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Upworthy - GOOD PEOPLE

Gabriel Reilich

GOOD PEOPLE is a much-needed trove of life-affirming stories told straight from the heart. Handpicked from Upworthy's community of millions, each piece speaks to the breadth, depth, and beauty of the human experience. With proof that decency surrounds each and every one of us, Upworthy's first book is a perspective-changing salve that will leave even the most unlikely reader feeling better about the world.

Rippling with wit, compassion, and courage, each chapter offers a restorative opportunity to believe in people's fundamental goodness. Inside, you'll find beautifully illustrated stories, including-

  • The Kindest of Strangers, when a waitress's regular customer gives her the opportunity to chart a new life course.
  • Learn by Heart, when a teacher's brilliance helps her class accept a little boy with an eye patch.
  • It's the Little Things, when a former baker finds a creative, and tasty, way to rally his community through the most difficult of times.
  • The Kids Are All Right, when a lonely woman and a four-year-old girl bond over some unexpected fairytale magic.
  • When I Needed It Most, when a landlord's generosity helps his tenant navigate his grief.
  • Away From Home, when a toddler and her mother provide safe haven for a sick fellow traveler.


An essential counterbalance to today's daunting news cycle, this deeply moving book is emotional nourishment for navigating modern life, both online and off.

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The Heart of Winter

Jonathan Evison

Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.

But when Ruth’s loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they’ve created together comes to a crisis. As Ruth struggles with her crumbling independence, Abe must learn how to take care of her while their three living children question his ability to look after his wife. And once again, the couple has to reconfigure how to be there for each other.

In this bighearted and profound portrait of a marriage, Jonathan Evison explores seventy years of big moments in subtle ways, elegantly braiding the Winters’ turbulent history with their present-day battles, showing us how the oddly paired college kids became parents, fell apart and back together, and grew into the Abe and Ruth of today. Endlessly heartwarming and moving, The Heart of Winter is a reminder that true love lives in small, everyday moments.

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The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park

Michiko Aoyama

The enchanting new novel by the multimillion-copy bestselling author of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, about five strangers who each seek comfort from a healing hippo ride.

Nestled at the bottom of a five-story apartment block in the community of Advance Hill is the children's playground in Hinode Park. If you look to the side, standing on stubby legs, is a hippo. Its upturned eyes give it a teary look, yet for decades, its quiet power has sustained the hearts of one community. According to urban legend, if you touch the exact part of the hippo where you have an ailment or wound, you will see swift signs of recovery. 

Meet the apartment residents who each find their way to Kabahiko:

  • Kanato, who hopes in vain to recover the stellar marks he once scored;
  • Sawa, a new mother with no friends, wishes to be able to communicate as she once did when she was an award-winning retail assistant;
  • Chiharu, off work as a wedding-planner, longs to listen better for the happiness of others;
  • Yuya avoids sports day with a fake injury, only to find he really is in pain;
  • Kazuhiko, despite his fading eyes, seeks to see life's everyday wonder.

    A quietly powerful story of hope, friendship and connection, Michiko Aoyama's beloved bestseller is a celebration of everyday encounters. Its subtle portrayal of the magic of community will lodge itself in every reader's heart as the eclectic cast of characters find healing in their lives--though they may not always find it in the ways they expect.

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How to Age Disgracefully

Clare Pooley

When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards.

The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.

When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.

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Always Remember

Charlie Mackesy

The brand-new book from Charlie Mackesy, revisiting the much-loved world of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

‘One day you’ll look back and realise how hard it was, and just how well you did’

Charlie Mackesy’s four unlikely friends are wandering through the wilds again. They’re not sure what they are looking for. They do know that life can be difficult, but that they love each other, and cake is often the answer. 

When the dark clouds come, can the boy remember what he needs to get through the storm?


 

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I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen

Kate Strickler

In a social-media saturated world, it's all too easy to see the shiny lives of others and find your own less than lustrous. And while most women won't admit they're unhappy, they will tell you they just wish. "I love my life! I just wish ____." After 10-plus years of professional life online, Kate Strickler, founder of Naptime Kitchen, has experienced the many ways we see a life on the other side of the screen--and wish it were our own.

Setting out to fight the lie that what she had wasn't enough, Kate discovered simple perspective shifts that ultimately helped her fall in love with the life she already had. Here she shares the small changes you can make that add up to a whole new outlook on life. With her trademark real-life tips and life hacks mixed with humor and stories she's never shared before, Kate helps you identify and dismantle 10 lies about relationships, money, time, and home life. As you discover how to live and mother in ways that work for you and your family, you'll stop just wishing your life away--and begin to truly enjoy the one you already have.

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The Gallery Assistant

Kate Belli

November 2001: Chloe Harlow wakes up late, with hazy memories of the party the night before but no recollection of how she got back to her Brooklyn apartment. Ever since the terrifying and catastrophic terrorist attack, it seems she has been on a collision course with destruction.

When she finally arrives at the exclusive Upper East Side art gallery where she works, she is immediately called into her boss’s office. A pair of NYPD detectives greet her, also very curious to know how her evening ended…because the host of the party, a rising painter and the gallery’s newest artist, is dead.

Navigating both the sophisticated high-stakes art world and her personal life in burgeoning Williamsburg, Chloe struggles to piece together a complete picture of that lost night. As she digs deeper, inconsistencies emerge between what she remembers and what people tell her actually happened, and more questions are raised. Everything begins to feel like a conspiracy and maybe it is. Because Chloe is the only one who glimpses the secrets the murdered artist left behind, and the closer she gets to the truth…the more deadly it becomes.

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The Painter's Fire

Zara Anishanslin

Told through the lives of three remarkable artists devoted to the pursuit of liberty, an illuminating new history of the ideals that fired the American Revolution.

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence.

Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often alongside more familiar revolutionary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Pine, an award-winning British artist rumored to be of African descent, infused massive history paintings with politics and eventually emigrated to the young United States. Demah, the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, was Pine’s pupil in London before self-emancipating and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause. And Wright, a Long Island–born wax sculptor who became a sensation in London, loudly advocated for revolution while acting as an informal patriot spy.

Illuminating a transatlantic and cosmopolitan world of revolutionary fervor, The Painter’s Fire reveals an extraordinary cohort whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

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The Lost Masterpiece

B.a. Shapiro

In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B. A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot--the one woman in their midst who never got her due--and the story of Morisot's great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet's Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. 

When Tamara inherits Party, she discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara's ordinary life is thrown into turmoil. What wounds and resentments plagued Morisot, and to what lengths will her spirit go for revenge?

The Lost Masterpiece is a story of love, adultery, betrayal, family secrets, and the grueling birth of Impressionism, taking the reader on a whirlwind adventure from the streets of Paris in the late 1800s and the studio Berthe Morisot shared with Manet, Degas, and Renoir to the present day. Shapiro brings Berthe's world to life, tracing her work through generations of descendants and introducing us to a painter as brilliant and original as her male counterparts across 150 years of triumphs, struggles, passions, animosities, and malevolence.

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Artpreneur

Miriam Schulman

A step-by-step guide for creatives to transform your passion into a profitable business.

Whether you're a musician, photographer, painter, writer, dancer, singer, or any other creative with aspirations of making a living from your art, this is the perfect time to turn your creative ideas into a sustainable business. With gatekeepers no longer controlling the market, anyone with a laptop and a dream can make a thriving living from their creativity.

