothers and searching for identity in the California suburbs. But during a Finals week celebration, high schooler V, compelled by strange impulses, crawls into a hollow tree trunk. That night in a fever haze, she sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her body - flowing between her and her mother, leading to a long-forgotten diary.
\nWith the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s memories spill onto the faded pages. V witnesses her mother map out her past through drawings, diagrams, and reclaimed histories of her brief time at Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college. Here, legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over family stories that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one - until her discoveries cracked open Alvsdahl’s secrets.
\nSharon’s rewritten narrative - of classroom rivalries, animal professors, debauchery in the woods, threatening Godmothers, and world-shattering powers - unfolds line by line as V desperately tries to help her mother, ultimately learning how to wield Sharon’s story to transform them both.
\nLyrical and tender, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies connecting us all.
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In Anespérer, where magic comes alive through artistic skill, Elara Rousseau knows she'll never be selected for the Objet d’Art. The high-stakes baking competition will elect a new Souverain to join the ruling council, and someone from the slums would never be considered. But when a brooding figure from her past sneaks her into the Objet, Elara has the chance to compete for a better future . . . as long as no one uncovers her traitorous secret.
\nNikolas Dupont will do whatever it takes to impress his powerful father, a Souverain who hasn't officially recognised his son - like handpick a contestant to win and become his father's political pawn. But Elara is more than he bargained for, and she ignites his own subdued passions.
\nAgainst all odds, Elara excels and becomes a hero to the city's poor, all while Nik’s faith in his father crumbles and the sparks between them burn brighter. As the competition heats up, Elara and Nik must choose: fight to win the competition and secure a future of safety for them both, or use the power of Elara’s art to spark a revolution.
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Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home.
\nSo when she comes across Stewart Whitfield - annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family - with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it’s in her nature to help. But Stewart’s proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as public dinners and high-society benefits turn into sunset boat rides and kisses that hit her bloodstream like a ghost pepper, Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful. She’s never relied on anyone besides herself - can she really start now?
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Tressa Fay Robeson has never been shy, which is how she’s made a name for herself as an in-demand hairstylist and social media star. So she can admit that spending her days at her hair salon and her nights with her tight-knit group of friends (and one grumpy cat) is not the kind of exciting life she’d hoped for.
\nWhen a misdirected text from a stranger leads to a flirty exchange, she surprises herself by suggesting an impulsive meetup. But the woman, Meryl, never shows. Tressa Fay brushes it off - until Meryl’s sister and friend show up at the salon demanding to know what’s going on. Because, you see, there’s no way Meryl could have texted her. Meryl has been missing for a month.
\nTressa Fay and her tight-knit group of friends soon discover they aren’t dealing with a catfish, but a temporal paradox. As they come to terms with the idea of parallel universes, they realise how many times their paths have crossed like this before. But even as they understand the multiverse more and more, nothing keeps Meryl from vanishing.
\nAs it draws closer to the moment of Meryl’s disappearance, there’s only one question: Have they done enough to change the outcome, or have they done so much that none of them will make it past that fateful day in September?
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It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty.
\nComplicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears.
\nBut Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger - a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.
\nWhen Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life - of success, failure, and joy - or risk losing themselves altogether.
\nWith a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future.
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Most weed farms in Humboldt don’t last more than a season, but there was always Sourland. And where there was Sourland, there was Sapphire. Hidden in the woods of Garberville, her farm was a haven for wayward souls - rebel college kids, down on their luck townsfolk, rejects, neo-hippies, eco punks - anyone willing to work. Sapphire took them in and offered them a place to live and learn. Everything changes one weekend when Sapphire dissapears, her scorched truck found days later deep in the woods.
\nFrankie, a hypercompetent, disgraced ex-ballerina and Sapphire's old girlfriend, returns to the farm and says that Sapphire promised her control of the land. When she arrives, she finds that Fizz - Sapphire's most recent lover - an ambitious former baseball player with a preternatural green thumb and colorful past, has already begun preparing Sourland for another harvest season.
\nThe farm’s fate hangs in the balance, and with it, the promise of the future Fizz and Frankie each once imagined for themselves. But their past demons remain hauntingly close, threatening to destroy the tenuous lifeline that control over the Sourland would offer them. And all the while, the specter of Sapphire looms over them in cryptic notes, in the garden harvest, in every blade of grass and piece of dirt.
\nA brilliantly constructed novel of intention, memory, and betrayal, Sourland sparkles with the beauty and grime of the California woods. Dixon's novel is about how our pasts, mistakes and true natures catch up to us all - despite our best intentions.
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Princess. Priestess. The most beautiful girl in Troy. Cassandra is used to being adored - and when her patron god, Apollo, offers her the power of prophecy, she sees an opportunity to rise even higher. But when she fails to uphold her end of the agreement, she discovers just how very far she has to fall. No one believes her visions. And they all seem to be of one girl - and the war she’s going to bring to Troy’s shores.
\nHelen fled Sparta in pursuit of love, but it’s soon clear Troy is a court like any other, with all its politics and backstabbing. And one princess seems particularly intent on driving her from the city before disaster can strike . . .
\nBut when war finally comes, it’s more than the army at their walls they must contend with. Cassandra and Helen might hold the key to reweaving fate itself - especially with the prophetic strands drawing them ever closer together. But how do you change your future when the gods themselves are dictating your demise?
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Local history insists that a legendary pirate buried his treasure somewhere beneath Windward, the decayed Cooper estate on Winthrop Island, but Lucy Cooper never trusted the fable that broke her family apart. When a widowed Lucy returns with her young daughter to grieve her estranged father, she discovers the property’s buried under a mountain of debt, and Ben Ressler has just turned up on her doorstep.
\nThirteen summers ago, a teenaged Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing next door at the Peabody estate, and the object of an all-consuming crush by Laura Peabody, Lucy’s best friend. Those two weeks with Ben were the best and worst of Lucy’s life, dooming her friendship with Laura. Now Ben’s returned to live quietly in the Peabodys’ caretaker lodge, after a fatal accident ended his dazzling NFL career. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive.
\nAs Lucy reconstructs her father’s troubling final days, she uncovers his research on the frozen winter of 1717, when a desperately wounded pirate sought refuge on Winthrop Island with an enigmatic healer. To Lucy, this history points the way to a different kind of how to forgive yourself for the mistakes of the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn of events reveals that someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.
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On the surface, Alice has her life together. She's got a job in music she loves; she's firmly sober; and she's grateful to be back in the good graces of her ex-girlfriend-once-best-friend-now-literal-only-friend Gin. Just in time, too, because Gin's getting married this summer! And Alice gets to be a bridesmaid.
\nIf only the maid-of-honor wasn't Renee Type-A, the opposite of her in every way, and a long-time Alice-hater who's clung to her animosity like a leech. Every second Alice spends around Renee makes her feel like who she used to be, rather than the person she’s spent years trying to make herself into - and she doesn’t want to be reminded of her younger self any more than she wants to be thinking, more constantly than she wants to admit, about her hair, her lips, her wit . . .
\nNo, Alice has her own stuff to figure out. She still loves music, but her career feels directionless. She’s grieving the loss of her father just a year ago, to alcohol. And then she finds out that her mother's started to date her father’s ex-bandmate, which sends her reeling . . . and with the wedding just around the corner, she doesn't want to bother Gin about any of it.
\nIt's pure chance that Renee runs into Alice, just when she needs someone the most - and suddenly, everything shifts. Neither of them are what they assumed the other to be. Over the days and nights they’re spending helping Gin throw a DIY summer wedding of epic proportions, Alice and Renee discover that though they have nothing in common - that might be precisely what each of them need.
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If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.
For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.
Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
\nTrauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors.
\nIn The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments - from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga - that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity.
\nBased on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal - and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
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When news hits that the Americans have entered the war between North and South Korea, everyone believes the war is all but over. Surely it is only a matter of time before Oksoon’s dad and brother will return from the south where they have gone to look for opportunities. As they wait, they are surprised to see the Chinese have also now entered the war, bombing their capital city Pyeongyang. They must quickly decide if they too should flee south toward Seoul or wait for their family. With winter closing in and very few resources left, the trek won’t be easy - and their father is the head of the family, after all. But neither will it be easy living under a communist regime.
\nMeanwhile, far to the south near Jinju, Oksoon’s cousin Junho flees the war to find refuge at the Lord’s Beloved Home for Children. As the orphanage struggles to keep its doors open, Junho is put in charge of drafting letters to rich American benefactors, convincing them to send money to Korea. But when the enigmatic orphanage director brings her aristocratic niece to stay at the Home, Junho finds himself caught between his impulse for survival and his growing affections, which put him at risk of being expelled from the only safe place he knows.
\nMovingly rendered, Song for Another Home highlights the tension between personal dreams and duty to family, the power of resilience, and how choices made in a brief moment have consequences that reverberate for lifetimes.
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Seventeen-year-old Isadora is reeling after the sudden loss of her older sister, Eleni, to a pulmonary embolism. Her grieving parents can’t offer much support - her only reprieve is her close friend Ani, but lately the intensity of her feelings for Ani have been more confusing than comforting. Then Isadora discovers secret letters in Eleni’s belongings that suggest her artist sister was hiding more from her family than Isadora ever expected.
\nIsadora travels to her uncle’s apartment in New York City, where Eleni lived, determined to unravel the threads of her sister’s life. As she searches for clues, Isadora embraces her own sexuality and begins to fall in love. But can she learn to live when Eleni will never have the same chance?
\nHeartbreaking and healing, this gut-punch of a novel is an essential read for anyone who’s ever lost - and loved.
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From the trailer parks of Vegas to the mansions of Nashville, Bunnie Xo has lived a lot of lives and seen the darkest sides of humanity. Her memoir, Stripped Unfiltered and Unapologetic, is cold, clear evidence that no one is irredeemable. With a heavy dose of humor and a refreshing sense of self-awareness, Bunnie pulls no punches as she shares her journey of redemption while offering some homespun wisdom to those who need a little saving themselves.
\nAlisa DeFord, known to her millions of fans as Bunnie Xo, started at the bottom and spent the first part of her life falling even deeper. Now, Bunnie Xo is one of today’s most successful podcasters and has paved her way through the entertainment industry as the owner of Dumb Blonde Productions, building an empire with heart and personality at the forefront.
\nStripped Down is the story of how Bunnie Xo rose to the top, how she used her own wiles to reach her goals, how she knew redemption was up to her - and that no one could hand it to her - and a message to anyone who needs advice on breaking their own cycles.
\nHilarious, earnest, thought-provoking, and occasionally downright shocking, Stripped Down is a modern-day rag-to-riches story and a message of hope to anyone struggling to redeem themselves.
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Saeldian has sworn never to fall in love. That oath isn’t just a personal promise, but rather a magical pact, granting them powerful abilities. The only catch? They must never give their heart away - a deal that Saeldian is perfectly content with. They’ve seen firsthand how messy love can get.
\nSaeldian prefers their no-strings-attached life as a con artist, pulling off heists and leaving a trail of broken hearts behind them. But when a grift goes horribly wrong, they catch the eye of a mysterious patron with a job offer they can’t refuse.
\nThe mission? Steal a gem called “The Kiss of Enduring Love” and return it to the Feywild. Simple enough, until Saeldian discovers their ex-partner, Kell - a charming bard - is part of the team.
\nThe last time Saeldian saw Kell, things hardly ended on good terms. A kiss became a betrayal, leaving Kell hurt and confused for almost a decade. But Kell can’t just walk away - not when this job might finally be his ticket back to the Feywild.
\nForced to work together again, their adventure takes them from high-society parties to Feywild couple’s therapy. But as Saeldian and Kell rekindle their chemistry, they realise the gem is much more than a fey bauble, and their simple heist has summoned powerful enemies . . .
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Sonny Magee has spent most of her life alone, finding comfort in quiet solitude and scribbling in the private pages of her notebook. She lost her loving but troubled mother in childhood and was raised by an indifferent, sometimes cruel grandmother who left her scarred and naïve about life.
\nWhen Sonny mysteriously comes into a large sum of money, she finds herself in Arizona, at the luxury Sanctuary Resort & Spa. Out of her element and her comfort zone, she struggles with the spa’s doting staff and the unfamiliar wealth and constant small talk of her fellow guests.
\nForced proximity introduces her to a cadre of eccentrics, and something akin to romance blossoms with a resort employee. Yet Sonny still feels most at peace when people watching from the margins, headphones on and scrawling in her notebook. But when a freak accident disturbs Sanctuary's carefully curated tranquility, a shocking twist crumbles Sonny’s inner world, and she finds herself unexpectedly - and maybe even pleasantly - surprised by the people around her.
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In a riveting new novel from the acclaimed author of The Astrology House, three women come together to investigate a string of haunting disappearances in a tropical paradise.
\nWhen Paige arrives at Sueños, the Caribbean’s most exclusive resort on Beck Island, she’s eager to use the time away from her young son to shake off the writer’s block that has stifled her new career as an author.
\nHollywood starlet Lindsay Law is on a mission of her own at Sueños: spiraling from a recent Oscar loss, she’s determined to find out why the winner in her category gave thanks to Mara Morgan, the legendary actress who owned Beck Island before her tragic death.
\nWhile Paige and Lindsay are drawn together by creative inspiration, Gabby, the resort’s concierge, is torn apart by the loss of a coworker and the mysterious appearance of a man from her past. Gabby still has the power to grant her guests’ most over-the-top requests, but she’s helpless against her own grief and confusion.
\nAs the sun-soaked days of bliss morph into sinister connections, Paige, Lindsay, and Gabby are united by a shocking twist, and must race to untangle the knot of Beck Island’s mysteries before another woman vanishes.
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I swore I’d never come back to Clover Lane. But when my aunt left us her home, I couldn’t say no. The last in a neat row of houses with white fences, it was the life I’d always dreamed of for my family. They deserved it . . . even if I didn’t.
\nAs neighbours drop by to welcome us, I see the sparkle back in my daughter Morgan’s eyes and know we’re safe. I won’t let her near the woods where my best friend went missing, but a coffee date with the people next door has me feeling like we belong. But then the first letter arrives: Dear Neighbour. I know who you are. I know what you did . . .
\nSuddenly, I notice curtains twitch and find myself looking over my shoulder as I leave the house. When more letters arrive and rumours poison the street, I start double-locking the doors. How much do I really know about the people next door? Are my children safe? Is there anyone I can trust?
\nSomeone thinks they know what happened that summer. I know they’re wrong, but my worst fear is realised when the last letter drops: Morgan is missing . . .
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Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight years old. Both passionate, impulsive, and headstrong - they’ve always clashed . . . and come back together. Until now. It’s the eve of Frankie’s wedding weekend, and she doesn’t know where they stand or even if George will show up as her best man.
\nThen, at the start of the festivities, in walks George. For one glorious evening, surrounded by her loved ones, Frankie’s life is finally perfect. But it all comes crashing down when her fiancé dumps her the next morning, leaving only a note as an explanation.
\nCrushed and confused, Frankie returns to her family’s home to wallow. But George has a different idea and a plan for healing Frankie’s broken heart. He wants her to go on her honeymoon. With him. For one week, to the lush rainforests and misty beaches of Tofino.
\nFrankie agrees, seeing the trip for what it really is: one last chance to repair their friendship. Even if it means unearthing secrets and long buried feelings neither knows how to handle. Even if it means falling apart for good.
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A work of immersion journalism about four young romance scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam, and the moral dilemmas they face.
\nWhen his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he traveled to Lagos to find his mother’s scammer and stumbled on a bigger story. There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa’s largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves “Yahoo Boys,” and each year they steal millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones.
\nIn The Yahoo Boys, Barragán takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who believes he caused the death of a Kentucky woman who was his victim for years. Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they steal, while others become dependent on drugs and “cash out” - successfully scam a victim - only to lose it all.
\nThrough the Yahoo Boys’ twisting fortunes, Barragán discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront. A work of radical empathy, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same coin.
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Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane are the envy of the mystery community, the perfect partners in life and in writing. Together they coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they’ve been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle.
\nBut their story isn’t quite the fairytale it seems to outsiders. Twenty years and twenty books after they met, Thea wants out. Their marriage and partnership haven’t been working for some time, and what better place to announce the end of the series than where it started?