This is the definitive sales and marketing playbook for anyone looking to make a living from their art. Each page provides the inspiration and practical steps you need to build a personal brand, overcome starving-artist syndrome, and finally make consistent sales from your art. By combining left-brain traditional marketing methods with the tools you'll build a confident mindset, take charge of your destiny, and create a clear path for success.

Miriam Schulman, host of the "Inspiration Place" podcast, breaks down the five core elements in the "Passion to Profit" planning framework to help you develop your art business--so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love:

  • PROSPECTING: Build an audience of followers who want what you've got and are prepared to pay top dollar.
  • PRODUCTION: Draw attention to your creations by embracing your authenticity.
  • PRODUCTIVITY: Create work-life balance by managing your priorities and setting manageable goals.
  • PROMOTION: Attract collectors in an authentic and non-salesy way.
  • PRICING: Price your art, products, or services based on cutting edge research that explains buyer psychology.

After twenty years of selling art as well as coaching other artists, Miriam knows that now is the time to leave the rat race and pursue your highest dreams. Don't wait for a sign from the universe to gamble on yourself.

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My Friends

Fredrik Backman

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

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How to Art

Kate Bryan

What is art, where do I find it, and once I'm in front of it, what am I supposed to think about it? Kate Bryan is a self-confessed art addict who has worked with art for over twenty years. But before she studied art history at university, she'd visited a gallery just twice in her life and had no idea she was entering an elitist world. Now, she's on a mission to help everybody come to art.

Like playing or listening to music, or cooking and eating great food, reading or watching films, making art or looking at other people's deserves to be an enriching part of all our lives. How to Art provides a nifty way to ingest art on your own terms. From where it is to what it is, to tips on how to actually enjoy famous artworks like the Mona Lisa, to how to own art and make art at home, to vital advice for making a career as an artist and even how to make your dog more cultural, How to Art gives art to everyone--and makes it fun. Laced throughout with original artworks by the very down-to-earth artist David Shrigley.

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Con/artist

Tony Tetro

The art world is a much dirtier, nastier business than you might expect. Tony Tetro, one of the most renowned art forgers in history, will make you question every masterpiece you've ever seen in a museum, gallery, or private collection. Tetro's "Rembrandts," "Caravaggios," "Miros," and hundreds of other works now hang on walls around the globe. In 2019, it was revealed that Prince Charles received into his collection a Picasso, Dali, Monet, and Chagall, insuring them for over 200 million pounds, only to later discover that they're actually "Tetros." And the kicker? In Tony's words: "Even if some tycoon finds out his Rembrandt is a fake, what's he going to do, turn it in? Now his Rembrandt just became motel art. Better to keep quiet and pass it on to the next guy. It's the way things work for guys like me." The Prince Charles scandal is the subject of a forthcoming feature documentary with Academy Award nominee Kief Davidson and coauthor Giampiero Ambrosi, in cooperation with Tetro.
 

Throughout Tetro's career, his inimitable talent has been coupled with a reckless penchant for drugs, fast cars, and sleeping with other con artists. He was busted in 1989 and spent four years in court and one in prison. His voice--rough, wry, deeply authentic--is nothing like the high society he swanned around in, driving his Lamborghini or Ferrari, hobnobbing with aristocrats by day, and diving into debauchery when the lights went out. He's a former furniture store clerk who can walk around in Caravaggio's shoes, become Picasso or Monet, with an encyclopedic understanding of their paint, their canvases, their vision. For years, he hid it all in an unassuming California townhouse with a secret art room behind a full-length mirror. (Press #* on his phone and the mirror pops open.) Pairing up with coauthor Ambrosi, one of the investigative journalists who uncovered the 2019 scandal, Tetro unveils the art world in an epic, alluring, at times unbelievable, but all-true narrative.

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Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Xochitl Gonzalez

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret. 

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.

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The Antique Hunter's Death on the Red Sea

C.L. Miller

When a painting vanishes from a maritime museum and a dead body is found nearby, Freya Lockwood and her Aunt Carole of the Lockwood Antique Hunter’s Agency are called to investigate.

Following a lead that takes them aboard a glamorous antiques cruise sailing toward the Red Sea in Jordan, they quickly discover that the ship’s art gallery is filled with stolen antiquities. Each antique is also listed in Freya’s late mentor’s journals that detail unsolved cases. In chasing a murderer with a stolen painting, they may have found something more sinister than they could’ve imagined…

Their hunt soon turns deadly when they learn the enigmatic and dangerous art trafficker named The Collector could be on board. But on a ship full of antiques enthusiasts—plus some unexpected familiar faces—will Freya and Carole be able to discover the Collector’s identity and stop his murderous plans before the ship docks? Or will the killer strike again?

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Get the Picture

Bianca Bosker

An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

In Get the Picture, Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for it: gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly-naked performance artist, and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.

Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram, and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art’s role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.

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Frida's Cook

Florencia Etcheves

A hidden painting. A buried past. A legacy waiting to be uncovered.

Mexico City, 1939: Young and determined Nayeli Cruz flees from her Oaxaca home to arrive in Mexico City with neither friends nor prospects. Alone and armed only with her sharp wit and extraordinary talent in the kitchen, she finds herself in front of La Caza Azul, the home of Frida Kahlo. As she begins work as the artist’s cook, Nayeli is pulled into Frida’s world of pain, passion, and defiance. But it isn’t long before amid the vibrant tapestry of flavors, scents, and colors, the two women form a deep bond—one that will shape the course of Nayeli’s life and leave behind a secret buried in art. 

Buenos Aires, Present Day: Paloma, Nayeli’s granddaughter, stumbles upon a mysterious painting depicting her grandmother as a young woman. The artist’s identity is unknown, but the artwork’s existence threatens to unravel long-held family secrets. As Paloma delves into her grandmother’s past, she uncovers a tale of passion, betrayal, and resilience that challenges everything she thought she knew about the one woman who raised her.

A lyrical and timeless portrait of the human side of one of the world’s most famous painters, Frida’s Cook celebrates the power of female friendship, art, and love.

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The Club

Jennifer Dasal

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.

Now in The Club, curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the never-before-told story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people.

For readers interested in women's lives as captured in books like The Barbizon, art history buffs who loved Ninth Street Women, and armchair travelers longing to visit Belle Époque Paris, The Club is a captivating, colorful new history.

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The Painter's Daughters

Emily Howes

Peggy and Molly Gainsborough—the daughters of one of England’s most famous portrait artists of the 1700s and the frequent subject of his work—are best friends. They spy on their father as he paints, rankle their mother as she manages the household, and run barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly periodically experiences bouts of mental confusion, even forgetting who she is, and Peggy instinctively knows she must help cover up her sister’s condition.

When the family moves to Bath, it’s not so easy to hide Molly’s slip-ups. There, the sisters are thrown into the whirlwind of polite society, where the codes of behavior are crystal clear. Molly dreams of a normal life but slides deeper and more publicly into her delusions. Peggy knows the shadow of an asylum looms for women like Molly, and she goes to greater lengths to protect her sister’s secret.

But when Peggy unexpectedly falls in love with her father’s friend, the charming composer Johann Fischer, the sisters’ precarious situation is thrown catastrophically off course. Her burgeoning love for Johann sparks the bitterest of betrayals, forcing Peggy to question all she has done for Molly, and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another.

A tense and tender examination of the blurred lines between protection and control, The Painter’s Daughter is an “engaging, transporting” (The Guardian) look at the real girls behind the canvas. Emily Howes’s debut is a stunning exploration of devotion, control, and individuality; it is a love song to sisterhood, to the many hues of life, and to being looked at but never really seen.

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How to Be an Artist

Jerry Saltz

Art has the power to change our lives. For many, becoming an artist is a lifelong dream. But how to make it happen? In How to Be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, one of the art world’s most celebrated and passionate voices, offers an indispensable handbook for creative people of all kinds. 

From the first sparks of inspiration—and how to pursue them without giving in to self-doubt—Saltz offers invaluable insight into what really matters to emerging artists: originality, persistence, a balance between knowledge and intuition, and that most precious of qualities, self-belief. Brimming with rules, prompts, and practical tips, How to Be an Artist gives artists new ways to break through creative blocks, get the most from materials, navigate career challenges, and above all find joy in the work.

Teeming with full-color artwork from visionaries ancient and modern, this beautiful and useful book will help artists of all kinds—painters, photographers, writers, performers—realize their dreams.

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Portrait of a Thief

Grace D. Li

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. 

Will Chen plans to steal them back.

A 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. 

His 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. 

Because 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.

Equal parts beautiful, thoughtful, and thrilling, Portrait of a Thief is a cultural heist and an examination of Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary cri­tique of the lingering effects of colonialism.

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Fun for the Whole Family

Jennifer E. Smith

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country.

Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota. They’re each at a crossroads: Gemma, who put her own ambitions aside to raise the others, now isn’t sure if she wants to be a mother herself; Connor, a celebrated novelist, is floundering after his recent divorce and suffering from an epic case of writer’s block; and Roddy, at the tail end of a professional soccer career, is dangerously close to losing his future husband for the chance at one last season.

Jude is the only Endicott who seems to have it all together—but appearances can be deceiving. As the weekend unfolds, and the siblings wrestle with their shared past and uncertain futures, they’ll discover that Jude has been keeping three secrets . . . each of which could change everything. 

A captivating journey and an ode to forgiveness that takes readers across all fifty states, Fun for the Whole Family brims with heart and resonates long after the final page.

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The Waterbearers

Sasha Bonét

Sasha Bonét grew up in 1990s Houston, worlds removed from the Louisiana cotton plantation that raised her grandmother, Betty Jean, and the Texas bayous that shaped Sasha’s mother, Connie. And though each generation did better, materially, than the last, all of them carried the complex legacy of Black American motherhood with its origins in slavery. All of them knew that the hands used to comb and braid hair, shell pecans, and massage weary muscles were the very hands used to whip children into submission.

When she had her own daughter, Sofia, Bonét was determined to interrupt this tradition. She brought Sofia to New York and set off on a journey—not only up and down the tributaries of her bloodline but also into the lives of Black women in history and literature—Betty Davis, Recy Taylor, and Iberia Hampton among them—to understand both the love and pain they passed on to their children and to create a way of mothering that honors the legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it.

The Waterbearers is a dazzling and transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves—as individuals, parents, communities, and a country.

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Boy from the North Country

Sam Sussman

A son returns home to his dying mother to discover the astonishing truth of his origins and the secrets of a woman whose life and wisdom he is only beginning to understand.

When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. He still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.

In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.

Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is an emotionally searing meditation on the most essential human themes: loss, healing, memory, and the redemptive power of love.

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The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore

Anika Fajardo

In the span of a year, Dolores Moore has become a thirty-five-year-old orphan. After the funeral of the last living member of her family, Dorrie has never felt more lost and alone. That is, except for a Greek chorus of deceased relatives whose voices follow her around giving unsolicited advice and opinions. And they’re only amplifying Dorrie’s doubts about keeping the deathbed promise she made to return to her birthplace in Colombia.

Fresh off a breakup with her long-term boyfriend, laid off from her job as a cartographer, and facing a daunting inheritance of her mothers’ aging Minneapolis Victorian and two orange tabbies, how can she possibly leave the country now? But when an old flame offers to housesit, the chorus agrees that there’s no room for excuses. Armed with only a scrap of a handdrawn map, Dorrie sets off to find out where—and who—she came from.

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Death on Dickens Island

Allison Brook

Delia Dickens has come home to Dickens Island, a small island in the Long Island Sound, after a twelve-year stint in Manhattan. She’s looking forward to helping her father revitalize the general store that the family owns as well as curating a small book nook. Most importantly, she wants to reunite with her fifteen-year-old son. But Dickens Island isn’t the peaceful town Delia remembers–and she might be in more danger here than she ever was in the big city. 

Delia’s Aunt Reenie and Uncle Brad, both prominent community leaders, are at odds over the sale of a farm and its future use. This has created friction, not only in their marriage, but amongst the citizens of the town. When a young woman, new to the town council and friendly with Brad, is found murdered, everything escalates and reaches a new boiling point. 

With Reenie and Brad both suspects in the case and at each other’s throats, the townspeople start to take sides. When the ghost of her grandmother visits her, Delia learns how past events have impacted the present, and it is up to her to expose the farm’s sordid secrets in order to catch a murderer and restore peace to her beloved island.

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Saltcrop

Yume Kitasei

From the acclaimed author of The Stardust Grail comes the epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister—and Earth’s environmental salvation.

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

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The Lost and the Found

Kevin Fagan

Award-winning San Francisco Chronicle journalist Kevin Fagan has been covering homelessness for decades and has spent extensive time on the streets for his reporting. In The Lost and the Found, Fagan introduces us to Rita and Tyson, two unhoused people who were rescued by their families with the help of his own reporting, and chronicles their extraordinary struggles to pull themselves out of homelessness and addiction.

Having experienced homelessness himself, Fagan has always brought a deep understanding to his subjects and has written here more than just a story of individuals experiencing homelessness, but also a compelling look at the link between homelessness and addiction and an incisive commentary on housing and equality. Kevin Fagan writes with “the deft touch that can come only when the ego of the journalist ebbs into something far more substantial and convincing” (The New Yorker). The Lost and the Found ends with both enormous tragedy and triumph to humanize this national calamity, forever changing the way we see the unhoused.

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The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk...

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The Usual Family Mayhem

HelenKay Dimon

Revenge is a dish best served cold--especially when it comes in the form of one of Grandma's "special" pies. Get the best of family hijinks, girl power, and hilariously justifiable crime in the latest novel from award-winning author HelenKay Dimon.

Kasey Nottingham needs a splashy idea at her company where they find and develop the next big thing for investors--her job depends on it. Impulsively, she pitches Mags' Desserts, a beloved small-town business run by her grandma Mags and live-in "best friend" Celia, two women who overcame deadbeat husbands and financial ruin to build a word-of-mouth clientele. Kasey expects her boss to say no. Instead, he sends her home to North Carolina to land the deal...and now she has a problem.

Mags and Celia aren't interested, which isn't a surprise, but something else is going on in their kitchen. Locked cabinets. Cryptic conversations. Unexpected notations on business records. The ladies have secrets and whatever they're hiding is big. As reports of mysterious deaths of abusive men in the area surface--all in households that recently received a delivery from Mags' Desserts--Kasey worries Gram and Celia have gone into the poison pie business.