\nExcept shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. The stunned conference-goers put it down to an unknown allergy, but Thea isn’t so sure. Could someone be trying to kill her? Perhaps her loving husband isn’t as ok with their series ending as he pretends, or maybe Nadine, the upstart young author who is vying to take Thea’s place, wants her out of the way. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has a motive, and when a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges - these deaths aren’t random, they’re following the murders in Death Takes a Castle exactly. Murders that Thea and Fred wrote.
\nIn order to save the day - and maybe even their marriage - the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree. That is, if they can trust the person they’ve spent twenty years plotting murders with . . .
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Post-war London is a city in flux, with burned-out buildings serving as vivid reminders of the past. But beneath those scars is a sense of resurging optimism. Chrissie Walker, a new student at Goldsmiths arts college, feels it keenly. So does Mary Quant, the auburn-haired classmate who becomes Chrissie’s best friend.
\nLike Chrissie, Mary wants more from life than to nab a husband and settle down. Though shy, Mary shows her daring in subtle ways, including her home-sewn clothes. Designed to run and move in, her outfits inspire Chrissie and others to reinvent their own style. They also catch the eye of charismatic fellow student Alexander Plunket Greene, who becomes Mary’s partner and helps fund the opening of Bazaar, a King’s Road shop that marks the beginning of an empire.
\nDresses with ever-rising hemlines, skinny-rib sweaters and Peter Pan collars, boldly patterned tights and scarves - Mary Quant’s “Chelsea look” becomes a sensation among socialites, working-class girls, and everyone in between. As the miniskirt becomes a global phenomenon, Mary Quant ignites a fashion revolution that transforms everyone in its orbit - including Chrissie, who must reconcile her own ambitions with her friend’s fame, debutante Daphne, whose life opens up in unexpected ways, and Fern, an aspiring model who will become an icon.
\nIn the years that follow, each will deal with the public and personal challenges faced by unconventional women willing to break the rules - and in the process, transform the world.
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Reeling from a very recent divorce, Frankie has moved into a glamorous London neighborhood. This is a new chapter in her life. She's decided to put down roots with Blue, the beautiful Persian cat she left her marriage with.
\nBut little doubts about her perfect new life start to grow and when Blue returns one night from slipping into places he shouldn't, Frankie’s concerns solidify. Two words are roughly scratched into his collar: HELP ME. Unsettled and unwilling to ignore the incident, Frankie roots out an old unused \"cat cam\" collar. What slowly begins as a voyeuristic fascination with her neighbors and the secrets they're hiding soon turns into a perilous quest for the truth that threatens to bring untold terrors to her doorstep.
\nA riveting thriller about the terrible secrets hidden behind the pastel-colored façade of one of London's most upscale enclaves.
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A radiant, exquisitely told portrait of a young woman growing up between cultures, in search of her future self.
\nBefore you are anything, you are a daughter.
\nAt first, you are a child at home in your mother’s belly: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become? At the Dol ceremony on your first birthday, dressed in a bright fuchsia hanbok, your family gathers around to see which item you’ll reach for that will determine the course of your life. You choose the pencil.
\nAs your family moves from Seoul to snowy Minnesota, you and your mother find yourselves in a new American life that you must navigate together, mastering its language and customs. Soon enough, you are in pursuit of perfection - your mother marshaling you through a childhood of achievements to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. But you are not just your mother’s daughter, despite her sacrifices. As the years go by, you want to build a life between these two cultures that feels yours - an identity that lies somewhere in between your homeland and motherland.
\nTold in incandescent prose, Cay Kim’s debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between worlds, and a glorious love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we’re from.
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Returning home from a month-long work trip covering the European championships for ESPN, worn out by life but too jet-lagged to fall asleep, Chris Jones opened his wife’s laptop intending to get a little writing done. Instead, he found a series of text messages that would burn his marriage - and his world - to the ground. “In the span of twenty minutes,” Jones writes, “I lost my wife and my best friend. In the coming weeks, I would lose my house, half my money, and some equal measure of my boys. That wicked morning, that terrible dawn, I watched the sun peel back the longest night of my life, and I felt my anger already making room for sadness, fear, disbelief. I was forty-two years old. Nothing true of my life would be true again.”
\nOverwhelmed by sorrow and often terrifying rage, Jones contemplated suicide, not for the first time. He fought to carry on, for his two sons if no one else, only to end up in an emergency room, begging a doctor for help. That was the start of his way back. He embarked on a journey to understand who he is and the mistakes he has made, to let go of anger and find forgiveness, and to give himself over to something outside of an underdog English soccer team from an underdog northern town called Burnley, beloved by his grandfather, forever destined to also-ran status. In some ways, following Burnley mirrored the ups - and downs - of the rest of his life, and Jones began taking the team’s lessons as his own. Together, they would navigate the long journey from hope to despair back to hope again.
\nHow does one rebuild a life? Can something as simple as soccer give someone a reason to live, offering solace and ultimately meaning? In this searing, beautiful memoir, Chris Jones reveals how his love for the game brought him joy, connection, and purpose when he needed it most.
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In an isolated village at the edge of a forest, the last of humanity ekes out a spirited existence on an Earth that was ravaged by cataclysm generations ago. Here, Sky Memoriam prepares to assume the role of memory keeper, sole relator of the long-forgotten histories of the Old World. But Sky is in for a shock.
\nWhen a ship from somewhere out in space lands in the survivors' clearing, its wisecracking AI interface, known as Box, quickly announces its intention to integrate Sky into what the visitor insists is the true reality. It seems assimilation is necessary if Sky is going to withstand the eldritch horrors - so soul-rippingly incomprehensible there are no words to describe them - that are coming.
\nCreature-combat training aside, Sky's greatest task will be making sense of everything the snarky bot keeps trying to impart about limitless imaginations, the endless infinity of other worlds, and the dangers on this one. Being torn between two realities - the one of the wasteland Sky and the plucky village folk call home and a new one proffered by Box - is enough to drive anyone insane. But as Sky soon discovers - and as weird as it sounds - madness itself may be the key to surviving this wild ride.
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As editor in chief of their school’s literary magazine, Mal Flowers expected senior year fall to be full of cozy sweaters, good coffee, and copyediting. They just want to stick to The Plan to graduate and get out of their small Midwestern town - a place where, as a broke, fat, queer person with ADHD, they’ve never really fit in. But when budget cuts result in the lit mag’s cancellation, Mal is suddenly scrambling to fill the hole in their college application.
\nThat is, until Emerson Pike - who also has ADHD but is loud, confident, and Mal’s complete opposite - suggests the staff go rogue and create a zine instead. Which would be cool, except that making and selling contraband isn’t exactly what Mal envisioned as the extracurricular activity on their college application. A zine would be unofficial, unapproved, and definitely not in The Plan.
\nBut a zine is also a good way to spend more time with Emerson, whose playful banter and bad jokes Mal can’t seem to get enough of. And maybe, with a group of new friends, the back of the charming coffee shop where Emerson works could be somewhere Mal does belong. Because breaking the rules with Emerson - and flirting with her over coffee - is fun.
\nMaybe The Plan isn’t the only way to find happiness, but can Mal let go of something they’ve depended on for so long?
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Two men venture through strange landscapes towards unknowable destinations. Paul, a feted designer, wanders the echoing corridors of a server farm in Norway - before, in a sudden blackout, he seems to vanish. In another time and space, a wounded stranger wakes in a forest, watched over by a young girl who helps him flee to an icebound settlement where perhaps he will find safety.
\nInventive, enigmatic and chromatically resonant, Air is the seductively disorienting new novel from one of the most significant European writers working today. Heir to the ingenious fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin or Jorge Luis Borges, resistant to single interpretation, it unfolds as a haunting journey through a layered universe that may be a dream, the afterlife or reality's inverted twin.
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Fashion influencer by day and grave-robber by night, Poppy Stringer is on call when Eddie Michaels - a flamboyant, piano-slamming rockstar and queer icon - unexpectedly dies. All Poppy has to do is retrieve Eddie’s body from the medical examiner’s office, but what starts as a routine delivery quickly goes off course when Eddie wakes up.
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Poppy must fight for her life in a blood-soaked night of carnage and fabulous entertainment all across Palm Springs.
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Great Britain, 2040. The Hope Party is in power, and their Future Generations laws have transformed the nation: the countryside is being rewilded, immigration curtailed, and births on the rise. But beneath the surface of this new order, freedom is fading.
\nKaren has learned to navigate this new world. A devoted wife to Tom, whose legal career thrives while hers has stalled, and a mother to seventeen-year-old twins, Rory and Charlotte. Charlotte is destined for Oxford, her future bright - until she reveals a life-changing secret: she's pregnant.
\nWith abortion now outlawed, Karen faces a terrifying choice. She refuses to let her daughter's dreams crumble, but seeking an abortion is fraught with danger. If they're discovered, Charlotte would disappear into 'Protective Custody', a chilling fate shrouded in mystery.
\nIn desperation, Karen turns to her sister Isobel, a gynaecologist working under the new regime. Isobel is reluctant to help at first, but when Charlotte's pregnancy is revealed to be ectopic - and life-threatening - the stakes skyrocket. Their only hope: an illegal journey to Ireland, where the laws are less draconian, but every step is shadowed by surveillance. As Charlotte's case grabs national headlines, the three women must rely on secret resistance networks to survive - and fight back.
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Ten thousand years ago, five cosmic beings - a dragon, a phoenix, a serpent, a lion, and a wolf - set their worlds on an inevitable collision course. Each civilisation was given one command: destroy the rival worlds, or crash into them and die.
\nAs the planets draw near to each other, the moment of final reckoning is at hand. In a galaxy filled with starfighters and superweapons, magic and manipulation, planet-killing devices and mechanised legions, five heroes must defend their homeworlds against overwhelming odds.
\nBut when prophecy and destiny collide, a far greater power begins to stir - one that challenges everything they’ve been told.
\nOaths will be broken. Chains will be shattered. Champions will rise. The fate of the universe hangs in the balance as these heroes discover whether any world deserves to survive.
\nThe War of the Creators has begun.
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1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energised by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
\n1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence - Pepper is a native speaker.
\n1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
\nWith his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.
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Whether you want to criticize, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story. Start with labor: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace: a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does - we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.
\nThe intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. . Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of \"value,\" every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.
\nAnything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI - as he so successfully did in Enshittification - Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life \"after\" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.
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After a botched hit in Avenhar lets an explosives merchant slip away - and the manor self-destructs in a blast that doesn’t sound entirely natural - Silas is reassigned before the blood on his wire is dry. His handler gives him a new target in Valthenar, a city clawed apart by the Hand and the remnants of the old regime, and an impossible condition: finish the job in a week . . . or become disposable.
\nSilas and his assigned partner Carris ride west into fae touched places where shadows double and the air tastes of copper and flowers, where the memory stone from Yur burns warm in warning, and where even Guild communications feel compromised. Someone is listening. Someone is cutting lines. And someone is moving threshold-resonant materials - crates and wagons filled with the essence of the fae gates themselves.
\nIn Valthenar, the assignment isn’t just an assassination. It’s a doorway into a conspiracy: harvested gate-frequency, silenced talents, and an engineer named Harwell building a resonance bridge designed to do what should be impossible - force the barriers between worlds to break. To stop it, Silas must trust a girl who listens to the Song without caging it, survive the Hand’s enforcers, and find a melody he didn’t know he still carried . . . before the bridge is completed and the world’s last thin line becomes an invitation.
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I stand on the balcony with my gorgeous husband, Reuben, by my side. My family have returned to this beautiful French hotel to celebrate my mother’s seventieth birthday. The sun is shining and everything seems perfect. It’s paradise but I feel like I’m trapped . . .
\nBecause twenty years ago someone was killed in the glittering swimming pool.
\nI watch as my children run around excitedly, my parents sip cocktails, and my brother throws his head back as he laughs. But a shiver runs down my spine because I know what really happened all those years ago.
\nI have to smile and lie to my family because of the secrets I’m keeping. Then I receive a text message, and the words turn my heart to ice:
\nYou should never have come back here . . .
\nI can’t sleep and I’m constantly looking over my shoulder. And then one night as Reuben and I stroll in the hotel grounds, I see a woman’s lifeless body in the pool. My mouth opens in a silent scream. It’s happening all over again.
\nAre my precious family now in danger too?
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Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém - a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue.
\nThe mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and - most lethal of all - a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined. To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.
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Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.
\nBut Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”
\nThe new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre - perhaps ridiculous - local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
\nJoyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
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Struggling writer Wren Lee hasn't slept properly in eighteen months. Not since the car accident that derailed her entire life. The night she still can't fully remember. So when she receives a surprise inheritance from her estranged grandfather, a house in rural Virginia seems like the escape Wren desperately needs.
\nBut the grand mansion she arrives at is nothing like she hoped. From the moment Wren arrives, something feels wrong. A strange lullaby echoes through the maze-like hallways at night and Ruth, the housekeeper who still sets a place at dinner for a dead man, watches Wren with an intensity that goes beyond protective. Unwelcome and unsettled, Wren is determined to uncover the house's secrets, starting with the forbidden east wing . . .
\nThen the storm hits, and Wren is trapped with no way out. To survive, she'll have to confront not only the darkness in these walls but the buried truth about the night that broke her. Because in this house, the past doesn't stay buried. And neither do its ghosts.
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Dominque Dupont is one of the world’s most sought-after designers of wedding dresses, and is as unfailingly chic as her gowns. Her international list of clients includes royals and presidents’ daughters.
\nAs for her own adult daughters, Felicity and Violet, they have unconventional views on marriage, due in part to their family history. Dominique’s French mother, Marie-Aurélie, was the adored mistress of a famous financier, and Dominique and her faithless husband divorced decades ago.
\nFelicity, an artist, is in no hurry to get married. Unfortunately, her beau, Taylor, is. When she expresses ambivalence, Taylor reveals a dark side that frightens her. Too ashamed to confide in her mother or sister, she agrees to an elaborate wedding with deep misgivings.
\nFun-loving Violet is dating a sports reporter, but firmly believes one should never spoil a good thing with matrimony. When he slips an MVP ring on her finger, they decide to celebrate their love in a way that is true to themselves.
\nDominique’s own long-term relationship with a married man is no longer giving her what she wants. As she struggles with making a change, her Parisian mother considers rekindling an old flame.
\nAs plans for Felicity’s wedding proceed, each woman will question the true meaning of commitment in this dazzling novel from a master storyteller.
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When Imogen Bly's mother suddenly passes away, she leaves her Seattle apartment and returns to Lake Blair - the picturesque Washington town where she grew up. After Imogen and her twin sister Amelia arrive, ready to pack up their mother's home, strange things begin to happen, reminding Imogen of her long‑held feelings of dread surrounding her hometown.
\nImogen enlists the help of her first crush, next-door neighbor Rory, to uncover the truth about her mother's death and the traumatic event she experienced as a child. But is the boy who got away really the man with something to hide? Or is the suspicious neighbor in the house across the lake behind it all? When Imogen’s own family’s tragedies lead her to question the disappearance of a local young woman the previous year, her persistent unease becomes terrifyingly real and suddenly nowhere feels safe . . .
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When a tall, stunning butch protects Mira from her ex-boyfriend at the club - and offers her a safe place to stay - Mira should be relieved. Not flustered. She’s not into women.
\nYet this tough electrician with curves for days makes Mira’s heart race like never before.
\nBut Isabel, wounded by grief, forces Mira to keep her distance. Until Mira’s desperate to win a union election at work - and only Isabel has the experience to teach her how.
\nSoon they’re lingering over dinner, teasing each other as the apartment heats up. And Isabel is making her coffee every morning, hanging her shelves, giving her smoldering looks before bed . . .
\nBut Mira can’t afford temptation. Not after living with her nightmare ex. No matter how well Isabel takes care of her . . . or how much Isabel needs healing, too.
\nShe can’t risk her freedom - or her heart.
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Virgil Wounded Horse is desperately trying to escape his past as a hired vigilante on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. But when a legendary figure from the reservation is murdered, he’s forced to return to the job. Making matters more complicated, threats are coming from the Pine Ridge 705 - a street gang from a neighboring reservation who want to expand their reach into Rosebud - and Mitch Gagnon, a shady politician who will stop at nothing to gain more power.
\nWith a heated tribal council election looming, as well as new revelations regarding past injustices at the local Native boarding school, the stakes grow even higher. Will Virgil find the justice he’s seeking before it’s too late?