As investors start circling, Kasey enlists Jackson Quaid, Celia's nephew and Kasey's long-time crush, as her reluctant investigation assistant. Jackson is practical. Kasey has a wild imagination. Together, they dodge Kasey's boss and gather intel. And kiss. Lots of kissing, though probably not the best idea to start an unexpected romance. Doing it while keeping two feisty ladies from going to jail for knocking off bad husbands--even if those husbands deserve it--might be impossible...but Kasey never shied away from a challenge.

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People Watching

Hannah Bonam-Young

Prudence Welch has found solace in her introverted life in Baysville, a charming tourist town in Northern Ontario. Despite once dreaming of a life beyond its borders, she now finds contentment in her routines: working at her father’s gas station, writing poetry, and caring for her mother, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease shortly after Prue’s nineteenth birthday. But as her mother’s condition worsens and her father’s concerns about her own future intensify, Prue feels her world slipping further out of control.

Enter Milo Kablukov, an enigmatic wanderer whose beat-up van covered with ill-advised bumper stickers rolls into town just when Prue needs a change. It’s all too easy to let go with him, and Prue can’t help but strike up an unlikely friendship with Milo, which leads to a wild and sexy agreement between them.

Milo, a man of many adventures and countless stories, is not one to settle down. However, his brother’s urgent need for help has brought him to Baysville, and now the intriguing Prue has given him more reason to stay—especially once they start spending more time together, their chemistry intensifying, and casual-sex lessons begin at Prue’s request.

But as their temporary arrangement blossoms into something deeper, Prue and Milo discover that getting out of their comfort zones is one thing . . . taking that leap together is something else entirely.

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Murder Runs in the Family

Tamara Berry

Amber thought she had troubles before her grandma was arrested for murder...

Former PI-in-training Amber Winslow has decided to flee her life in the dead of night, carrying nothing but the clothes on her back. Down on her luck and with no other choice, she heads to the sunny state of Arizona to the luxury accommodations of her grandmother's retirement community. Never mind that Amber's never actually met her estranged and eccentric Grandma Jade.

As soon as she sneaks her things into Seven Ponds (a place she technically doesn't qualify for and definitely can't afford), she's shocked to learn that George Vincent, a.k.a. the Admiral, was found dead the very night of her arrival. What's even more shocking is that no one seems particularly distraught over the news of the Admiral's death or the disappearance of his prize pet tortoise. All anyone can talk about is a missing Vincent family heirloom, and they're quick to blame Jade for both the Admiral's murder and the theft of the priceless ring.

Amber doesn't want to admit the woman she's just met--and who accepted her without question--could be behind the Admiral's death, and she's determined to clear her grandmother's name no matter the cost.

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We Survived the Night

Julian Brave NoiseCat

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, NoiseCat and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself.

Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist. Told in the style of a "Coyote Story," a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional art form nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America's First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and a restoration—of Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as NoiseCat seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.

Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. A soulful, formally daring, and indelible work from an important new voice.

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The Memory Library

Kate Storey

If you were to build a library that has shaped your life, which books would you choose? For forty-two years, Sally Harrison has been building a library. Each year, on her daughter's birthday, she adds a new book to her shelves - with a note in the front dedicated to her own greatest work. But Ella - Sally's only child - fled to Australia twenty-one years ago after a heated exchange, and never looked back. And though Sally still dutifully adds a new paperback to the shelves every time the clock strikes midnight on July 11th, her hopes of her daughter ever thumbing through the pages are starting to dwindle. Then disaster strikes and Ella is forced to return to the home she once knew. She is soon to discover that when one chapter ends, another will soon follow. All you have to do is turn the page... Journey through the pages of this heartwarming novel, where hope, friendship and second chances are written in the margins. Perfect for book lovers everywhere and fans of Sally Page's The Keeper of Stories.

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The Boy from the Sea

Garrett Carr

Ireland 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. Fisherman Ambrose Bonnar offers to bring the child into his own family: his son, Declan, wife, Christine, and up the lane, Christine's sister and aging father. The townspeople remain fascinated by the baby, now named Brendan, as he grows into a strange yet charismatic young man. 

The Boy from the Sea tells the story of a family and community, all thrown into turmoil by Brendan’s arrival. The family's fortunes rise and fall over the years—as do the town's, because nothing happens to one family here that doesn't happen to them all—as the forces of a voracious global economy and modernized commercial fishing wreak havoc on their way of life. In the village, Brendan and Declan are wildly different and often wildly at odds; out on the sea, Ambrose worries about his children, but cannot afford to tear his attention from the brutal work that keeps his family afloat. As the world around them keeps changing, the mystery of one boy’s origins pulls them all toward a surprising, stormy fate.

Both outrageously funny and incredibly moving, The Boy from the Sea is a dazzling novel from a major new voice in Irish literature.

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A Family Matter

Claire Lynch

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

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Homegrown Magic

Jamie Pacton

Yael Clauneck is more interested in drinking and flirting than joining their powerful family’s business. They’re on the precipice of a predetermined life when they flee their own graduation party, galloping away in search of . . . well, they’re not sure, but maybe the chance to feel like life can still be a grand adventure.

Margot Greenwillow—talented plant witch, tea lover, and greenhouse owner—has never felt further from adventure in her life. She’s been desperately trying to keep what remains of her family’s magic remedies business afloat. So when Yael, her childhood friend and former crush, rides back into her life, she’s shocked. But perhaps this could be a good thing. After all, Margot could use an assistant in the greenhouses.

Yael has no experience or, honestly, practical skills, but they’re delighted to accept the job. They can lay low for a while, flirting with Margot and figuring out what to do next. Meanwhile, Margot has plans of her own—but plans are notoriously unreliable, and unlikely to survive a swiftly blooming mutual attraction, not to mention the machinations of parents determined to get their heir back . . . no matter the cost.

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Super Natural

Alex Riley

From scorching deserts to frozen seabeds, from the highest peaks of the Himalaya to the hadal depths of the oceans, there are habitats on this Earth that appear hostile to life--yet where, nevertheless, life flourishes. In North American forests, wood frogs awaken each spring from solid blocks of ice. Under the Saharan sun, shielded by silvery hairs, desert ants sprint through the midday heat that is lethal to any other animal. At the bottom of ice-covered lakes, painted turtles pass months without breathing oxygen. Transporting readers to far-flung environments we could never call home, in Super Natural, award-winning science writer Alex Riley paints an awe-inspiring portrait of life's remarkable resilience even under the harshest circumstances.

Riley illuminates ecosystems on every continent to tell the stories of creatures exquisitely adapted to endure unimaginable deprivations--of water, oxygen, food, sunlight--and extremes of heat and cold, of pressure and altitude. To survive half a year without food on barren islands, snakes will shrink and regrow their digestive systems--even their hearts. At the site of the Chernobyl disaster, fungi harness radiation to thrive. Evolution, we see, can and will carve out a niche just about anywhere.

Super Natural shows us how, at nature's furthest limits, the rules of biology as we know them are rewritten--and how, in life's astonishing ingenuity and persistence even in the face of calamity and change, we can find hope for the future of life on Earth.