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In The Land and Its People, his first collection since Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, a brother, a lifelong friend. He tries on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery, and both succeeds and fails. He buys his sister a cape and discusses his brother with a jaded Duolingo bot. He walks dozens of miles with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. Ever adding to his list of “Countries I Have Been To,” he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo.
\nThere is sadness here - scrolling through his address book, he realises how many dear friends are now deceased - but also delight: he revels in author’s biographies, the malapropism that becomes a decades-long inside joke, and pair of well-made cotton underpants. He is bitten by a dog. A train passenger vomits in his face. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. Look how hard it is to be alive!
\nThroughout these essays - at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound - Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity this fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
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Noah Blue’s finally got her foot in the door. After clawing her way to the top of the charts with her webcomic, she’s garnered enough attention to earn a full-time position at a comic company re-launching their cult classic comic: Queen Leisah.
\nQueen Leisah is predicted to be an instant bestseller with movie deals already in the making. Things are falling into place. There’s nowhere to go but up . . . as soon as she gets one person out of her way.
\nSage Montgomery has always been the best artist in every building she’s stepped foot in. Raw talent’s gotten her webcomic to the top of the charts every month for the past eight years. She’s been the best for as long as she can remember. Sure, her career has plateaued but that can be fixed with a big, mainstream comic.
\nShe was promised full creative control over Leisah. Instead, she got a shared credit with the one artist who’s been breathing down her neck since college. The one artist who has a fighting chance of being better than her. Sage and Noah have to work as a team - or, at least appear to work as a team. They thought the hardest part of the relaunch would be drawing together. But that’s easy in comparison to resisting their feelings for each other.
\n
Ten years after her father - the infamous serial killer Gabriel Thorn - was caught, Ryan Shipley is back in Starling, Tennessee, trying to lay low. No one can know who she really is. No one can know the truth about her past.
\nBut as fresh eyes dig deeper into the case, old secrets refuse to stay buried. Cryptic texts, eerie coincidences, and a chilling note leave everyone wondering - does Ryan know more than she’s letting on? As the truth unravels, one thing becomes in a town full of secrets, Ryan might be the biggest mystery of them all.
\n
Clockmaker Arthur Throckmorton lives a quiet life with his sister and her children, only dreaming of adventure. So when a wealthy client offers him a job that involves traversing Shiftleaf - an enchanted forest that claimed his father decades ago - he reluctantly accepts. The forest is treacherous, but the money will change his family’s lives.
\nThe journey quickly turns perilous. Fleeing monstrous birds, Arthur stumbles upon a hidden vale where he meets the Lord of the Wood - a figure from his father’s many stories. Instead of the fairy prince Arthur always imagined, Ira is a morose man, slowly transforming into a beast, his power over a dying forest waning.
\nArthur enjoys the safety of the vale, and Ira’s company. But he yearns for his family. To safely return home and rescue Ira from a cursed and lonely existence, Arthur and Ira must reach the heart of the wood to heal the forest. Except the farther they venture from the vale, the more beastly Ira becomes. If they can’t complete their mission before he turns completely, Arthur could lose the man he’s falling for - and never see his family again.
\n
Lenny Winter is fifteen years old when she moves with her parents to an aging houseboat off the rugged coast of Washington. She imagines a quiet life spent charting constellations and chasing her dream of becoming an astronomer. Instead, a sudden tragedy shatters her world and catapults her to Blanchard, a renowned boarding school for the Pacific Northwest's elite, where wealth and tradition rule.
\n\n
Blanchard is dazzling, insular - and haunted by its own legends. At its heart lurks the Pascalianum Club, a secret society known to shape the school's greatest and most notorious students, and whose influence stretches far beyond campus walls. Hungry to belong, Lenny is drawn into its orbit, even as she senses that the club feeds on the very vulnerabilities she is desperate to hide.
\nAs privilege collides with grief and loyalty warps into obsession, Lenny’s choices will lead to an unforgettable reckoning - and a murder investigation that will test every story she tells herself about guilt, power, hope, and who she is becoming. Sweeping, suspenseful, and deeply moving, Bright Work is both a gripping mystery and a profound coming-of-age story - asking what we risk, what we become, and who we hold dear, when the need to belong eclipses everything else.
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Unmoored by her mother's sudden death, Frances has never felt so diminished, or so old. She's painfully aware that strangers no longer look at her the same way - and that she's now, at thirty-two, older than the great aunt for whom she was named, who was killed in the seventies under mysterious circumstances involving an extramarital affair.
\nHer husband, Ben, will do anything to help Frances regain her vivacity and sense of purpose. So when Frances suggests that they open their marriage, Ben complies.
\nOver the next two years, they explore their sexualities and latent kinks; they navigate jealousy, betrayal, desire, and obsession; they defend their choices - and their new identities - to confused friends. They do all of this together, as a team. But when Ben finds himself falling in love with another woman, just as Frances realises she's ready to settle down and have a baby, they are forced to confront the consequences of their experiment.
\n
Clara Graysword is Oricalis’s most wanted. Hunted and cornered, not even her mastery of tarot can save her this time . . . until the mysterious Worldkeepers appear. This secretive order may hold the key to changing Clara’s fate. If she dares to trust them.
\nBut the most dangerous alliance of all is one she’s already deeply ensnared Prince Kaelis.
\nKaelis, second-born prince of Oricalis and headmaster of Arcana Academy, is the one man she can’t escape - maybe she doesn’t want to escape. Ruthless, dangerous, and bound to Clara by destiny and desire, Kaelis tests her heart as much as her loyalty. Together, they grow closer to the most powerful secrets of the tarot . . . and to the truths they both hide that could destroy the passion that they no longer deny.
\nHidden in plain sight within Arcana Academy, Clara walks the dagger’s edge. Revelations about Oricalis threaten everything she thought she knew, and every choice she makes is the difference between salvation and ruin.
\nTo change the world, Clara must risk everything - her power, her beliefs, and her heart.
\n
Four stories. Four couples. Three years of real life after graduation . . .
\nA wedding.
\nA proposal.
\nAn elopement.
\nAnd a surprise pregnancy.
\nLife after college for Garrett and Hannah, Logan and Grace, Dean and Allie, and Tucker and Sabrina, isn't quite what they imagined it would be. Sure, they have each other, but they also have real-life problems that four years at Briar U didn't exactly prepare them for. As it turns out, for these four couples, love is the easy part. Growing up is a whole lot harder.
\n
Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven't been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again.
\nTo distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case - a series of apparent suicides, all young men who fell to their death from high places. She believes the deaths are linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boys they could fly. Ali goes to one of Power's shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones.
\nWhen Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past . . .
\n
After a hack gone tragically wrong, a teen girl is given an ultimatum: accept a harsh prison sentence or leave her old life behind and use her talents in the service of a shady government agency.
\nThree years later, the newly-named Augusta Pine has become a skilled wraith, one of the Identity Security Division’s secret operatives. She has no home, no family, and her only friends are her coolly professional handler and a snarky AI spybot. So when she is sent to Portland for an assignment, she seizes the chance to catch a glimpse of her beloved grandmother and rents the apartment next door.
\nWhat begins as nostalgic stalking turns into a fight for survival when a group of cyberterrorists hacks the building and imprisons the residents. Augusta doesn’t know exactly what they want, but she does know they are ready to murder for it. With her quick wits, tech savvy - and help from an intriguing fellow hostage - Augusta must race against the clock to stay one step ahead of the killers.
\nUnfolding through a suspenseful narrative interspersed with case-file excerpts, this is a pulse-pounding novel about identity, connection, and justice.
\n
The world might not have ended all at once. But end it did.
\nKayla Hollins is a survivor. Living in the fragmented wasteland of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, she's outlived a colony, a cult, a paramilitary group, and most of her family. So when her younger sister April falls seriously ill, Kayla will do anything to save her. They trek to Salt Spring Island, a beacon of hope in their otherwise brutalised world, which is rumoured to still have a hospital. But Salt Spring's utopia comes with a price. Not just anyone can enter paradise or access their medical care, and Kayla's past is chequered.
\nDesperate, Kayla makes a deal with Sid Charles, an aspiring politician with whom she had a chance encounter before arriving on Salt Spring. If Kayla and Sid get married, it will boost Sid's chances of election, and grant April automatic access to the medical treatment she desperately needs. And in two years, when Kayla is eligible for citizenship herself, they can get a divorce. Simple, right?
\nSid is distant and cranky, but Kayla comes to learn he is also shockingly kind. The more time she spends with him and his ragtag group of rescued boys, the more she comes to admire him. But with April's treatment and Sid's election on the line - and the constant terror of her past being discovered - Kayla isn't sure she can risk trying to change their arrangement.
\nTrapped together in the closest thing left to paradise, Kayla and Sid both know what it means for the world to end. But as they try to rebuild with the people of Salt Spring Island, there may be time left to save - if not the world - then themselves.
\n
Yaseema is a brilliant scholar and loyal servant of the Empire - or so they think. By day, she catalogs the fae relics of her conquered kingdom. But by night, she reclaims the artefacts in secret to restore magic to her dying land.
\nUntil she finds the long lost key to cross the River into the fae world and save her people. But a ruthless realm awaits her there, ruled by monsters wearing beautiful skin - especially the cold-eyed captain who sees through her lies. But even he isn’t what he seems - under the guise of upholding a cruel regime, he works to overthrow it from the inside. To succeed, he needs the same lost relic Yaseema the crown of an ancient Fae Queen.
\nWith magic that is a mystery even to her, Yaseema can help him find the crown and save his family from a fate worse than death. Unless she steals it first to help her own.
\nTo survive, they must work together to outwit ancient curses, battle creatures born of nightmares, and find a power that could resurrect their worlds. But as secrets unravel and loyalties blur, they face the greatest danger of losing their heart to each other.
\n
A controversial arts collective is rolling out their most audacious project to date: a second moon, set to launch from the Mojave Desert and into the Earth’s atmosphere at the summer’s end. The problem? No one seems to understand how “Moon2” actually works, or how it may alter the mind of every creature on the planet.
\nThe project is classified, but a malcontent member of the collective, Dean Konig, threatens their privacy with his secret long-distance relationship with an East Coast artist, Vesta Furio. Their constant video calls allow him to escape the confines of this isolated desert compound, while giving Vesta an escape from her failing marriage to an aging art gallerist who is spiraling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies surrounding Moon2.
\nThe Moon Papers tracks an intricately linked collection of characters between the East Coast and the Mojave Desert in the deliriously hot summer months leading up to the divisive launch event. A raucous, psychedelic, and humorous meditation on artistic and mystical vision, surveillance, conspiracy, and what makes us human.
\n
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston: Fort Sumter.
\nMaster storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter - a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
\nAt the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable - one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
\nDrawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink - a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
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It's 2005, and Susan is barreling down the Long Island Expressway driving a car full of friends to an indie rock show. Eliza is a surprise addition in the backseat - unexpected, out of place, and impossible to ignore. Their connection is immediate, electric, and complicated from the start, shadowed by the kind of small-town rumors that have a way of sticking. As quickly as they come together, they part.
\nAs Susan moves from Long Island to Brooklyn, from college to the insular world of indie labels, she begins to carve out a life in music, and the future she always dreamed of. Yet the scene that once felt like home reveals its limits, forcing her to confront who gets to belong, who gets to create, and what it costs to stay.
\nWhen Susan and Eliza reconnect years later, the pull between them hasn’t faded - but neither have the unresolved histories that first drove them apart. As past and present collide, Susan is caught between two worlds - where she's from, and where she's trying to go.
\nMoving between the raw intensity of youth and the clarity of hindsight, Long Island Girls captures the ache of growing up, the messiness and joy of queer identity, and the way music, memory, and desire shape who we become.
\n
History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now.
\nWill Chen plans to steal them back.
\nA senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son who has always been his parents’ American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible - and illegal - job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago.
\nHis crew is every heist archetype one can imagine - or at least, the closest he can get. A con artist: Irene Chen, a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering major who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they’ve cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down.
\nBecause if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars - and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they’ve dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted attempt to take back what colonialism has stolen.
\n
Delilah Thomas, beloved preschool teacher to the twos class, has always been the unconventional \"black sheep\" in the perfectly manicured town of Pearl, Georgia. While the rest of Pearl thrives on perfection and tradition, Delilah's thrift store wardrobe and carefree demeanor set her apart, much to the dismay of her pageant-loving mother and her circle of polished, lifelong friends. Though she loves her quiet life, she can't quite understand why she doesn't feel like she truly belongs in the only hometown she's ever known.
\nWhen a new multi-level marketing craze called Peach Pit takes hold of Pearl's high-achieving moms with promises of becoming #girlbosses, Delilah's suspicions are immediately piqued. Promising miracle beauty products made from the \"magical\" pits of Georgia peaches, the company pressures women to invest in hefty starter packs. To Delilah, it's not just a scam but a direct attack on the women of Pearl, already burdened by the weight of polished perfection.
\nBut when it gets personal, Delilah joins forces with her quirky elderly neighbor Mrs. Chopra and her best friend Jasper to uncover the truth behind Peach Pit's toxic façade. What begins as a battle against shady business practices quickly spirals into revelations about Delilah's own family, her lifelong friendships, and the place she holds in a town desperate to change her.
\n
The astonishing, never-before-told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II - when the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines . . . During a bombing campaign, hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Local Serbian villagers risked their own lives to give refuge to the soldiers, and for months the airmen lived in hiding, waiting for rescue.
\nIn 1944, Operation Halyard was born. The risks were incredible. The starving Americans in Yugoslavia had to construct a landing strip - without tools, without alerting the Germans, and without endangering the villagers. And the rescue planes had to make it through enemy airspace and back - without getting shot down themselves.
\nClassified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time. The Forgotten 500 is the breathtaking, behind-the-scenes look at the greatest escape of World War II.
\n
Wales, 1941. As the second world war ravages the globe and bombs fall from the sky, people all over the world begin to dream of King Arthur. The dreams spread like a fantastical plague, flooding people's sleep night after night. Whispers arise of wonders and unexplained sights - dragons in the London Underground, and strange lights over Stonehenge. Self-proclaimed prophets claim they are miracles, heralding Arthur's return at the time of Britain's greatest need.
\nElaine Ambrose has never dreamed of Arthur, and she doesn't believe in miracles. A librarian at the British Museum, she wants only to protect the museum's collection from the Blitz, and is frustrated to be sent instead to catalogue a reclusive professor's private library on the coast of North Wales. But all is not as it seems. Soon Ellie must confront what she's tried to ignore: she dreams not of Arthur, but of Nimue - the Lady of the Lake. And her dreams promise not salvation, but a return to the darkness of the last days of Camelot.
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SALEM
\nI wasn’t supposed to be here.
\n\n
I was supposed to be marrying my fiancé, looking forward to a tropical honeymoon. Instead, I found myself on a ferry headed for historic Balfour Manor on Blackridge Island, in the Pacific Northwest. Now I’m stranded, with a woman I’m irresistibly drawn to.
\n\n
Rayne holds secrets as dark and mysterious as her old house. Crimson shadows stalk the halls and strange voices call out in the night—but it's she who haunts me most.
\n\n
Following a gruesome murder, the island's true nature is revealed, and every night becomes a fight for survival. Something is stalking the forest, killing indiscriminately . . .
\n\n
And this time, we're its prey.
\n\n
\n
RAYNE
\nDeath has followed me since childhood. My mother's murder and father's violent death changed me, teaching me just how cruel the world could be.
\n\n
I never got what I wanted, until Salem showed up at my door. She’s adventurous, beautiful, and doomed if she stays here. Now, I suddenly have something to the woman who broke down my walls and saw through my mask, who showed me I'm worth loving.
\n\n
My family has long been buried, but even the vilest of secrets must be dug up again to survive the evil that hunts us. I finally have something to fight for, and I'll do whatever it takes to save her.
\n
The Decennial is over, but for the students of Blackwood Academy, the fight for the afterlife has just begun.
\nThe infamous school was hiding more secrets - and lies - than any of the Decennial’s participants could have imagined. And there’s still so much that remains buried beneath its ancient foundations. Now the future of the academy, and all the souls within it, rests in the hands of six former pupils:
\nThe charmer and the golden boy . . .
The traitor and the girl desperate to save her . . .
The Chosen One and the one who would choose her over and over again . . .
Any of them could be the hero the afterlife needs . . . or the villain who will destroy it for good. Because the truth is, Blackwood’s biggest secret has yet to come to light - and when it does, it will shake the institution to its core.
\n
Alabama, 1813: In the midst of the battle and massacre at Fort Mims, a baby is born. It’s a portentous beginning for Emilie McCain, who has inherited the Sight - visions that come in dreams guided by an owl. Owl is Emilie’s steadfast companion, a welcome balance to her mother’s neglect. Along with the Sight, Emilie possesses an innate talent for communicating with horses. In an era when a woman legally belongs to her husband, such gifts may be the only things that are hers to keep.
\n\n
The family makes a perilous move to Arkansas Territory, where Emilie becomes a master horse trainer and leatherworker. For all her skill with horses, Emilie sometimes fails to see the dark truth about the people she encounters. Other dangers, even when predicted, may be impossible to defend against - yellow fever, greed, vengeance, and the unforgiving land itself.
\n\n
Through love, marriage, heartache, and hardship, Emilie gains strength and resilience. After years of avoiding emotional entanglements, she meets a man who presents her with a horse to be trained and an offer of friendship she could sorely use. But with his arrival come other tests of her will and her judgement. Finally, a shocking revelation inspires an act beyond her imagining - and may set her free to find the place she truly belongs . . .
\n
When Kendra Michaels receives a cryptic message from her sometimes-paramour Adam Lynch, she concludes that he must be in extreme danger - the kind where he can’t trust his FBI and Justice department colleagues to rescue him. Lynch has saved Kendra’s life during past investigations so she’s immediately willing to put everything on the line for him.
\n\n
With her heightened senses, honed in the dark before she regained her eyesight in a cutting-edge surgical procedure, Kendra knows she can do what the federal agents cannot. So along with private investigator Jessie Mercado, Kendra is soon following the first intriguing clue to London.
\n\n
What they find there will lead to a chase with deadly stakes because Lynch is willing to risk it all to protect something he believes is bigger than himself. Something that could change life for everyone on the planet . . . if only they live long enough to share the truth.
\n
After many years abroad, Hatoko reluctantly returns to Kamakura to take over the stationery store left to her by her late grandmother. As the custodian of the store, she also inherits the profession of public scribe, a role Hatoko trained for as a child under the guidance of her strict grandmother.
\nAs the locals seek out Hatoko's help, she takes on all manner of writing letters of greeting, condolence, farewell, love, and more on behalf of those who come to her. A local community forms around Hatoko and the store, and when the secrets of her late grandmother begin to unravel, Hatoko learns that the role of the scribe requires much more than putting ink to paper.
\nSet to the rhythm of the four seasons and the Japanese rituals and festivities that come with them, Tsubaki Stationery Store is a charming story about the importance of community and the reconciliatory power of the written word.
\n
For sale: Greek cottage. One euro.
\nSkye MacKinnon is desperate for an escape. When she wins a lottery to buy a run-down cottage on a Greek island for only one euro, Skye jumps at the chance to get out of England and start over. As she unlocks the tattered blue door of her whitewashed new cottage, the sun-kissed sea glinting in the bay outside her windows, Skye immediately feels like she’s found her true home.
\nSkye and the other lottery winners - the first residents in these houses since the 1940s - form a tight-knit group, finding in one another the strong relationships they’d been missing in their own lives. When Skye and local contractor Andreas find a set of mysterious letters, they begin to unravel the history of the prior residents, and the truth about life on Folegandros during World War II.
\n
Kitty thought moving to London would spice up her life. Unfortunately, she ended up on Ashdown Close, where the hottest topic of gossip is a missed bin collection.
\nThat was before the arrival of Sian and Rich at number 8. They are cool and glamorous, and Kitty is perfectly willing to be dazzled by their company.
\nBut when she spots a mysterious woman furtively leaving their house, she realises they might not be the magnetic couple she thought. Aided and abetted by best friend Grace, Kitty feels she needs to investigate.
\nDo Sian and Richard really have something to hide, or are Kitty and Grace just being nosy neighbours?
\nAnd if they are, perhaps they are not the only ones. Because on this street’s nobody’s business might just turn out to be everybody’s business . . .
\n
What if Mary Bennet’s life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalised middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Jane Austen fans.
\nUltimately, Mary’s journey is like that taken by every Austen heroine. She learns that she can only expect joy when she has accepted who she really is. She must throw off the false expectations and wrong ideas that have combined to obscure her true nature and prevented her from what makes her happy. Only when she undergoes this evolution does she have a chance at finding fulfillment; only then does she have the clarity to recognise her partner when he presents himself - and only at that moment is she genuinely worthy of love.
\nMary’s destiny diverges from that of her sisters. It does not involve broad acres or landed gentry. But it does include a man; and, as in all Austen novels, Mary must decide whether he is truly the one for her.
\n
In a world divided into four rival Dominions, power is everything - and Rubi Morningtail has almost none. Three years after the Annihilation destroyed her homeland and shattered her memories, she lives as an Azure refugee in the Dominion of the Silver Tyger, scraping by as a ribbon dancer and hiding her little bit of singing magic. When she wounds a massive battle-tyger on her doorstep, she draws the notice of Blake Axefire - supreme metal mage, leader of the royal tyger warriors, and the last man an Azure should trust. His sentence? Cast her into the Bonding, a brutal trial where tygers choose their riders and slaughter the rest. Surviving is unthinkable.
\nBut survive she does. Now she's stuck on Blake's elite team racing to reseal the Anchors to the demon realm. With rebels striking, demons rising, and the Dominions at each other's throats, Rubi must unlock the truth of her magic and her past . . . while resisting her dangerous attraction to the ruthless warrior who could be her redemption - or her ruin.
\n
Set over 12 hours in 1985 the residents of Delmont Close are preparing a neighbourhood barbecue to watch the biggest music event in Live Aid. A day that will end having touched the lives of millions and changed the lives of all in Delmont Close.
\nHosted by the Gordon family, Lydia whose idols are Princess Di and Delia Smith, is determined to put on a show that will impress all. As the neighbours flood in, all the secrets that have been kept locked tight come rushing out.
\nRita, a new resident from Australia, harbours a shocking event in her past, Steve a young Falklands veteran battles his own demons, and Hanna, the Gordon's young teenage daughter prepares to flee to hide a shocking truth.
\nThe Barbecue at No.9 explores the nature of family and friendship, who we were and how far we have come.
\n
All games must come to an end. In this series-shattering conclusion, everyone is a player, long-held secrets are unveiled, precious threads are unraveled, and impossible mysteries are solved.
\nIn the grandest of games, there is so much to win - money, love, power, revenge - but there is also everything to lose.
\n
Jess loves volleyball - she really does. Playing in Southern California Beach Volleyball League with her best friend Tania is a blast, but their recent losing streak has destroyed her confidence. In fact, a lot of what used to bring her joy - stargazing, hanging with friends at Maggie's bar, and her adorable wiener dog, Fleming - just doesn't seem like enough anymore. It doesn't help that Vivienne, one of Jess's rivals in the league, always seems to be around just when she's feeling her worst. Vivienne is everything Jess isn' beautiful, confident, effortlessly charming, and, most infuriatingly, winning.
\nWhen Jess is ghosted again, it's another blow to her confidence. Who better to challenge her than the most confident girl she knows? And as Jess gets to know Vivienne, she discovers there's much more to her than just a pretty face (and wicked serve). But even though there's an undeniable connection between them, they're competing for the same spot in the pro leagues. Jess has the opportunity to build self-confidence and a better life, but she'll have to learn to believe in herself, and the people around her, if she doesn't want to lose everything she's gaining. And there's nothing Jess hates more than losing.
\n
Brett Novak is a young upstart chef, with real, raw talent - if only she could catch a break. After getting dumped by her married girlfriend and losing the perfect job offer, Brett accepts a temporary position as a live-in, personal chef of a reclusive, bestselling author, Carson Smart, who resides in a mansion on a secluded beach in Cape Cod.
\nCarson immediately seduces her, but things get complicated when Carson's wife, Vera, arrives home from her trip, and the love/hate relationship between the two spouses erupts, leaving Brett caught in the middle. Brett, starved for attention, craves Carson's affection and yet is oddly drawn to Vera's seductive and destructive charms.
\nAs Brett becomes an unwitting pawn and weapon, she questions how far husband and wife will go to wound the other. With nowhere else to turn, she has no choice but to stay - even as her hold on reality begins to slip. Can she survive her employers’ dark appetites?
\n
When Caroline Lash arrives in Greenhead, Massachusetts, she falls head-over-heels for Van Whittaker, a fleece-wearing, litter-collecting, kayak enthusiast with long, floppy hair and the personality of a Border collie. Born and raised in this picturesque coastal village, Van runs with the same crowd he did as a kid: His ex-girlfriend, Bailey, a beautiful girl who attracts men like moths to a flame; Augusta, old money, horsey, and snobbish; and Fran, surrounded by brothers and sons, too fed up with boys to ever consider marrying one.
\nTogether, the group runs wild through the marshes, beaches, and bars of Greenhead, drinking on houseboats, spending long afternoons sunbathing with their children, and playing games the way they always have. But when Bailey discovers that she is pregnant with Van’s baby, the delicate balance of the group’s friendship is thrown off. Soon Caroline is cast out of the circle and what she does next - in a potent mix of fury and heartbreak - exposes long-held secrets and works the entire town of Greenhead into a lather.
\nDazzlingly funny, sexy, and as juicy as it is astute, The Shampoo Effect is a story of late-night parties, early mornings with small children, the dawn of midlife, and a group of old friends finally growing up despite all their best efforts to the contrary.
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Izzy Chen is dreading her family’s annual Chinese New Year celebration, where they all come together at a Michelin-starred restaurant to flaunt their status and successes in hopes to one up each other. So when her seventy-three-year-old glamorous and formidable grandmother walks in with a stunning woman on her arm and kisses her in front of everyone, it shakes Izzy to her core. She’d always considered herself the black sheep of the family for harboring similar feelings to the ones her Nainai just displayed.
\nSeeing herself in her teenage granddaughter's struggles with identity and acceptance, Magnolia Chen tells Izzy her own story, of how as a teen she was sent by her Indo-Chinese parents from Jakarta to Los Angeles for her education and fell in love with someone completely forbidden to her by both culture and gender norms - Ellery, an American college student who became Magnolia's best friend and the love of her life.
\nStretching across decades and continents, Magnolia's star-crossed love story reveals how life can take unexpected turns but ultimately lead you to exactly who you're meant to be.
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When Ash spots an ad for Retro during a depressing Instagram scroll - she’s in debt and unemployed; everyone else is, evidently, thriving - she’s surprised the algorithm sent it her way. She’s heard of recreational time travel, but it’s way out of her budget. Then she sees the Come away with us! We’re hiring.
\nSo begins Ash’s life as a Time Travel Agent, leading wealthy tourists on vacations to historical hotspots. She takes bachelorette parties to live out their cowboy-romance fantasies in the Old West and throws “'20s for your twenties” birthday bashes at speakeasies; she smiles politely as rich Wall Street guys give prospecting a shot in the Gold Rush. It's all thrilling, outrageous, and totally surreal. Bygone America is just a Retro Metro ride away.
\nDespite Ash’s tendency toward cynicism, she finds herself swept up in her dazzling new job. Sure, Ash isn’t the actress she always dreamed she’d be. But isn’t this so much better? It’s like Ash’s life is a movie, complete with an impossible love triangle. How is she supposed to choose between her mysterious office crush and the handsome private eye pursuing her in 1937?
\nFor the first time in years, Ash’s life feels enviable - so she’d really rather not pay attention to the strange things happening to her memory and relationships outside Retro. But as her trips threaten to unravel her real life, she confronts an unsettling “escaping” into the past was never really an escape at all.
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In the cramped basement office of their university newspaper, Jake and Nadia break a huge story that exposes a decade of institutional corruption. In the quieter hours, they also fall in love.
\nThen Nadia leaves.
\nA decade later, she returns from New York, once a fast-rising finance hotshot, now exiled after a deal gone wrong. Back in Sydney, Jake has forged a reputation as a crusading reporter whose by-line regularly brings down the rich and powerful.
\nBattlelines are drawn when they're each pulled into the orbit of a biotech visionary whose startup becomes Nadia's big break and the target of Jake's latest investigation. As old wounds flare, both must decide how far they'll go to come out on top.
\nClear-eyed and taut, Good Intentions asks if it is possible to be a good person in a morally grey world, and what happens when someone you once loved with your whole heart threatens to topple everything you've built.
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The Serenissima is built from mist and belief, a mythical shadow sister to Venice and crossroads of the nine worlds.
\nWhen a laborer called Tiry has a dream that Serenissima will have a doge, and that they will marry the sea, he tells it to a fortune teller named Khadsha. She tells her apprentice, a gondolier called Taddeo, who tells a cop named Gom, who's heard it from five people this morning already.
\nAnd by that point, it's already settled into the bones of the Serenissima, more than half-fated.
Margaret thinks her time is up . . .
\nThings have been hard since her husband Derek died, and they never got over the disappearance of their daughter, Jeanie, all those years ago. With his support, it seemed like everything would be okay - okay enough, that is.
\nBut now Derek’s gone.
\nMargaret moves through the days slowly, quietly, alone. Then one day, Margaret returns home to an unlikely visitor, and together they set out to discover what really happened to Jeanie. Perhaps if she knocks on enough doors, she might find another end to the story.
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Frank and Chrissy meet a few days into ’70. Frank has been travelling around California for a while with friends, when someone tells him about a house in the desert two hours east of LA where the walls are steel and the glass shimmers. Frank tells I have to see this house. When Chrissy picks him up on the side of the road, all blond hair and oversized sunglasses, it’s love at first sight.
\nYears later, as their shared dream of recreating a mid-century masterpiece of a home in Britain threatens to overwhelm them, Frank will often think about how this was where it started. What if he had carried on walking, kicking at the dust? What if she had driven to Palm Springs the next day or even the next hour? Every moment of tomorrow would have completely changed.
\nSo begins California Gold, a portrait of a marriage, a family and the thin line between a dream and an obsession.
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Garrodigh was once a four-headed dragon, among the most powerful in Kardoša. After an unfortunate incident, he now has three heads, one stump, and a daily whirlwind of internal bickering. Centerhead wants to rain death upon all humanity, Bottomhead is like a feral cat, and Upperhead is under the delicate delusion that he is, in fact, human.
\nWhen a nearby battle goes awry, Garrodigh sneaks into an elite dragon rider academy, pretending to be tame to get free food and a warm bed. Lucky for him, rider Rania Albright is desperate enough for a dragon of her own that she overlooks his eccentricities.
\nAs Garrodigh recovers under Rania’s care, all three heads start to turn, for the first time, in the same direction. Each wants to protect her from the invaders who killed their fourth head - the same invaders who seek to conquer Kardoša. When the academy comes under attack, can this wild dragon and his wilder rider save their homeland together?
\nThis cozy fantasy intertwines epic battles with loving friendships, sharing an utterly unique perspective on what it means to be a \"monster.\"
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438 Days is the miraculous account of the man who survived alone and adrift at sea longer than anyone in recorded history - as told to journalist Jonathan Franklin in dozens of exclusive interviews.
\nOn November 17, 2012, Salvador Alvarenga left the coast of Mexico for a two-day fishing trip. A vicious storm killed his engine and the current dragged his boat out to sea. The storm picked up and blasted him west. When he washed ashore on January 29, 2014, he had arrived in the Marshall Islands, 9,000 miles away - equivalent to traveling from New York to Moscow round trip.
\nFor fourteen months, Alvarenga survived constant shark attacks. He learned to catch fish with his bare hands. He built a fish net from a pair of empty plastic bottles. Taking apart the outboard motor, he fashioned a huge fishhook. Using fish vertebrae as needles, he stitched together his own clothes.
\nHe considered suicide on multiple occasions - including offering himself up to a pack of sharks. But Alvarenga never failed to invent an alternative reality. He imagined a method of survival that kept his body and mind intact long enough for the Pacific Ocean to toss him up on a remote palm-studded island, where he was saved by a local couple living alone in their own Pacific Island paradise.
\nBased on dozens of hours of interviews with Alvarenga and interviews with his colleagues, search and rescue officials, the medical team that saved his life and the remote islanders who nursed him back to health, this is an epic tale of survival, an all-true version of the fictional Life of Pi. With illustrations, maps, and photographs throughout, 438 Days is a study of the resilience, will, ingenuity, and determination required for one man to survive fourteen months, lost at sea.
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Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand - and fail to understand - mental illness.
\nWhen the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.