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Running Deep

Tom Clavin

There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the Silent Service in World War II: the USS Tang. Captain Richard Hetherington O’Kane commanded the attack submarine that sunk more tonnage, rescued more downed aviators, and successfully completed more surface attacks than any other American submarine. These undersea predators were the first to lead the offensive rebound against the Japanese, but at great cost: Submariners would have six times the mortality rate as the sailors who manned surface ships.

The Tang achieved its greatest success on October 24, 1944, when it took on an entire Japanese convoy and destroyed it. But its 24th and last torpedo boomeranged, returning to strike the Tang. Mortally wounded, the boat sunk, coming to rest on the bottom, 180 feet down. After hours of struggle, nine of the 87 crewmen, including O’Kane, made it to the surface.

Captured by the Japanese, the Tang sailors joined other submariners and flyers – including Louis Zamperini and “Pappy” Boyington – at a “torture camp” whose purpose was to gain vital information from inmates and otherwise let them die from malnutrition, disease, and abuse. A special target was Captain O’Kane after the Japanese learned of the headlines about the Tang. Against all odds, when the camp was liberated in August 1945, O’Kane, at only 90 pounds, still lived. The following January, Richard O’Kane limped into the White House where President Truman bestowed him with the Medal of Honor.

This is the true story of death and survival in the high seas—and of the submarine and her brave captain who would become legends.

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Canyon of Deceit

DiAnn Mills

A rescue team searches for a missing young girl and suspects all is not as it seems in this high-stakes romantic suspense novel from the author of Lethal Standoff and Facing the Enemy.

When wilderness survival expert Therese Palmer receives a frantic phone call from former colleague Professor Rurik Ivanov, she is shocked by the news that his young daughter, Alina, is missing--and that Rurik wants Therese's help finding her. She's sure Rurik hasn't given her the whole story . . . especially since he refuses to report the kidnapping to the police. Yet with a child's life hanging in the balance, Therese can't turn down this mission. She knows the clock is ticking and she can't do this alone.

Therese reaches out to Texas Ranger Blane Gardner, whom she met seven months ago during one of her training courses in wilderness survival skills. Blane's specialized training and background with the Crisis Negotiation Unit make him uniquely prepared for this search-and-rescue mission. He agrees to help Therese and to accept Rurik's terms to keep Alina's disappearance quiet, and as the two begin working together, Therese is determined the spark growing between them won't distract from their mission to save Alina.

Traversing deep into the desert of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Alina's last known location, Therese and Blane struggle to separate truth from lies within the mix of intel they're receiving. As they close in on answers that suggest the involvement of Russian organized crime and a high-profile international assassination attempt, they must fight to rescue Alina before she becomes an innocent casualty of a much bigger plot--no matter the risk to their own lives.

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After the North Pole

Erling Kagge

From acclaimed Norwegian explorer, philosopher, and writer Erling Kagge comes the astounding story of his record-setting 58-day journey on skis to the North Pole, laced with profound meditations on nature, other daredevils, and the history of our obsession with the Pole.

"The numbers are uncertain, but in the twentieth century, it is estimated that around a thousand men tried to reach the North Pole... of those, 751 have died doing so." -- Erling Kagge

The North Pole is the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet's rotation. Its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding. Kagge and his friend Børge Ousland became the first people to ever reach the pole without any support from man or machine, skiing for 58 days from a drop-off point on the ice edge of Canada's northernmost island.

Erling, whose books often top 'best of' lists, probes:

  • the physical challenges and psychological motivations for embarking on such an epic expedition
  • the extensive history of the territory's exploration--marked as it was by scandal, murder, shipwreck, shifting ice, and roaming polar bears
  • its place in legend and art
  • and the thrilling adventures he experienced during the trek. It is yet another example of what bestselling author Robert Macfarlane has called "Kagge's extraordinary life in wild places."

As majestic, mesmerizing, and monumental as the terrain it captures, After the North Pole is for anyone who has gazed out at the horizon--and wondered what happens if you keep going.

After the North Pole is illustrated with 12-14 photographs.

Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.

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This Kind of Trouble

Tochi Eze

In 1960s Lagos, a city enlivened with its newfound independence, headstrong Margaret meets British-born Benjamin, a man seeking his roots after the death of his half-Nigerian father. Despite Margaret’s reluctance, their connection is immediate. They fall in love in the dense, humid city, examining what appears to be their racial and cultural differences. However, as they exchange childhood stories during lazy work lunches, they uncover a past more entangled than they could have ever imagined. Margaret’s deteriorating mental health combined with the shadow of events that transpired decades ago in a small village sets their gradual fracture in motion.

By 2005, Margaret has retired to an upscale gated community in Lagos, and seemingly happy Benjamin lives alone in Atlanta, managing his heart problems with no options when asked to name his next of kin. But their attempt at a settled life is shattered when their grandson begins to show ominous signs echoing the struggles Margaret once faced. The former lovers are forced to reunite to confront the buried secrets they had dismissed in the passion of their youth—secrets that continue to ripple through their family.

A startling and propulsive tale of forbidden love, This Kind of Trouble traces the intertwined legacies of one family’s history, exploring the complex relationship between tradition, modernity, and the ways we seek healing in a changing world. With this debut novel, Tochi Eze announces herself as a dazzling new voice in world literature.

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The Wayfinder

Adam Johnson

Talking corpses, poetic parrots, and a fan that wafts the breath of life—this is the world young Kōrero finds herself thrust into when a mysterious visitor lands on her island, a place so remote its inhabitants have forgotten the word for stranger. Her people are desperate and on the brink of starvation, and the wayward stranger offers them an impossible choice: they can remain in the only home they’ve ever known and await the uncertainty to come, or Kōrero can join him and venture into unfamiliar waters, guided by only the night sky and his assurance of a bountiful future in the Kingdom of Tonga. What Kōrero and her people don’t know is that the promised refuge is no utopia—instead, Tonga is an empire at war and on the verge of collapse, a place where brains are regularly liberated from skulls and souls get trapped in coconuts with some frequency.

The perils of Tonga are compounded by a royal feud: loyalties are shifting, graves are being opened, and everyone lives in fear of a jellyfish tattoo. Here, survival can rest on a perfectly performed dance or the acceptance of a cup of kava. Together, the stranger and Kōrero embark upon an epic voyage—one that will deliver them either to salvation or to the depths of the Pacific.

Evoking the grandeur of Wolf Hall and the splendor of Shōgun, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Adam Johnson conjures oral history, restores the natural world, and locates what’s best in humanity. Toweringly ambitious and breathtakingly immersive, The Wayfinder is an instant, timeless classic.

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Thirty Below

Cassidy Randall

Cassidy Randall draws on extensive archival research and original interviews to tell an engrossing, edge-of-the-seat adventure story about a forgotten group of climbers who had the audacity to believe that women could walk alone in extraordinary and treacherous heights.

Grace Hoeman dreamed of standing on top of Denali. The tallest peak in North America, the fierce polar mountain loomed large in many climbers' imaginations, and Grace, a doctor in Alaska, had come close to the top, only to be turned back by altitude sickness and a storm that took the lives of seven fellow climbers in one remorseless blow.

Other expeditions denied her a place because of her gender, and when a letter arrived from a climber in California named Arlene Blum, who'd also been barred from expeditions--unless she stayed in base camp and cooked for the men, Grace got a defiant idea: she would organize and lead the first-ever all-female ascent of the frozen Alaskan peak.