\nMichael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.
\nDiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
\nThe Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many. In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.
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By the time Lou turns eighteen, modeling agents across Portland have scouted her for her striking androgynous look. Lou has no interest in fashion or being in the spotlight. She prefers to take photographs, especially of Ivy, her close friend and secret crush.
\nBut when a hike ends in a tragic accident, Lou finds herself lost and ridden with guilt. Determined to find a purpose, Lou moves to New York and steps into the dizzying world of international fashion shows, haute couture, and editorial shoots. It's a whirlwind of learning how to walk and how to command a body she's never felt at ease in. But in the limelight, Lou begins to fear that she's losing her identity - as an individual, as an artist, and as a person still in love with the girl she left behind.
\nA sharply observed and intimate story of grief and healing, doubt and self-acceptance set against the hyper-image-conscious industry of modeling and high fashion, Body Grammar shines with the anxieties of finding your place in the world and the heartbreaking beauty of pursuing love.
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Sparrow and her companions have been left with an impossible task: slay the immortal Deathless King, whose magic siphons the very life of the world to sustain himself.
\nThe answer may lie deep in the past, when those who would become Deathless Kings stormed the sanctuary of the goddess of Fate, in an attempt to remove their threads from the Weave and become immortal. They broke off a piece of the goddess's loom and hurled it to the earth, where it still lies at the center of a dangerous wasteland called the World Scar.
\nFor any chance against the Deathless King, Sparrow and her companions must brave the World Scar and reach the loom, which would grant the power of a goddess. But the journey is fraught with danger, and the powerful Deathless King determined to find them.
\nAnd if the loom is reached - what will the power of a goddess do to a mere mortal? Sparrow has no choice but to find out.
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Certainty Bulrush wants to be useful - to the Guild of Mages that took her in as a novice, to the little brother who depends on her, and to anyone else she can help. Unfortunately, her tepid magic hasn’t proven much use to anyone. When Certainty has the chance to earn her magehood via a seemingly straightforward assignment, she takes it. Nevermind that she’ll have to work with Mage Aurelia, the brilliant, unfairly attractive overachiever who’s managed to alienate everyone around her.
\nThe two must transport minorly magical artifacts somewhere safe: Shpelling, the dullest, least magical village around. There, they must fix up an old warehouse, separate the gossipy teapots from the kind-of-flaming swords, corral an unruly little catdragon who has tagged along, and above all: avoid complications. The Guild’s uneasy relationship with citizens is at a tipping point, and the last thing needed is a magical incident.
\nStill, as mage and novice come to know Shpelling’s residents - and each other - they realise the Guild’s hoarded magic might do more good being shared. Friendships blossom while Certainty and Aurelia work to make Shpelling the haven it could be. But magic is fickle - add attraction and it might spell trouble.
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When Lila Dixon gets a call that her mother has gone missing, she initially brushes it off - Mattie’s disappearances are a part of life, like earthquakes in their dusty California hometown. But this time the prime suspect is Lila’s larger-than-life the one-time baseball star, local hero, and fatal charmer John “Dix” Dixon. Dix’s main accomplishment as a dad was finding new ways to disappoint his daughter, but even Lila knows he’s not behind this.
\nAnd when they uncover a $250,000 deposit to Mattie’s bank account, and someone slips a threatening note under Lila’s motel door, they realise Mattie may be in real danger. Now they’re heading down a trail marked by unsavory Russian thugs, fat-cat farmers, and an unseen enemy who’s always a step ahead.
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Inspired by the author’s own family history, and spanning the past hundred years of Chinese history, this multi-generational family saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history.
\nNothing to My Name chronicles the intertwined fates of three generations of Chinese Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei. The Grandmother, Ah Xue, witnesses the rise of the Communist Revolution while earning a meager living combing the hair of the few wealthy ladies in her small fishing village. Mimosa, the Mother, grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles as the growing tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull their family apart. And Fei Fei, the Daughter, brought up as a “boy” by her activist father, grapples with gender identity in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
\nAwash in the tides of societal upheaval, Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei Fei are all driven by the instinct to survive, weathering hardship that splinters the boundary between the personal and the political. For listeners of sweeping upmarket book club fiction like Pachinko and Homegoing, Nothing to My Name is a braided history of suffering and dignity, of loss and reckoning, and of the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds.
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Welcome to sixteen-year-old Alex’s life, ripped straight from the headlines.
\nAlex is a victim of Munchausen by proxy, but he’s also a witty, sarcastic kid with unusually good crossword skills and a penchant for astronomy. At least he used to be. Now that he’s recovered from years of illness induced by his mother, he sort of has to figure out who he is all over again . . . And most importantly, he’ll have to decide if he can testify against the woman who gave birth to him.
\nAs Alex awaits the trial, his friends convince him to start a podcast as a way to tell his story. Together, they create “Lethal Lullaby.” The podcast brings Alex closer to his old life - hanging out with friends, cracking jokes, having fun . . . At the same time, new memories surface and disturbing revelations come out, forcing Alex to acknowledge that the podcast could be making things worse. It seems like he’s got deeper issues than he’d like to admit - and this time, he can’t blame them on his mom.
\nDay by day, Alex’s mental health crumbles, until he can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction. Should he trust himself to testify? And if he gets up there, what version of the truth will he share?
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Tess wants nothing more than for her upcoming society wedding to overshadow the failure of her first marriage. Her fiancé Warren, a steady soon-to-be state senator, is nothing like her first husband. Tess’s relationship with working-class artist Peter was a passionate crash-and-burn, and a chapter of her life that she's ready to forget.
\nPeter hasn’t seen Tess in five years, so he’s shocked to receive an invitation to her wedding. But he’s moved on too, and it wouldn’t hurt to prove it by showing up with a handsome younger man as his plus-one. Mitch, an aspiring writer, is intrigued by Peter and jumps at the chance to pry into the lives of his Waspy ex-in-laws. What he’s not bargained for is developing serious feelings for both Peter and Peter’s ex-Tess, the bride. But Peter and Tess have complex desires of their own, and Mitch is dangerously close to uncovering them.
\nWasp's Nest is a fast-paced, humorous, and heartfelt exploration of the shape of our affections that proves real love triangles connect on all sides.
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One of the most underestimated - and challenging - positions in the world, the First Lady of the United States must be many things: an inspiring leader with a forward-thinking agenda of her own; a savvy politician, skilled at navigating the treacherous rapids of Washington; a wife and mother operating under constant scrutiny; and an able CEO responsible for the smooth operation of countless services and special events at the White House.
\nNow, as she did in her smash #1 bestseller The Residence, former White House correspondent Kate Andersen Brower draws on a wide array of untapped, candid sources - from residence staff and social secretaries to friends and political advisers - to tell the stories of the ten remarkable women who have defined that role since 1960.
\nBrower offers new insights into this privileged group of remarkable women, including Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Patricia Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. The stories she shares range from the heartwarming to the shocking and tragic, exploring everything from the first ladies’ political crusades to their rivalries with Washington figures; from their friendships with other first ladies to their public and private relationships with their husbands. She also offers a detailed and insightful new portrait of one of the most-watched first ladies of all time, Hillary Clinton, asking what her tumultuous years in the White House may tell us about her own historic presidential run . . . and what life could be like with the nation’s first First Husband.
\nCandid and illuminating, this first group biography of the modern first ladies provides a revealing look at life upstairs and downstairs at the world’s most powerful address.
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When Julia Dodds meets Harry Adams, love hits her like a lightning bolt. He’s adventurous, charismatic, and impossibly handsome. Little does Julia know that her boyfriend has left out a few key details. His name isn’t Harry: it’s Ares, as in the ancient god of war. His mother is Hera, and his father is Zeus.
\nSoon, Julia is caught up in a world of wealth and privilege as she joins Harry at a lavish family reunion. Except these billionaires don’t just have wealth - they have divine powers. And the moment she steps onto their private island, Julia becomes their latest target.
\nIt’s no secret that the Gods love to meddle, and when it comes to Julia, Harry’s immortal relatives each have their own agenda. Harry’s mother, Hera, will do anything to protect her own. Harry’s sister-in-law Aphrodite has a deeply personal reason for hating Julia, and tasks Hermes, keeper of family secrets, with digging up dirt. Meanwhile, Hades has spent years trying to upend Zeus’s power - and now he finally sees an opportunity to strike.
\nSet against a globe-trotting backdrop that sweeps from New York’s exclusive private clubs to the wilds of New Zealand to the gated estates of the British aristocracy, Ungodly Rich is a story of love, revenge, secrets, sex, and the most ancient motivator of all: family.
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Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick hates the ocean. Has always been terrified of it. And now he’s in a real pickle.
\nDrifting alone in the sea after falling (or jumping? He can’t remember as the all-inclusive drinks on the cruise he was taking with his extended family were, well, inclusive) Kick must survive. Breath by breath, hour by hour in the lonely sea.
\nAs the waves crash over him, so too do the thoughts and memories of just how he got there. A Thanksgiving cruise with an obnoxious brother-in-law he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at. A father who gives the Great Santini a run for his money. And a mother, who already left the family boat, so to speak, a long time ago. His family may be complicated, and the pains of life may seem unbearable - infuriating enough to leap from the deck - but maybe the will to survive is stronger.
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2000: Isabelle Whitmore vanishes at Sherman Ranch in Anhalt, Texas, without a trace.
\n2025: The annual Lone Star Princess Pageant looms, bringing long-standing grudges to the surface. Ingrid fled Anhalt in the wake of her sister Isabelle’s disappearance and has now returned, just in time for a construction crew to start digging up Sherman Ranch; the pageant brings up past traumas that Melanie can't forget; Cat, newly sober, starts to feel threatened in ways that bring back old demons; and Sarah Lynn, who comes from a long line of pageant winners, knows that losing is not an option.
\nWhen old resentments and new confrontations reach their boiling point, temperatures drop to deadly degrees as a record-setting storm brings down the state’s power grid. With everyone trapped under one roof, scores will be settled, and more than one person will end up dead.
\nSome secrets are better left buried.
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Gretchen Falk, a Park Avenue sophisticate born into great wealth and blessed with a storybook marriage, knows she lives a charmed life, and she’s not about to risk losing any part of it. That’s why she tried to convince Richard, her devoted husband and father to their three children, not to join his old college friends on an expedition almost eight thousand miles away, to the imposing peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Little did she know the beautiful artist climbing alongside him might prove the far greater danger.
\nFrankie Callahan’s dream of artistic success is within reach, with her career-making exhibition at a celebrated New York gallery only weeks away. If all goes well, the show will leave her financially independent, free of the tainted money that ties her to a past - and a man - she’s desperate to escape. To mark the end of this chapter, she is going to climb Kilimanjaro. But when she learns she’s the sole female accompanying a group of male friends, Frankie realises that nothing about the trip will be as she expected. She certainly hasn’t counted on meeting anyone like the very charismatic, very rich, very married Richard Falk. By the time the group descends - with one fewer than when they began - they have lost more than they ever could have imagined.
\nNow, just two weeks after returning to New York, Frankie is dead, her East Village loft a blood-soaked crime scene. When Richard is charged in Frankie’s death, it falls to Gretchen to piece together how the life she so carefully constructed could have imploded so completely. There are only two things Gretchen knows for she’s the only woman Richard has ever loved, and he would never hurt anyone.
\nSomeone Else’s Husband is the sweeping and suspenseful story of two women on a collision course with love - and with each other - in which no one is right and everyone is very, very wrong.
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Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable, but their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make . . .
\nErica and Laure’s love story spans decades, marriage, children, secret trysts, and the agonising changes - both personal and political - that might mean they can be together, after all. But when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?
\nBeautifully capturing young love and all its complexities, Almost Life is a story of longing for the paths not taken, and the almost lives we live.
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Mei’s life isn’t what she thought it would be. She's still entangled in a love triangle with Jacques and Kath that began when they were teens; her parents are drowning in debt; and she’s stuck pulling off identity fraud jobs for her cruel auntie and her auntie’s nauseating son, who won’t leave Mei alone.
\nBut Mei’s world begins to truly unravel when she hears her childhood best friend Soey’s voice for the first time in years, being interviewed on the radio about her new memoir, chronicling the childhood attack that left Soey with brain damage and killed her younger sister. When Mei reconnects with Soey, the leader of their childhood friend group known as the Daisy Chain, their encounter kicks off a series of events that culminate in another shocking death, putting Mei squarely in the public eye. As past and present collide, Mei starts spiraling after Soey implores her to find out who killed Daiyu - a search that leads Mei to uncover what happened that dark day in the woods behind their school, all those years ago.
\nRevered for her lyrical imagery, emotional acumen, and thoughtful voice, Lang Leav uses her gifts to brilliant effect, exploring unsolved mysteries, cycles of trauma and abuse, and the answers to a timeless question: how do you honor someone's memory without losing sight of yourself?
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Suffolk, 1937. As the English countryside swelters in a historic heat wave, preparations for a party at Snare House are in full swing. The Winthers’ only daughter, Joanie, is returning from a summer in Europe, a flying visit before she leaves for university in Oxford. Only Margaret, long-time ward of the family and Joanie’s closest friend, knows the Joanie won’t be going to Oxford. Instead, the two will be leaving the stultifying society they know to live together in London, as lovers.
\nThen the pair is discovered, and everything goes wrong. Banished to a cabin in the nearby woods, Margaret is alone with her estranged father. As summer curdles into fall and magpies throng the forest, Margaret begins to lose herself. Her dreams turn dark and terrifying, and she wakes from them with dirt on her soles and scratches on her back. Everything suggests that a perverse power is awakening within her - perhaps the very one which led to her mother’s ostracism and eventual death. If she can harness it, Margaret may be able to secure an approximation of the love she’s always craved - but at what cost?
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Ruby Wynne is a staunch rule-follower who lives by the numbers. So when a surprising breakup - on her thirty-fifth birthday - ruins all her well-laid plans, Ruby makes an unexpected wish . . . Only to wake up inside a M.A.S.H. game from seventh grade.
\nSettled in a Technicolor mansion, driving a tie-dye Jeep, and running a roller-disco restaurant, Ruby is living out her childhood dreams come true - with one exception. According to the game, Ruby’s “other half” is supposed to be Penn Hayes, her brother’s annoying, and annoyingly handsome, best friend. But there’s zero romance between them. Just like in real life, all they share is sarcasm. With no rules to follow and desperate to return to reality, Ruby makes her best guess at an escape plan: win Penn’s heart so the game comes completely true and she can go home.
\nIt’s unthinkable. On Ruby’s list of dos and don’ts, Penn Hayes is a lifelong don’t. But as Ruby navigates the magical world she dreamed up at thirteen, she wonders if, by finally throwing out her rules, she might just find her way home to the life and love she deserves.
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The photos Judith Stanley takes are just for her, a private passion to fill her suburban days. But when she shares them with Paul Sorenson, her new photography instructor, she's unprepared to hear his astonished praise. \"Stunning,\" he calls her photos. \"Extraordinary.\" She has an uncanny eye, he says, and should consider publication. He could help. Except Judith has no interest in sharing her work; in fact, the mere idea of it frightens her.
\nStill, emboldened by Paul’s encouragement, Judith ventures out beyond her quiet neighborhood to the city in search of increasingly striking images. When she starts to notice the dark shape of a man in the corner of her self-portraits, Judith is certain he's an attacker from her past. She doesn't know why he has returned, but she's sure of his the hoarse sound of his breathing, his hard grip on her elbow. Perhaps it would appease the man if she were to put her camera down and give up her private passion. But she can't; she refuses. Until one night when the man finally emerges from the shadows, and Judith’s story suddenly and irrevocably becomes his own.
\nChilling and heart-poundingly propulsive, The Man is a phenomenal and timely novel exploring the inescapable fear of living as a woman, the tantalising seduction of artistic freedom, and the very real dangers that lurk both inside and outside the confines of the mind.
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In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.
\nFor the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, 'like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.' It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset. Or to the set of the hit show that you - as a twenty-five-year-old - are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to the White House, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster.
\nBut Dunham does it - even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her - because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition. All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again - if only she could remember who that self was.
\nAs Dunham takes us through her journey, tracking her rise to fame - from selling the pilot of Girls to the present - in three acts, it becomes clear that the spotlight casts long shadows, distorting the relationships she once held dear and isolating everyone in its glare. When an endless supply of drugs can’t protect you from pain - and begins to control your every move - being famous doesn’t stand a chance against the darker corners of the human experience.