Everyone told the "Denali Damsels," as the team called themselves, that it couldn't be done: Women were incapable of climbing mountains on their own. Men had walked on the moon; women still had not stood on the highest points on Earth. But these six women were unwilling to be limited by sexists and misogynists. They pushed past barriers in society at large, the climbing world, and their own bodies.

And then, when disaster struck at the worst time on their expedition, they could either keep their wits and prove their mettle, or die and confirm the worst opinions of men.

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Never Alone

Woniya Dawn Thibeault

Woniya Thibeault wasn't looking for an adventure of such magnitude, but when the opportunity to participate in Alone(R) Season 6 fell into her lap, she couldn't say no. Never Alone is the story of that journey.

Dropped into the Arctic wilderness-solo-as winter descended, Woniya intended not only to survive, but to thrive. With only a few tools and meager resources, she would need her survival skills, quick wits, and whole heart to make it through.

The skids scraped against the hard granite as the helicopter settled onto the barren peninsula. My fingers were shaking so badly from the adrenaline, it was hard to unbuckle my chest straps. Then, with one step down the ladder, I left the modern world and the rest of humanity behind.

I expected the land to be harsh and unforgiving, but I didn't expect that it would be so breathtaking.

Nor that I would fall instantly in love with it.

The northern wilderness kicked my butt repeatedly throughout the next three months, but each time it picked me back up, staggered me with its beauty, and showed me again how truly resilient I am.

My Arctic adventure could easily have been a grueling struggle, but by putting my trust in myself and the land, it instead became a beautiful journey to a deeper sense of connection and belonging.

In her debut memoir Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey, Woniya shares how months of starving by herself in the Arctic wilderness brought more healing than suffering, and led to a deep sense of belonging and peace. Her story affirms the incredible strength of the human spirit and shows us that strength comes in many surprising forms. Never Alone's message is one of inspiration and learning to trust in ourselves and the land around us; embracing the wild and being wholly and beautifully human, flaws and all.

Never Alone will take you on an Arctic journey through challenges and triumphs, joys and heartbreaks, and leave you inspired and wanting more.

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North of Nowhere

Allison Brennan

After five years in hiding from their murderous father, the day Kristen and Ryan McIntyre have been dreading has arrived: Boyd McIntyre, head of a Los Angeles crime family, has at last tracked his kids to a small Montana town and is minutes away from kidnapping them. They barely escape in a small plane, but gunfire hits the fuel line. The pilot, a man who has been raising them as his own, manages to crash land in the middle of the Montana wilderness. The siblings hike deep into the woods, searching desperately for safety—unaware of the severity of the approaching storm. 

Boyd’s sister Ruby left Los Angeles for the Army years ago, cutting off contact in order to help keep her niece and nephew safe and free from the horrors of the McIntyre clan. So when she gets an emergency call that the plane has gone down with the kids inside, she drops everything to try save them.

As the storm builds, Ruby isn’t the only person looking for them. Boyd has hired an expert tracker to find and bring them home. And rancher Nick Lorenzo, who knows these mountains better than anyone and doesn’t understand why the kids are running, is on their trail too. 

But there is a greater threat to Kristen and Ryan out there. More volatile than the incoming blizzard, more dangerous than the family they ran from or the natural predators they could encounter. Who finds them first could determine if they live or die. . .

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The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

Anne Sebba

In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a band that would play in all weathers marching music to other inmates, forced laborers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the harshest of circumstances, with little more than a bowl of soup to eat, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra saved their lives. But at what cost?

What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care.

From Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members, and the response of other prisoners for the first time.

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Perilous Waters

Terry Shames

Jessie Madison escaped to the Bahamas when she made a terrifying discovery at home and a bad decision got her dismissed from the FBI training program. Three months later, Jessie is ready to return to Virginia to pick up the pieces of her shattered
life - until she and a friend are attacked during a boat ride and thrown overboard, with devastating consequences.

Jessie is determined to bring their attackers to justice. Who are they? What were they looking for on the boat? And can she trust Nick, the handsome but enigmatic stranger who claims he wants to help her? Jessie must draw on all her survival and
investigative skills if she is to stay alive long enough to get answers . . .

 

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The Last Room on the Left

Leah Konen

The caretaker at an isolated mountain hotel finds herself fighting for her life—and sanity—in this twisty, addictive thriller.

Kerry’s life is in shambles: Her husband has left her, her drinking habit has officially become a problem, and though the deadline for her big book deal—the one that was supposed to change everything—is looming, she can’t write a word. When she sees an ad for a caretaker position at a revitalized roadside motel in the Catskills, she jumps at the chance. It's the perfect getaway to finish her book and start fresh. 

But as she hunkers down in a blizzard, she spots something through the window: a pale arm peeking out from a heap of snow. Trapped in the mountains and alone with a dead, frozen body, Kerry must keep her head and make it out before the killer comes for her too. But is the deadly game of cat-and-mouse all in her mind? The body count begs to differ . . .

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The Six

Steven Schwankert

When RMS Titanic sank on a cold night in 1912, barely seven hundred people escaped with their lives. Among them were six Chinese men. Arriving in New York, these six were met with suspicion and slander. Fewer than twenty-four hours later, they were expelled from the country and vanished.

When historian Steven Schwankert first stumbled across the fact that eight Chinese nationals were onboard, of whom all but two survived, he couldn’t believe that there could still be untold personal histories from the Titanic.

Now, at last, their story can be told. The result of meticulous research, a dogged investigation, and interviews with family members, The Six is an epic journey across continents that reveals the full story of these six forgotten survivors. Who were Ah Lam, Chang Chip, Cheong Foo, Fang Lang (or Fong Wing Sun), Lee Bing, and Ling Hee?

Professional mariners, their incredible journeys reveal an overlooked, but all-too-common, experience of inequality and discrimination. The Titanic continues to reveal a multitude of secrets, and the lives of these six men add a layer of humanity and nuance to one of the most storied shipwrecks in history.

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Out of the Woods

Gregg Olsen

In May 2005, authorities discovered the Groene family murdered in their Idaho home. The family's youngest members--eight-year-old Shasta and her brother, nine-year-old Dylan--were nowhere to be found.

As a community prayed for their return, Shasta and Dylan were already miles away in the woods of Montana at the hands of serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan. After a harrowing forty-eight day ordeal, Shasta was rescued. In many ways, her survival story was only beginning.

In the following years, while Shasta struggled to outrun her trauma, a pattern of self-destructive behavior shadowed her like an ever-worsening thunderstorm. She still had hope buried deep inside. Every bit as much as the little girl who had been held captive in the woods. This would be an all-new battle for Shasta. And she was determined not to lose.

Out of the Woods is the haunting and intimate true-crime story of one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history--and a young woman's journey to reclaim her life in its wake.

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The Fourth Consort

Edward Ashton

Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood.

That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.

Funny thing, though—turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don’t like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don’t like Unity’s new human minions.

When an encounter between Boreau’s scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly’s nightmarish shock troops, the planet’s natives, who aren’t winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he’ll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn’t come to the conclusion that he’s worth more to her dead than alive.

Part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle, The Fourth Consort asks an important question: how far would you go to survive? And more importantly, how many drinks would you need to go there?

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The Isle in the Silver Sea

Tasha Suri

In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.

Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen's court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other? 

As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.

But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?