\nIn Famesick, Dunham asks herself what the cost of fulfilling her dreams has really been, and whether it was worth it. What she finds is deeper than physical relief, and more lasting, as she learns to live with what she can’t change and turn her regrets into wisdom that can carry her forward, as she reconnects to what, and who, she loves.
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Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a small white terrier appears, alone and with no sign of the teenaged girl he’d been staying with nearby. When the teenager is reported missing, Jane offers to return the dog to his registered owner, hours away in London. Arriving at a run-down house called Thornwood in the deepest backwaters of Hampstead, she is immediately on alert - because Jane has a dark history with this house.
\nThe man who answers the door is not the man that Jane remembers from her past. He is cagey, and claims to know nothing about the missing teenage girl. Then, through the window of the house, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman.
\nConjuring her memories from twenty-five years ago, Jane knows this unsettling house holds the key - to the missing teenager, to her own traumatic story, and to the dark secrets of the past.
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Julia Pritzker loves her new life as a wife and mother in beautiful Tuscany - except that she misses her best friend Courtney, back in the States. One night, Julia calls Courtney and reaches her as she’s arriving at her grandmother’s farm in Pennsylvania.
\nThen the unthinkable happens.
\nA dreadful premonition overwhelms Julia as Courtney is entering the house, but it’s too late to stop Courtney, who makes a heartbreaking discovery. Her beloved grandmother has been murdered, and the killer is escaping out the back door. A distraught Courtney chases him, but he jumps into a pickup truck and gets away.
\nJulia flies home the next morning to support Courtney in her grief. The local police believe the murder was a botched burglary, but the women suspect something much more sinister. They dig to unearth the truth in a town filled with explosive secrets, and Julia’s uncanny intuition points her to the missing pieces of a dark puzzle.
\nThe women call in hotshot Philly lawyer Bennie Rosato, but events take a deadly turn, and Julia becomes the target of a murderous conspiracy. She ends up fighting for her life, with no one to save her . . . but herself.
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First contact with the vast spacefaring empire of the Reshketh seemed like a miraculous boon for Humanity, trapped on a dying Earth. But in pursuit of an alliance, something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s up to cultural advisor Jenna Kalandra to figure out why before it’s too late. The only problems are that she has no information, no connections, and her own Ambassador hates her just for existing.
\nJenna isn’t one to give up easily, but she’ll need the help of a mischievous AI, an inventive Human tech, her no-nonsense ex-girlfriend, and one charmingly unprofessional Reshketh security guard named Tarek to survive her Ambassador’s wrath. Can these misfits find a way to save the alliance (and themselves) before prejudice dooms Humanity? And can Jenna’s friendship with the roguish Reshketh become something deeper when no one knows who to trust?
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Cambridge, 1942: Twins Tessa and Theo are each eager to do their part in the war. Theo is recruited by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and disappears into the skies, while Tessa jumps at the chance to join the Special Operations Executive (the SOE), devoted to spying and sabotage in German-occupied France. It will be dangerous, highly classified work, but Tessa is no stranger to secret-keeping.
\nTwo years later, Theo comes home. Tessa does not. Theo, a clandestinely gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal, is physically wounded and emotionally broken by the deaths of his fellows and the disappearance of his sister. He is angry and cannot stop pursuing answers about Tessa’s fate, even though he will pay a steep price for his quest.
\nYears later, PhD candidate Edie is deep into her research on the SOE when it leads her to Theo. The old man and young scholar form an unlikely partnership and together, they finally uncover the truth about Theo’s beloved sister - a truth that stretches all the way back to the summer Tessa spent in France before the war had even begun.
\nBoth intimate and sweeping, elegantly written and unflinchingly honest, The Shock of the Light is a novel of bravery, the brutal cost of war, a sibling bond that outlasts even death, and the redemptive love that grows in unexpected places.
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Two years after Ji-ji’s miraculous flight on her own impossible wings, the Dream of Freedom has stalled. The Rising promised by Prophet Dreg has not occurred. Ji-ji’s fellow seeds, living in bondage on plantings, had started to believe the legend of Flying Africans was more than just a myth enslaved people told themselves.
\nBut in a polarised nation, torn apart by a Civil War Sequel, faith is slippery.
\nJi-ji’s quest to discover the truth behind her people’s origin story will send her, Afarra, and the men they love on a perilous transatlantic pilgrimage to find answers to questions that haunt her: Were Wingchildren engineered by those who experimented on imported humans? Or is she part of an improbable myth? An ancient tribe of Flying Africans from the Cradle, who etched their own remarkable story into the stuff of dreams.
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When Dr. Eva Glass dies protecting an impossible secret, her final message hurls Eden Black into a race for the Eye of the Sahara - an ancient crystal encoded with the secrets of a lost civilisation.
\nFrom motorcycle chases through Marrakech to an underground chamber older than recorded history, Eden must face a rogue scientist determined to use the Eye to resurrect the past. The last time it awakened, a paradise became the Sahara. Now, it could swallow the planet.
\nThe stakes are higher, the truth closer, and the price of saving humanity may mean losing one person Eden can't let go.
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Barfield Prison is one of the toughest high-security prisons in England, housing the country's most dangerous criminals. And when an inmate is found dead in his cell, a riot breaks out, forcing the authorities to investigate a potential murder.
\nDespite being Barfield's youngest ever female Governor, Helen Hewitt is seen as the best woman for the job. But with a prison full of corrupt and suspicious officers, restless inmates and a broken system, Helen has her work cut out - and no allies to help her . . .
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In an alternate Spanish Golden Age, the Council of the Sea Beyond has risen to unrivaled power, exploiting the Otherworld’s most precious resources for their own gain. Estevan seeks to uncover their secrets, but he risks the exposure of his that he is a faerie, masquerading as a mortal.
\nThe Hungry Girl is the human whose place he took. Lost among the fae and desperate to find some purpose for her existence, she leaps at the chance to help a group of Spanish explorers in the Sea Beyond . . . only to be horrified at the atrocities they commit.
\nA faerie pact has separated them - but only together can they bring down Spain’s worlds-spanning empire and save the homes they have both come to love.
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In a kingdom forgotten by history, a legend unfolds . . .
\nWounded in his county's endless wars, former soldier Mag Tresti finds work in the home of a reclusive widow, Jannae Mirchella. But Jannae is more than she seems. A witch of great skill and might, she hides her powers and her deep-laid plans behind a mask of harmless respectability.
\nWhen a dead demon falls out of the sky, the fates of the soldier and the witch are irrevocably intertwined. On the demon's body Mag finds a tinderbox - an artefact of terrifying magical power that can not only grant his every wish, but also change the fate of nations.
\nThis is a tale of spellcraft and devilry, of witchcraft and trickery - of the wickedness that resides within a few, the goodness that lies deep within us all, and the choices on which our lives turn.
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A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.
\nFrom the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump's second presidency - a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him \"no\" are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone.
\nBased on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President's enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history.
\nThis is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds - and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America - a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
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Yuko has had four different surnames and been brought up in several families. The parental figures in her life, despite not being related by blood, have always cared deeply for her. Through it all, pragmatic and resilient and Yuko has navigated life’s changes and its occasional conflicts without bitterness, always managing to find a kind of equilibrium.
\nAs an adult, Yuko falls in love with Hayase, a talented pianist she’s known since her school years. Now a married woman, she embarks on a journey to reconnect with the various parental figures from her past to seek their blessing for her marriage. Along the way, she revisits her former life and the people in it and gains a deeper understanding of what truly defines a family.
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What happens when one knock at your door sends your entire world into chaos? When a stranger becomes a lifeline? When the reality you’ve meticulously curated seems to be a mirage?
\nFrom the outside looking in, one might say that Dionne Daphne had it being the beauty editor at a prestigious New York magazine, a boyfriend who could have been plucked out of its model pages, the social life of the upper echelon, and a girlhood steeped in debutant balls.
\nBut that is from the outside. When the now ex-boyfriend arrives at her Brooklyn doorstep Dionne imagines reconciliation, going back to the good life brimming with the possibility of marriage; the life her mother always wanted for her. Instead, he delivers life-threatening news that creates a crack in her picture-perfect world. A crack that grows legs and runs her right into her past, unearthing a secret that she has hidden since childhood.
\nIn an effort to run toward the truth and away from a lie, Dionne sets out on a spur-of-the-moment road trip with an unlikely stranger to confront the long-buried darkness of her past and the family who made it so. As Dionne comes to a final reckoning, she begins to unravel new layers of herself and fresh possibilities for her life, her family, and even her love.
\nThe Revelation of Dionne Daphne is at once a deeply moving and provocatively gripping novel that shows when you dig deep enough into the shadows of your life, light can be revealed. It’s a novel of broken lovers, a fractured family, and distant friendships all making their way back to one another.
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It is the future, and the earth has seemingly refused to cooperate with humanity, producing only thorn-bearing plants and caustic fogs in abundance. Life is hard for those who still inhabit urban communities. For those who have chosen to live ‘off-grid’ it is subsistence at best, but at least there is some kind of independence.
\nA woman and her son live alone, surviving as scavengers. Even so, the boy must attend military school like all the other boys. In time he will be shipped off with the rest of them to a distant planet - the Promised Land - to fight the colonising war that is touted as humanity’s only hope.
\nBy chance, the woman meets a young man who has avoided this fate, despite his lack of physical impairment. It appears that he comes from a place of sanctuary. Can he lead her back there - and help her to save her son?
\nIn taut, evocative prose, Maria Takolander has conjured an eerie and compelling story of desolation and hope that resonates in the imagination.
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Jenny Sweet's marriage is ending - and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.
\nNow twenty-five, Neko is a a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother’s long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it - someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade - she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother's fate - and her own.
\nA profound tale of resilience set in a future wracked by calamity and buoyed by hope, Mudlark is an unforgettable novel that explores how love and art persist as beacons of humanity.
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When Tilly Turner signed up for an introductory pole-dancing class, she was looking for a distraction. Reeling from her mother’s passing, and with her career as a stand-up comedian in ruins, Tilly has just moved back to the Idaho hometown she was desperate to leave, with her twin daughters in tow.
\nBut Tilly gets more than she bargained for after a night out with her new pole-dancing pals. She wakes to a raging hangover, no memory of the evening before, and a dead body in the trunk of her car.
\nWho was the dead man? And more importantly, who killed him? Tilly has no alibi and needs answers. But investigating a murder is complicated, especially with an old frenemy circling, childcare plans falling through, and pole-dancing classes to attend. And don’t even mention the sexy ATF agent who she’s trying (and failing) to keep at arm’s length.
\nAs Tilly races to solve the mystery before the police come knocking, she finds herself implicated in a larger plot that includes political subterfuge and arms dealing. But who knows - maybe busting a criminal enterprise will be just the shake-up she needs.
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In 1942, a rational fear was mounting that New York Harbor was vulnerable to sabotage. If the waterfront was infested with German and Italian agents then the U.S. Navy needed a recourse just as insidious to secure it.
\nNaval intelligence officer, Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden had the solution: recruit as his own spies, members of La Cosa Nostra. Pier to pier, no one terrified the longshoremen, stevedores, shopkeepers, and boat captains along the harbor better than the Mafia gangs of New York, who controlled the docks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Haffenden was prepared to make a deal with the devil–the man who put “organized” into organised crime. Even from his cell in Dannemora State Prison, former Public Enemy #1, Charles “Lucky” Luciano still had tremendous power. Luciano was willing to wield it for Haffenden. But he wanted something in return - Luciano’s contacts in Italy to track the Nazis’ movements.
\nOperation Underworld is a tale of espionage and crime like no other, the unbelievable, first-ever account of the Allied war effort’s clandestine coalition between the Mafia and the U.S. Government to protect New York, vanquish the Nazis by taking the fight to the enemy in the 1943 U.S. invasion of Sicily. It was an ingenious strategy carried out by some of history’s most infamous, improbable, and unsung heroes on both sides of the law. It was a Faustian bargain that brought homefront enemies together but, as journalist and crime historian Matthew Black reveals, one that ultimately succeeded in helping the Allies win World War II.
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Maurice Broaddus returns with A City Dreaming, the third book in his Astra Black trilogy, which explores the struggles of an empire. Epic in scope and intimate in voice, it follows members of the Muungano Empire - a far-reaching coalition of city-states that stretches from Earth to Titan and beyond - as it faces renewed threats to its progress.
\nWe received a signal. Everything has changed.
\nThe Interstellar Alliance are coming.
\nA new empire approaches and the Muungano, already facing foes much closer to home, will have to contend with what it means for their future. Across the solar system, from Earth to Mars and Titan, beyond the Orun Gate, and across time and space itself a battle will rage.
\nTheir soldiers, scientists, diplomats and leaders will all have a role to play if their empire is to live on.
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Edira Brillwyn is not enjoying retirement. She's traumatized and heartbroken by Orin and the battle at Fernglove Manor. Although her brothers are safe and financially secure at home in Willowfell, she fears of wasting away her dwindling lifethreads. It's a welcome surprise when Seville comes knocking at her door - at least until she reveals that the blight has returned to the Ferngloves.
\nEdira has had a taste of the power her heartbond with Rorik provides, and she's certain there is a way to cure the blight for good . . . with Rorik's help. But Rorik doesn't think his life is worth saving, at least not worth Edira's few remaining years, or months. He's more concerned about keeping her alive than saving the world.
\nBut other powerful Ever families have caught wind of Edira's talents and are desperate for a cure. As those families begin circling, centuries-long conflicts rise to the surface and, once again, Edira finds herself at the whims of power-hungry Evers fighting for their lives. Before she runs out of time altogether, Edira and Rorik will have to face the source of the Death himself.
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Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from luxury jewelry to chainsaws and more. When the girls learn that Kayla’s family can’t afford a private school opportunity that Jackie’s can, Jackie becomes distraught about losing her best friend.
\nWith their sharp minds but youthful lack of foresight, they scheme a way to embezzle money from the pawn shop. As the hot Florida summer unfolds, the girls steal thousands of dollars from the shop. But when their heist is discovered, Jackie is faced with a situation that no amount of negotiating or charisma can fix.
\nWith incredible heart and wit, and based on Richardson’s own experience working behind the counter of a pawn shop, Paradise Pawn navigates current-day themes of trust, familial love, female friendship, and class differences, and asks us how far we would go to protect the ones we love most.
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Two young women. Heirs to altogether different hereditary burdens. Yet bound by a monstrous threat to their village.
\nGabrielle is the first woman in Alveus to carry the mantle of Hunter, which comes with an obligation to kill the faery beasts murdering travelers in Brimmond Wood. Wary of the power she wields as guardian of her people, Gabrielle is summoned by her first love, a seductress who shattered her heart into pieces a decade ago.
\nIsabeau is the rarest of nobility - a lady duke. She is also afflicted by a curse that leaves her in a deep sleep between the gloaming and daylight. How can she begin her tenure as protector when she can’t keep her village safe from whatever stalks its darkest hours? For that, she needs the help of the Hunter.
\nAgainst her will, Gabrielle is falling in love all over again. But what new threats will arise when Gabrielle and Isabeau’s star-crossed destinies collide with the beast of Brimmond Wood?
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Este Walker didn’t move to Winter Park, Florida, to make friends. Five years ago, she ghosted her life in California to reinvent herself among the lakefront estates of Florida’s elite. With a cocktail in hand, more money than she could ever spend, and secrets she intends to keep buried, she’s finally content - or, you know, close enough. Who cares if her seclusion and secrets have left her with a small social circle? Her husband Beau and her best friend Nora are the only company she needs.
\nBut Este’s secrets are catching up to her. Last year, when Nora gained national attention as a suspect in her husband's disappearance, Este’s picture was flashed onscreen. Suddenly the past she had hoped to keep buried is closing in on her - and Beau might be keeping secrets of his own. And then a mysterious death turns Winter Park upside down.
\nThrust into a high-stakes murder investigation, Este must unravel a web of lies and secrets to answer the question: What exactly happened in California, and has it come back to haunt her? More importantly: How is she going to get herself out of this mess?
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Detective Sergeant Stilwell knows that his posting on Catalina Island is no paradise, but to most residents, it seems blissfully separated - by twenty-two miles of ocean - from the troubles of Los Angeles County. But now a threat is coming to his safe haven.
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Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell and his deputies watch a plane land in the middle of the night at the Airport in the Sky, a remote airstrip in the mountains. A duffel bag of drugs is dropped and the deputies move in, but things quickly go sideways. While Stilwell chases the fleeing pickup man into the mountainside brush, shots are fired on the runway and the plane flies off.
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An internal inquiry follows, putting Stilwell on the bench until he is cleared of responsibility for the disastrous operation. But he is determined to find out who brought deadly violence to his island, and begins his own secret investigation into the drug deal gone wrong.
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While under orders to remain in the sheriff’s substation, he finds in the lost and found a valuable backpack that was never claimed. He traces it to a woman who disappeared while hiking on the island four years ago. But then why was the pack only turned in two months back? Now thoroughly intrigued, he follows the mystery all the way to the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and Detective Renée Ballard.
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Stilwell and Ballard work the case from both sides of the channel, and soon realise they are on the trail of a criminal who revels in taunting the authorities. Meanwhile, frustrated at being shut out of an investigation on his own island, Stilwell risks his already shaky standing in the department to pursue a case whose reach is wider than he ever imagined.
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Mallory is a freshman in college, reeling from her mother's recent death, when she encounters the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university's gym, immediately entranced. Soon, they meet, drawn by an electric tension and shared past wounds; before long, they begin sleeping together in secret. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof - the woman is everything Mallory wants . . . and wants to be.
\nDesiring not only the woman but also the idea of who she is when they're together, Mallory retreats from the rest of the world, solidifying a sense of aloneness that has both haunted and soothed her since childhood and will continue to do so for years even after the affair ends. As an adult, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in isolation or step fully into the world, to confront what the woman meant to her and how their relationship shaped her, for better or worse.
\nMallory's life is transformed by loss and by love and by discovering who she is while enduring both. In this enthralling debut novel, the complexities of influence, obsession, and admiration reveal how desire and its consequences can alter the trajectory of someone's life.
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Kitt Carver is one of the best diviners in the business at finding destinies for the rich and powerful. When she’s nearly killed, and her regular broker is murdered, it becomes clear that someone has an issue with the last destiny that she found.
\nDetermined not to let anyone else die, Kitt gathers a mismatched group - including Two Tongue Derna, her childhood friend and now a renowned street duellist; Sulian the Swallowmage, powerful but plagued with intrusive visions of futures; and Donal Klae, Kitt’s one-night stand who was accidentally responsible for her near-murder - and sets off across the Timeless Lands to warn the destiny’s recipient.
\nHowever, unbeknownst to Kitt, she has her own destiny; one which might spell disaster for everyone.
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Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.
\nHe finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognisable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.
\nWith fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours - one that just may be a model for how to better our own.
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What if you could come back after death to watch over your loved one, installing yourself in a treasured mug, for example, or perhaps your mother's hearing aid, a diary, or even a climbing frame, to feel the clambering limbs of a beloved sister?
\nEleven recently deceased protagonists find themselves floating in the afterlife where a nameless ghost offers them a joyous reunion with their loved ones.
\nBut not as you would expect.
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Jodie always dreamed of being a housewife. And after a whirlwind romance, she marries renowned psychologist Dr. Roy Davies and moves into his perfect Beverly Hills home. But the fairy tale fades fast. Roy is distant, his friends view her as a gold-digger, and the house still reveres his late wife, Deborah, whose presence still looms over everyone and everything.
\nWhen Jodie learns Deborah became a recluse before death, she begins to suspect Roy was behind it. And the deeper she digs, the darker Roy's past appears - obsessive, controlling, unfaithful. Increasingly convinced he had something to do with Deborah's death, Jodie knows she should go to the police, but that would require revealing her own secret. A secret that could destroy her.
\nBut Jodie won't be silenced. Because the truth about Roy is worse than she imagined - and now, trapped in a house built on lies, she must find a way out before she becomes the next perfect wife to vanish.
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It girl Estella Aubergine is everything Pippa and Bidi are not: wealthy, popular, influential, missing. Finding her and collecting the reward money Estella’s reclusive mother is offering could turn their lives around. They’d be able to pay off the overdue bills on Pippa’s family’s store, and all the media attention would only help Bidi’s chances of becoming the youngest elected official in San Francisco.
\nBut to uncover what happened to Estella, they’ll have to enter her wealthy world. Namely, the prestigious Beaumont Academy, where Estella’s classmates and teachers all seem to have dark secrets and enough money to hide them.
\nThe deeper Pippa and Bidi dig, the more questions come up about Estella’s disappearance. Worse, someone seems to be clocking their every step. And as cracks form in the girls’ friendship, they begin to see that maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
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Kirby Turner is on her last chance. With her previous girlband career dead in the water alongside the band's lead singer, Hailey, she's been drifting for years. But then came the call.
\nArena tour. Had a last-minute dropout. Want a girl drummer. Feminist thing or something. Would be good for you.
\nWhen she finds out who the artist is, it feels like fate. Silver might now be the most famous singer on the planet, but Kirby knows her best as Alice Taffer, her former bandmate. From before Hailey died, and Kirby was blamed, and she slid into the gutter while Alice shot towards the stars.
\nIt seems too good to be true that they're reunited now - and as the tour begins, and Kirby is playing in front of fans again for the first time in years, it feels like coming home. But as the music starts to bring back buried memories of that last day with Hailey, she starts to wonder: was Hailey's death really her fault? How exactly did Silver rise to the top so fast? And now that Kirby's got everything she ever wanted - what would she do to hold on to it?
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Over a decades-long, distinguished career, award-winning journalist Norah O’Donnell has made it her mission to shed light on untold women’s stories. Now, in honor of America’s 250th birthday, O’Donnell focuses that passion on the American heroines who helped change the course of history.
\nWe the Women presents a fresh look at American history through the eyes of women, introducing us to inspiring patriots who demanded that the country live up to the promises made 250 years ago in the Declaration of “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Since the signing of that document, the pressing question from women has been: Why don’t those unalienable rights apply to us?
\nThrough extensive research and interviews, as well as historical documents and old photos, O’Donnell curates a compelling portrait of these fierce fighters for freedom. From Mary Katherine Goddard, who printed the first signed Declaration of Independence, to the Forten family women, who were active in the abolition and suffrage movements and were considered the “Black Founders” of Philadelphia, to the first women who served in the armed forces even before they had the right to vote, O’Donnell brings these extraordinary women together for the first time, and in doing so writes the American story anew.
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Romania, 1989, the twilight of Ceausescu’s dictatorship: A time when every neighbor, every friend, every family member may be an informant for the regime.
\nWhen news emerges of a man-eating bear terrorising the country, two bright lives collide. Constantin, an idealistic police detective - prone to daydreaming and scribbling fairytales in his notebook for his four-year-old son - is tasked with solving the string of mysterious deaths.
\nLia, a rebellious, inquisitive schoolgirl pining for more color in her life, is unwittingly drawn into an elderly neighbor’s secret plot against the regime. The decisions they make amid the constant gray skies and fear of speaking out will have sweeping consequences - for themselves, for their families, and for their country.
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Here to slake the unquenchable thirst of Dazai's legions of loyal fans are eleven works of short fiction and vignettes, most of which have never before appeared in English.
\nBeginning with \"Memories\" (which tells a tale of teenage love, based on the autobiographical events that inspired Dazai's famed No Longer Human), and ending with \"Good-Bye\" (the chapters of a comic romance that the author left unfinished when he took his own life), the short works here show the range and breadth of an author best known for his meditations on squalor and despair. But there is laughter here too, as in \"Tengu,\" a tongue-in-cheek critique of august hucksters of haiku. And there is also suspense on display: \"A Bluff Illusion\" presents a literary murder story in which a harmless prank escalates into a deadly pose. \"A Warning on Worldly Pleasures\" retells Saikaku's famous story about the temptation of a holy ascetic, and \"A: Autumn\" unfolds a quiver of epigrams (seemingly) drawn at random from the author's notes. All are masterfully translated by Ralph McCarthy.
\nSpanning the breadth of Dazai's delightfully multifaceted, if tragically foreshortened, career, Good-Bye is a must-have for any Dazai fan.
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Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she’s certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer.
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So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world 50 years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage.
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Alongside her Ministry colleagues and her clever girlfriend Siti, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city - or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems . . .
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When Babe - the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers - dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm-swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.
\nDidion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again - along with the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.
\nWhat should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover . . . it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.
\nTrapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.
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Malti Patel is absolutely fine. Concussed and bruised, maybe, but fine. Certainly fine enough to not need her daughter's soon-to-be-ex-husband, Nathan Whitlock, playing nurse in her home while she recuperates. And yet, that's exactly the quandry in which she finds herself. Her doctor insists on in-home supervision for seven days, and with her daughter, Kavya, abroad at grad school in India, Nathan proves too much of a do-gooder to let Malti rehabiliate alone.
\nSeven days of Nathan, the man divorcing her daughter for all manner of cultural misunderstanding, emotional walls, simmering hostility . . . most of them having to do with Kavya's scars from her childhood with Malti.
\nThey want nothing to do with one another. But over the course of the week, as Malti grapples with the shadows of her past and Nathan ponders the wreckage of his marriage, they learn that they are the two people who know Kavya best - and the ones who have hurt her so deeply that she's left them both entirely.
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A spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface.
\nIn the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 AM he jumped into the river.
\nIn a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.
\nIn their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.”
\nAs the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable - or unwilling - to bring the perpetrators to justice.
\nIn a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerising investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations.
\nBut it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.
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When the magnificent home of entrepreneur Brian Malloy mysteriously goes up in flames, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch tries to pull Malloy’s burning body from the fire but is too late. Malloy was suspected of murdering his young, illegitimate son. Now it looks like someone else has delivered a verdict.
\nMiles away, on a lonely stretch of icy railroad track, the body of Axl Deming, once accused of a brutal rape, is found literally cut in half. Though the two murders seem unrelated, a cryptic text from an unknown number draws Bowditch to the scene - and hints at a chilling connection. He suspects someone is orchestrating the executions of criminals who escaped justice, and for reasons he can’t explain, his own name is on the list, but the state police aren’t convinced. His search for the truth takes him through frozen harbors, trackless forests, and remote islands, far from rescue.
\nMeanwhile, Bowditch is facing a disciplinary hearing that could end his career. His wife Stacey, just weeks from giving birth, is being stalked by a stranger in a white van. And when he realises someone has also been watching their home, the case turns increasingly personal.
\nTo protect his family, Bowditch must work alone to uncover who’s behind the killings - and stop them before he becomes their next victim.
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At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
\nWhen Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father.
\nWhat makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away?
\nPaul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.
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Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn’t like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse. One sham interview later, she’s offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state - one with proprietary AI implanted in his head - from California to the East Coast.
\nTo sum up in Julia’s own words: “You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country.” In a word, yes. But he’s not dead dead.
\nMeet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn’t remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember.
\nUsing a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was - and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.
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To save her family’s struggling ranch, 18-year-old Claire fabricates a video of her hometown’s legendary alien cryptid, Old Lucky, that grabs the attention of paranormal vloggers Lenny and Evan. Lenny is plagued with doubts about their channel’s future, so catching Old Lucky might just be her chance at finding something real.
\nAfter Evan deserts Lenny, believing the investigation to be a hoax, Claire agrees to “help” Lenny uncover the history of Old Lucky - and preserve her deceit. But the more the girls are drawn together and the more clues they unearth, the more secrets rise to the surface. The cows are being mutilated, the ranch hand has disappeared, and the strange lights in the sky are back.
\nSomething inhuman lurks in Scarberry, where danger lives close to home. The Monsters We Made is an eerie and suspenseful exploration of one town’s dark history and the people who brought it back to life.
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Petra McBride is at a crossroads.
\nHer work with Police Scotland’s Complex Crimes Unit has come to an end, she’s been forced to abandon her academic career, and she’s homeless.
\nIt looks like she has no options.
\nBut then she gets a call from Interpol agent Susannah Roscoe, who needs a forensic psychologist to help crack a perplexing case at the Louvre in Paris.
\nPetra is just the woman. Filled with a new sense of purpose, she travels to Paris and starts to unravel the clues.
\nBut as the killer continues to target new victims and Paris police are stumped, can Petra and Susannah crack the case before more people die? Or will they become victims themselves?
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Isobel “Izzy” Ker, the last working artist of the Old Holy Order, lives a life of poverty in the Dumps outside of Mahl City, covertly selling her illegal paintings to the Old Order’s few remaining devotees. But when her studio is ransacked by the city’s enforcers, her only choice is to seek refuge with the Half-Light Rebels, a gang of anti-art radicals and glorified thieves.
\nShe agrees to help the rebels, but their first mission goes south, and Izzy is arrested and brought before the leader of the oppressive New Art Government, a group that keeps people in check by feeding their addiction to a novel and dangerous craft, Trigger Art. Izzy has a choice: Convert to their way of life, using her skills to debut as a Trigger Artist, or rot in the city’s infamous prison. Izzy accepts and is thrust into the spotlight, now intoxicated by the luxury and power afforded her, not to mention her handsome bodyguard, Rilke.
\nThe wild, engrossing act of creating her first public piece almost makes her forget what life was like in the Dumps. Almost. All the while, Izzy is fanning the flames of rebellion, working in secret with the rebels and preparing to unveil her audacious debut piece.
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Maris Larsen is the captain of the West Eaton High cheer team. She’s Coach’s favorite and the team worships her. Being on the team makes her feel special - powerful. When she’s leading the girls on the mat, Maris doesn’t have to think about her dead-end life in a dead-end town. She can forget about her depressed mother and absent father and the fact that her girlfriend doesn’t really love her. But when newcomer and Coach’s new golden girl, Genevieve Ray, joins the team, the only thing going right in Maris’s life is suddenly in jeopardy. A bitter rivalry develops between the two, but Maris is determined to take Genevieve down. The knife she needs to wield comes to Maris in her dreams.
\nWhile sleepwalking, Maris is visited by a monstrous, decaying beast in the shape of an enormous deer. Doe is an ancient, tired creature who has been wandering, trapped in her current form for decades. She cannot die, but she cannot go on living as she has. Only a girl related by blood to those who bound her in this form can free her, but those girls she loved died years ago - murdered in a fire.
\nBut Maris is somehow linked to Doe’s beloved girls - linked by blood - and so she has the power to free Doe, to unleash her immense power. In Maris’s dreams, she and Doe form a bond, but Maris doesn’t know the creature from her dreams is real. Maris doesn’t understand the danger she’s in. She only knows Doe has promised her a way to win her battle with Genevieve. But for Maris to win, someone has to die, and the only real winner in the end will be Doe.
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Torian Razner finally bought a starship, and contrary to Amelia’s assessment, it was not “a meteoric sign of stupidity.” Sure, the alien starship may have been abandoned for a century, and it may be covered in moss now . . . but it’s Torian’s ticket to freedom, regardless of what her ex . . . ah, captain . . . said.
\nExcept Torian’s first flight reveals a surprise passenger: the moss is actually an organic computer with a snarky attitude and serious abandonment issues. The target of its loathing? The immortal alien who built it (and then parked the starship, with Moss inside, and forgot about it). The same alien who just found Torian and accused her of “stealing” the ship.
\nIt’s entirely possible that Amelia was right about this meteoric stupidity.
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Ruby Spencer is known as “the exonerator.” Her job as an investigator is to free innocent men from death row, and she’s good at what she does. What many people don’t know is that she spends her time finding missing women, too. The orphaned daughter of an orphaned mother, Ruby feels a natural affinity for those who have been mistreated by the world at large.
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Her newest case takes her to Georgia, and involves a man set to be executed in two weeks. What begins as a routine exoneration unexpectedly sends Ruby down a winding path. Pursuing the truth, she begins to uncover crimes that lead to startling revelations about her own life.
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With time running out, will Ruby’s search for answers ultimately lead her to danger?
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In a small town in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside. Franca soon gives birth to a son so handsome that people come from miles around to see him - but his sheer beauty causes Gino to doubt that he is truly the boy's father.
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Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca's lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic effects on those around him.
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When most Americans think of acts of courage, elected office is rarely the first place they look. And while more Americans than ever reject party labels, the political arena remains dominated by the loudest voices at each extreme. This moment demands leaders willing to govern across party lines, resist the incentives of modern politics, and choose courage over outrage.
\nOne group is uniquely suited to meet that challenge: America’s veterans. Courage Can Save US follows nine veterans and a former FBI agent - five Democrats and five Republicans - who have carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into public life. Ambitious and altruistic, forthright and flawed, they confront the moral and personal costs of leadership in an unsettled age: public attacks, private doubt, and the risk of losing everything they have worked for in service of the common good.