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Hemlock & Silver

T. Kingfisher

Healer Anja regularly drinks poison. Not to die, but to save - seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on. But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja's unorthodox methods can save her. Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow - but nothing seems to work. Nothing, that is, until she finds a secret world hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick. Or it might be the thing that kills them all . . .

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The Graceview Patient

Caitlin Starling

Misery meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers in this genre-bending, claustrophobic hospital gothic from the bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence. 

Margaret’s rare autoimmune condition has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated and in pain. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial. 

The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. 

Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls.

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The Third Rule of Time Travel

Philip Fracassi

Rule One: You can only travel to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.

In this electrifying science fiction thriller from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time--to any point in the traveler's lifetime--and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.

After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella--their only daughter--and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.

Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.

As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.

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Death of the Author

Nnedi Okorafor

Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister's lavish Caribbean wedding, she's unceremoniously fired from her university job and, to add insult to injury, her novel is rejected by yet another publisher. With her career and dreams crushed in one fell swoop, she decides to write something just for herself. What comes out is nothing like the quiet, literary novels that have so far peppered her unremarkable career. It's a far-future epic where androids and AI wage war in the grown-over ruins of human civilization. She calls it Rusted Robots.

When Zelu finds the courage to share her strange novel, she does not realize she is about to embark on a life-altering journey--one that will catapult her into literary stardom, but also perhaps obliterate everything her book was meant to be. From Chicago to Lagos to the far reaches of space, Zelu's novel will change the future not only for humanity, but for the robots who come next.

A book-within-a-book that blends the line between writing and being written, Death of the Author is a masterpiece of metafiction that manages to combine the razor-sharp commentary of Yellowface with the heartfelt humanity of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable, this is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.

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When the Moon Hits Your Eye

John Scalzi

The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

For some it’s an opportunity. For others it’s a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now... something absolutely impossible.

Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives -- over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each get their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve. All in a kaleidoscopic novel that goes all the places you’d expect, and then to so many places you wouldn’t.

It’s a wild moonage daydream. Ride this rocket.

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Station Eternity

Mur Lafferty

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an alien space station, but her problems still follow her in this witty, self-aware novel that puts a speculative spin on murder mysteries, from the Hugo-nominated author of Six Wakes.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.
 
But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime—and fast—or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board….

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We Lived on the Horizon

Erika Swyler

The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Over generations, an elite class has evolved from the descendants of those who gave up the most to found mankind’s last stronghold, called the Sainted.

Saint Enita Malovis, long accustomed to luxury, feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s hidden underclass and the programs that impose and maintain order.

A complex, imaginative, and unforgettable novel, We Lived on the Horizon grapples with concepts as varied as the human desire for utopia, body horror, and what the future holds for humanity and machine alike.

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Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

V. E. Schwab

This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life—how it ends, and how it starts.

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Alchemised

SenLinYu

What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.” 

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.

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The Incandescent

Emily Tesh

Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented and chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions.

Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But when a new threat arises in the form of the ancient demon who has long waited patiently just beyond the school’s wards, even Walden and the aggressively competent Chief Marshal, Laura Kenning, may not be able to contain it.

It’s Walden’s responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself.

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Cold Eternity

S.A. Barnes

Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay low: a gigantic space barge storing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth’s most fortunate citizens from more than a century ago...

The cryo program, created by trillionaire tech genius Zale Winfeld, is long defunct, and the AI hologram "hosts," ghoulishly created in the likeness of Winfeld’s three adult children, are glitchy. The ship feels like a crypt, and the isolation gets to Halley almost immediately. She starts to see figures crawling in the hallways, and there’s a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents.

It’s not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from....

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The Devils

Joe Abercrombie

Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.

Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it's a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.

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Wearing the Lion

John Wiswell

Sometimes a goddess's worst enemy is her biggest fan.

Heracles, hero of Greece, dedicates all his feats to the goddess Hera. If only he knew that his very face is an insult to her...as he is yet another child that Hera’s dipshit husband, Zeus, had out of wedlock.

“Auntie Hera” loathes every minute of Heracles’ devotion, until she snaps and causes an unspeakably tragic accident: the death of Heracles' children. Plunged into grief and desperate for revenge, Heracles is determined to find the god that did this. 

Wracked with guilt and desperate to save face, Hera distracts Heracles with monster-slaying quests, only to find that he is too traumatized to enact more violence. Instead, Heracles cares for the Nemean lion, bonds with the Lernaean hydra, and heeds the Ceryneian hind.

Each challenge adds a new monster to Heracles' newfound family. A family that just might lay siege to Mount Olympos.

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Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back...

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists--and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud's inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud's dominant species. It also begins to understand them.

If they escape Shroud, they'll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They'll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.

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The Rush

Beth Lewis

Gold fever has taken him. I believe he means to kill me...

Canada, 1898. The Gold Rush is on in the frozen wilderness of the Yukon. Fortunes are made as quickly as they're lost, and Dawson City has become a lawless settlement.

In its midst, three women are trying to find their place on the edge of civilization. Journalist Kate, along with her dog Yukon, has travelled hundreds of miles after receiving a letter from her sister warning that her husband means to kill her. Martha's hotel and livelihood are under threat from the local strongman, who is set on buying up the town. And down by the river, where gold shimmers from between the rocks, Ellen feels her future slip away as her husband fails to find the fortune they risked so much to seek.

When a woman is found murdered, Kate, Martha and Ellen find their lives, fates and fortunes intertwined. But to unmask her killer, they must navigate a desperate land run by dangerous men who will do anything for a glimpse of gold...

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The Gales of November

John U. Bacon

For three decades following World War II, the Great Lakes overtook Europe as the epicenter of global economic strength. The region was the beating heart of the world economy, possessing all the power and prestige Silicon Valley does today. And no ship represented the apex of the American Century better than the 729-foot-long Edmund Fitzgerald--the biggest, best, and most profitable ship on the Lakes.

But on November 10, 1975, as the "storm of the century" threw 100 mile-per-hour winds and 50-foot waves on Lake Superior, the Mighty Fitz found itself at the worst possible place, at the worst possible time. When she sank, she took all 29 men onboard down with her, leaving the tragedy shrouded in mystery for a half century.

In The Gales of November, award-winning journalist John U. Bacon presents the definitive account of the disaster, drawing on more than 100 interviews with the families, friends, and former crewmates of those lost. Bacon explores the vital role Great Lakes shipping played in America's economic boom, the uncommon lives the sailors led, the sinking's most likely causes, and the heartbreaking aftermath for those left behind--"the wives, the sons, and the daughters," as Gordon Lightfoot sang in his unforgettable ballad.

Focused on those directly affected by the tragedy, The Gales of November is both an emotional tribute to the lives lost and a propulsive, page-turning narrative history of America's most-mourned maritime disaster.



 

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Heartwood

Amity Gaige

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is an “unputdownable” (Real Simple) and redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

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Four Thousand Paws

Lee Morgan

Few sporting events attract as much attention, or create as much spectacle, as the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Each March, despite subzero temperatures and white-out winds, hundreds of dogs and dozens of mushers journey to Anchorage, Alaska, to participate in "The Last Great Race on Earth," a grueling, thousand-mile race across the Alaskan wilderness.