\nMore than a collection of political profiles, Courage Can Save US is a portrait of a bipartisan generation of post-9/11 leaders striving to rise above polarisation and a culture of contempt. It is an examination of courage in its many forms - and a challenge to all of us to consider how courage can strengthen our democracy, and our own lives.
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When the king calls a hunt for the Lichtenwald forest’s elusive phoenix, wizard Sy jumps at the chance. Years ago, he indentured himself to the crown to pay for his magical education, and an unbreakable spell binds him to carry out the king’s every wicked whim, or face certain death. The prize is enough to pay off his debt, but he can’t survive the forest alone. Seeking help, he finds Anya, a skilled huntress living on the Lichtenwald’s edge, and lies about splitting the prize.
\nBut Anya’s lying too. Cursed by a witch after killing her familiar, Anya must find the phoenix and bind it to the witch by the summer solstice, or else suffer a gruesome transformation. With the curse worsening and the Lichtenwald swarming with wizards, she needs Sy on her side - for now.
\nNeither of them can split the prize, nor win alone. And despite the growing attraction between them, betrayal remains their only option.
\nBut anything is possible in the forest. And the forest is hungry.
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Lost in the streets and smoldering rubble of Occupied Germany, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American soldier spots a gaggle of mixed-race children following a nun. Desperate to conceive her own family, she feels compelled to follow them to learn their story.
\nOzzie Philips volunteers for the army in 1948, eager to break barriers for Black soldiers. Despite his best efforts, he finds the racism he encountered at home in Philadelphia has followed him overseas. He finds solace in the arms of Jelka, a German woman struggling with the lack of resources and even joy in her destroyed country.
\nIn 1965, Sophia Clark discovers she’s been given an opportunity to integrate a prestigious boarding school in Maryland and leave behind her spiteful parents and the grueling demands. In a chance meeting with a fellow classmate, she discovers a secret that upends her world.
\nToggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms - familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self - can be transcendent.
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Kate gave up her dreams of being a painter years ago. But six little words pinned to the noticeboard of her local café could change her path forever.
\n‘To be, or not to be . . . ’ - printed on orange card with no explanation - appears one morning.
\nEach day, a new line from a different Shakespeare play is added, sparking curiosity throughout the café. Among the regulars is Bardy, a retired English teacher grappling with writer’s block.
\nAs Kate and Bardy follow this breadcrumb trail, they discover a local community group encouraging people to rediscover their own creative spark - and the long-lost courage to chase it.
\nFor Kate, their new group might just offer a second chance at happiness, if only Bardy can find the strength to share his story too . . .
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In a sun-drenched house on the Catalan coast, a young, queer photographer arrives to capture the portrait of a celebrated writer. But what begins as a professional collaboration slowly unravels into something more intimate and unsettling - a charged exchange of glances, silence, and shifting emotional boundaries.
\nThe photographer, unnamed and quietly observant, is drawn to the writer’s enigmatic presence, her self-possession, her power. Over shared meals and quiet routines, the difficulty of understanding the desire of the other begins to obsess the narrator. As the summer heat thickens, so too does the unspoken tension between them, heightening the photographer’s insecurities and her perception of her own flaws. When a third woman arrives, an old friend with blurred boundaries, the fragile connection begins to unravel. Is this seduction, or projection? Intimacy, or illusion?
\nTold through lyrical, introspective prose, The Seduction is a poetic, slow-burn exploration of the complexities of seduction between women, intimacy, queer longing, and the quiet ache of unfulfilled connections.
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A year ago, Elle made a deal with the devil to save her sister. Now, they live on a desolate spit of land beyond Halifax harbor. Elle, as lighthouse keeper, steers unsuspecting sailors to their destruction; those are the terms of her bargain. Liney need never know the cost. Her safety is worth every drop of blood.
\nBut a sinner’s pact is not so simple. When the devil returns, demanding more - more shipwrecks, no survivors - Elle knows what she must do to keep Liney safe . . .
\nThen a woman washes ashore. Is she a soul to be sacrificed, or part of a darker design? As Liney and the stranger grow closer, Elle faces an impossible choice: kill, and break Liney’s heart, or forfeit her own soul.
\nDanger arises from all sides: the merciless sea, ruthless men on the mainland, and the infernal bargain itself . . .
\nSouls and sisterhood, fate and fire - what must be sacrificed for the devil to get his due?
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With her identity erased from the Corporate Federation, Wylla is a ghost in the untraceable, unpredictable, and fueled by vengeance. She fights alongside Sable, the AI consciousness whose murder they avenged, the one she loves in ways no system could ever define. Together, they’ve built a reputation for tearing through VisorForge’s carefully constructed lies.
\nBut notoriety has a cost.
\nWhen one of their attacks draws the attention of the Edenic Order - a clandestine eco-resistance whose insurgents bloom with Old Earth flora - Wylla and Sable are offered something more than a chance to dismantle VisorForge from the roots up.
\nAs they fall deeper into the Order’s radical vision, tensions rise. Wylla, seduced by ideology, by purpose, by something - or someone - else. Sable, pushed to her morals’ limits when what she’s wanted since death is at her fingertips.
\nTo survive, they’ll need to embrace what makes them two minds, one body, and a shared resolve to bring down a corporatised dystopia - no matter the cost.
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At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into adulthood. A semi-employed gig worker in Washington, DC, she's grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a relationship that she’d thought would lead to marriage. When Aubrey learns that she has inherited a shared stake in a sizable Tennessee farm from her father, she simply sees an opportunity to get out of the city - and the potential to erase a mounting pile of debts.
\nUpon her arrival in Lanyer County, though, Aubrey meets the relatives with whom she shares ownership of the farm, and discovers the backstory of the land, beginning with her great-grandfather Thomas - one of the first Black landowners in his community, who gave his four children a homestead on which they could flourish.
\nBut the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it divides the family, turning Thomas’ descendants against each other and drawing the attention of external forces only too eager to wrest the land from Black hands. These struggles come to a head when a catastrophic tragedy befalls the Lambs, splintering the family and echoing down through the decades, with repercussions for Audrey herself.
\nAs Aubrey learns this history from her living relatives, the ghosts of her ancestors interject with their own exasperated, gossipy commentary on the flaws and foibles of relatives living and dead, and stake their own claims on the farm.
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Temmi, a young trash collector stuck in a dead-end job on a garbage planet, finds herself with a golden ticket she never expected: an opportunity to compete in an intergalactic dating show starring the brother and sister heirs to the galactic empire. Twenty-four women will compete on a televised program to marry the prince and princess - and future emperors - and to win the dynasty’s favor for their home planet.
\nTemmi may have been hand-picked to date the quiet, bookish prince, who is immediately taken by her brash personality and their shared passion for the sciences. But she can’t seem to keep away from the princess - and even though it couldn’t be a worse idea, their chemistry is undeniable.
\nBut when contestants start turning up dead, and conspiracies begin to swirl around anti-imperial motivations of several contestants, Temmi among them, so much more than feelings are at stake.
\nIn fact, very few of the participants of Love Galaxy have come on the show to find love. Sexy, snarky, and revolutionary, this fast-paced thrill ride will hook lovers of reality TV, fans of thoughtful sci-fi, and anyone who lives for drama.
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Over the course of thirty years, Sigrid Nunez has become one of contemporary fiction’s most beloved and distinctive voices, producing nine profound, penetrating, and singular novels celebrated by fans and critics alike. Revered for her “wry, withering wit” and deceptively simple style combining intelligent frankness and “bright good humor”, Nunez’s fiction offers “a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love” in novels “as sophisticated as they are straightforward”.
\nBut she has not, until now, produced a book of stories. With It Will Come Back to You, Nunez gives us thirteen stories collected in one volume. Carefully selected from three decades of work, these stories show the origins of her style as well as her incomparable range as an artist.
\nMoving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her irrepressible humor, bite, and insight, her expert balance between intimacy and universality, gravity and levity, all while entertainingly probing the philosophical questions we have come to expect, such as: How can we withstand the passage of time? Is memory the greatest fiction?
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Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won't last forever, and he's desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.
\nHe thinks he's found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn't expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.
\nWhen Inés discovers Ulises' true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast and clean.
\nBut Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained on. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.
\nVenture into the streets of a small town where the patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.
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Call Me By Your Name meets Elena Ferrante in this debut coming-of-age novel about a young girl who spends summers working at her family’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, the tragedy that rends her life into “before” and “after,” and her romance with an American girl, which has unexpected consequences.
\nTo ten-year-old Leo, life is a collection. She spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious bits of left-behind detritus from guests - a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with gathering the stories that flow from her father’s lips - liquor - spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. But when an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up.
\nYears later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same. Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. When she meets Dolores, an American girl made brilliant by Leo’s perception of her, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into.
\nEmbroidering the atmospheric yearning of Call Me By Your Name with the precise, elevated prose of Elena Ferrante, Sofia Montrone’s jaw-dropping debut revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood and captures the universal experiences of trying to hold on to what is elusive, to deny what cannot be faced, and to say what cannot be said.
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Carriwitchet, the violent, rugby-esque game played atop winged beasts, was once Taissa Cho’s whole life, and she was once the United Kingdom’s most promising player. Until her nemesis, rival player Kion Locke, destroyed her career in a single moment. Expelled from the sport in disgrace, Taissa has spent the last two years dreaming of nothing but revenge and relishing watching Kion’s team plummet to the bottom of the league.
\nSo when Taissa is offered the chance to redeem herself and her career, she can’t refuse - even if the offer is coming from the very man who ruined everything in the first place. It’s close to a dream come true . . . except for that pesky clause in her contract that demands she and Kion enter a fake relationship in order to garner some much-needed positive PR for the team. This could not be a worse match. Taissa and Kion only have two things in their love of the game, and their undying hatred for each other.
\nYet as a mysterious illness befalls the winged creatures of the entire league - putting both the beasts’ lives and the very sport itself at stake - the athletes find themselves partnering up in other ways, determined to crack the case of the eerie sickness. As their investigation takes them on a whirlwind adventure, Kion and Taissa are prepared for anything . . .
\nAnything, that is, but their fake-for-the-cameras relationship to maybe, just maybe, become something real after all.
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In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.
\nAs the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand-to-mouth off land that isn’t his, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past, yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for Big Oil, who refuses to give up his claim to the land where Boy makes his living.
\nMeanwhile the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Throughout all of this, Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience, and the fragile miracle of hope.
\nShould the Waters Take Us reaches across four hundred years of history to illuminate the many epochs and peoples of this storied place. Soileau has crafted an emotionally explosive family saga, as well as a masterful literary crie de coeur about the ways in which moral compromise can eat away at the very fabric of the places we call home.
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Yasmine is a red wolf girl stuck in rural Alabama. Her world is small: pick up shifts at the greasy late-night diner and endure her pack’s petty squabbles. She’s not good at being a wolf or being human, directionless in life and disconnected from her ancestors.
\nBlessed by a century-old enchantment, the local red wolves have escaped extinction by blending into the human world. But with the old witches’ blessing wearing thin, the wolves face an uncertain future.
\nAn answer arrives in the form of an exiled blood witch whose magic is steeped in reckless grief. Kalta rides into town in her dead brother’s truck, prophecy following on her heels. Despite the danger Yasmine can smell swirling around the witch, a fated bond tangles their futures - and those of all the wolves.
\nAfter an accident threatens the wolves’ secret, Yasmine has no choice but to join Kalta on the road, carving a path through the South’s backroads and hoping the magic brewing between them is enough to overcome their bloody pasts.
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Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to high-powered banker Lucy is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children - and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous.
\nAs a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power, and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created - and the deeper insecurities that fuelled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?
\nWith propulsive momentum, sharp wit and sly, lucid prose, The Au Pair is a sleek literary thriller about failure, desire, and the unravelling of a man as he grapples with his fading relevance - when the lies others spin pale beside the fictions we tell ourselves.
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Dr. Jo Ness prefers jellyfish to people. Her best friend, Aldo, was the exception, but he died seven months ago. So she spends her days hidden away at an underfunded aquarium with her specimens and a draft of the jellyfish guide she and Aldo had been working on together. His voice is alive in the notes in the margins, and it’s enough. Almost.
\nUntil she receives a call from Nadia, one of the few other humans she’s loved but whom she hasn’t heard from in years, asking for her help. Nadia tells her a grand tale of a giant jellyfish terrorising her tiny island off the coast of Maine and sends a grainy video of the creature. Frankly, the footage looks fake, but Jo drops everything to fly across the country to see Nadia again, and to find this supposed sea beast. She couldn’t save Aldo, but perhaps she can help Nadia.
\nBut when Jo arrives on Shattering Point, Nadia is nowhere to be found, and the islanders she meets each have something different to say about the creature they’ve dubbed Clementine . . . a jellyfish who changes all who see it.
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Tata begins with a mystery - Agnès is asked to identify the body of her beloved aunt Colette - who, as far as she knows, died three years earlier.
\nFrom this phone call, Valérie Perrin crafts a compelling blend of family saga and literary suspense. As Agnès searches for the truth, long-buried secrets and hidden lives come to light, revealing an unforgettable cast of characters and the extraordinary story of the woman she thought she knew.
\nAt the heart of the novel is Colette - Agnès’s beloved aunt - whose decision to fake her own death sets in motion a richly layered tale of resilience, identity, and reinvention. Told with warmth, humour, and emotional depth, Tata is a captivating story about the mysteries that shape a life and the courage that is required of women who choose to forge one's own path.
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To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history’s most powerful sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
\nDrafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation.
\nIsaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it. Readers will gain a fresh appreciation for how it was drafted to inspire unity, equality, and the enduring promise of America. With clarity and insight, he reveals not just the power of these words but describes how, in these polarised times, we can use them to restore an appreciation for our common values.
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Alyssa wants to be seen. Less wants to be someone. She takes two buses to class, posts pictures of her lunch, and pretends it's all effortless. He hides his privilege beneath thrifted clothes and a sketchbook full of impossible designs. Together, they are inseparable - two outsiders constructing a version of themselves the world might finally applaud.
\nThen Alyssa stumbles upon the hidden world of phrogging – living unnoticed inside other people's homes. She and Less slip through Los Angeles' glossy influencers, producers, pop stars, all so busy performing their perfect lives they don't notice the shadows in their attics, the scratching in their walls.
\nAn act of rebellion. A harmless thrill. A social experiment.
Until they choose the wrong house.
Until the influencer they idolise catches them in the act.
Until the cameras, already rolling, capture everything.
What begins as a reckless adventure becomes a nightmare of lies, power and the cost of visibility. Bad Influence is a breathtakingly tense, darkly funny thriller about the lives we curate, the secrets we hide, and the monsters made by the need to be seen.
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Thirty years ago, a group of idealists built Perfectville - an isolated town with no crime, no competition, and no chaos. A generation was raised in safety, free to play before “paying their debt.”
\nTisha Moore is the flaw in the system. A single mother of twins, she broke the rules - and now lives under constant scrutiny in a world designed to have none.
\nShe dreams of escape. But Perfectville offers her children something the Outside never could: safety.
\nWhen a violent gang targets her family and forces her into a criminal network operating inside the town, Tisha becomes a threat to the very system keeping her children safe. Undercover agent Rafe Portman is sent to stop her - by gaining her trust, exposing her secrets, and bringing her down.
\nAs pressure builds and a new generation begins to push back against the rules, Tisha faces an impossible choice: protect the system that keeps thousands safe, or destroy it and risk losing her children to the chaos beyond its walls.
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In a world where gods must be slain from within, two young rebels fight on opposite sides of a shattered revolution.
\nGodslayers, Zoe Hana Mikuta's high-octane dystopian sequel to Gearbreakers, continues the saga of Eris and Sona, once lovers, now mortal enemies. Months after the Gearbreakers' devastating blow against the tyrannical empire of Godolia, the few remaining rebels hide in the mountains, hunted by the last surviving Zenith leader.
\nEris, held captive since the attack on the capital, discovers that Sona has been corrupted by the Zenith's cybernetic brainwashing. Now a loyal Godolian soldier, Sona views Eris as her nemesis. With the rebellion in shambles and Godolia inducting Badlands children into a Windup Pilot program, the Gearbreakers' last hope depends on Eris and Sona finding their way back to each other across the battle lines.
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