While many veterinarians apply, only a small number are approved to examine the elite canine athletes who, using solely their muscle and an innate drive to race, carry handlers between frozen outposts each year, risking injury, illness, and fatigue along the way. In Four Thousand Paws, award-winning veterinarian Lee Morgan--a member of the Iditarod's expert veterinary corps--tells the story of these heroic dogs, following the teams as they traverse deep spruce forests, climb steep mountain slopes, and navigate over ice-bound rivers toward Nome, on the coast of the Bering Sea, where the famed Burled Arch awaits.

From the huskies of Iditarods past to the intrepid dogs of today, Morgan shows how these fierce competitors surmount the dangers of the Arctic, aided, along the way, by attentive mushers and volunteer veterinarians. A world away from his Georgetown veterinary clinic, Morgan examines dogs at each checkpoint, and sees how their body language reflects the thrill of the race--and how, when pulled from it, they often refuse to eat. As in any team sport, distinct personalities among the sled dogs create complex group dynamics, and Morgan captures moments of intense rivalry, defeat, camaraderie, and, ultimately, triumph.

In the tradition of Why Elephants Weep, Four Thousand Paws is an intimate look inside the animal mind, and an exciting new account of a storied race.

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The Oligarch's Daughter

Joseph Finder

Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his security is breached, Paul is forced to flee into the New Hampshire wilderness to evade Russian operatives who can seemingly predict his every move.

Six years ago, Paul was a rising star on Wall Street who fell in love with a beautiful photographer named Tatyana--unaware that her father was a Russian oligarch and the object of considerable interest from several U.S. intelligence agencies. Now, to save his own life, Paul must unravel a decades-old conspiracy that extends to the highest reaches of the government.

Rivaling the classic spy novels of the Cold War, The Oligarch's Daughter is built for the frightening world we live in now.

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North to the Future

Ben Weissenbach

At the age of twenty, college student Ben Weissenbach went north to Arctic Alaska armed with little more than inspiration from his literary heroes and a growing interest in climate change. What met him there was a world utterly unlike the 21st century Los Angeles in which he grew up--a land of ice, rock, and grizzlies seen by few outside a small contingent of scientists with big personalities.

There's Roman Dial, the larger-than-life ecologist with whom Ben walks and rafts a thousand miles across Alaska's Brooks Range. There's Kenji Yoshikawa, the reindeer-herding permafrost expert who leaves Ben alone for eleven days to care for his off-grid homestead, where temperatures drop to -49 degrees Fahrenheit. And there's Matt Nolan, the independent glaciologist who flies him to the largest glaciers in the American Arctic.

As these scientists teach Ben to read Alaska's warming landscape, he confronts the limits of digital life and the complexity of the world beyond his screens. He emerges from each adventure with a new perspective on our modern relationship to technology and a growing wonder for our fast-changing--ever-changing--natural world.

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Black Woods, Blue Sky

Eowyn Ivey

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. 

Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains, on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic and she can picture a happily ever after: Together they catch salmon, pick berries, and climb mountains so tall it’s as if they could touch the bright blue sky. But soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have ever imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.

Black Woods, Blue Sky is a novel with life-and-death stakes, about the love between a mother and daughter, and the allure of a wild life—about what we gain and what it might cost us.

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Empire of Ice and Stone

Buddy Levy

In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame.Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.Twenty-two men and an Inuit woman with two small daughters now stood on a mile-square ice floe, their ship and their original leader gone. Under Bartlett’s leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. He would take one of the young Inuit hunters and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It was their only hope.

Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's Empire of Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership—one selfless, one self-serving—and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history, considered the last great voyage of the Heroic Age of Discovery.

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The High Country

William W. Johnstone

Luke Ransom and Jug Sartain, trappers for the American Fur Company, made a formidable team when they partnered up in the grueling winter wilderness of Blackfoot Country. No hostile raids by man, no brutal obstacles of nature could stop them from snaring what they came for. The nicest surprise was that Luke came home with a wife—Willow, a lovely young Crow woman. Now, one year later, in this new trapping season of 1834, it’s Luke, Jug, and Willow who become the hunted . . .

They’re heading farther to the northwest in the mountain valleys of the Beaverhead and Pioneer Range. It’s a known risk. The fearsome, kill-crazy Blackfoot claim exclusive rights to the territory—even the hardcase Hudson Bay trappers think twice about crossing that line. But it’s an unknown risk that’s putting the lives of Luke, Jug, and Willow in danger. A kill-crazy, vengeance-seeking hound named Jake Purcell is following their every move. He aims to make a big killing in the High Country—and take Willow alive for his feral own needs. A cold and bloody day in hell is storming on the horizon.

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Trouble Island

Sharon Short

A gripping new novel inspired by a real place and events from the author’s family, Trouble Island is the standalone suspense debut from historical mystery writer Sharon Short.

Many miles from anywhere in the middle of Lake Erie, Trouble Island serves as a stop-off for gangsters as they run between America and Canada. The remote isle is also the permanent home to two women: Aurelia Escalante, who serves as a maid to Rosita, lady of the mansion and wife to the notorious prohibition gangster, Eddie McGee. In the freezing winter of 1932, the women anticipate the arrival of Eddie and his strange coterie: his right-hand man, a doctor, a cousin, a famous actor, and a rival gangster who Rosita believes murdered their only son.

Aurelia wants nothing more than to escape Trouble Island, but she is hiding a secret of her own. She is in fact not a maid, but a gangster’s wife in hiding, as she runs from the murder she committed five years ago. Her friend Rosita took her in under this guise, but it has become clear that Rosita wants to keep Aurelia right where she is.

Shortly after the group of criminals, celebrities, and scoundrels arrive, Rosita suddenly disappears. Aurelia plans her getaway, going to the shore to retrieve her box of hidden treasures, but instead finds Rosita’s body in the water. Someone has made sure Aurelia was the one to find her. An ice storm makes unexpected landfall, cutting Trouble Island off from both mainlands, and with more than one murderer among them.

Both a gripping locked room mystery, and a transporting, evocative portrait of a woman in crisis, Trouble Island marks the enthralling standalone suspense debut from Sharon Short, promising to be her breakout novel, inspired by a real island in Lake Erie, and true events from her own rich family history.

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The River

Peter Heller

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since college orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey.

One night, with the fire advancing, they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank; the next day, a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the same man they heard? And if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

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The North Line

Matt Riordan

Even at the ragged edge of civilization, some lines should not be crossed.

Everyone believes Adam to be something he's not. Sometimes that's because he's told them a story. Sometimes he's told himself one. But when Adam joins an Alaskan fishing crew that's promising quick money, the dangerous work and harsh lifestyle strip away all fabrications and force a dark-hearted exploration of who he really is.

On the unforgiving Bering Sea, Adam finds the adventure and authenticity of a fisherman's life revelatory. The labor required to seize bounty from the ocean invigorates him, and the often crude comradery accompanies a welcome, hard-earned wisdom. But when a strike threatens the entire season and violence stalks the waves, Adam is thrust into a struggle for survival at the edge of the world, where evolutionary and social forces collide for outcomes beyond anyone's control.

In his riveting debut novel, Matt Riordan pairs personal experiences with a master storyteller's eye in a piercing examination of the quest for identity in the face of tempests within and without.

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The Twenty-Ninth Day

Alex Messenger

A six-hundred-mile canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness is a seventeen-year-old's dream adventure, but after he is mauled by a grizzly bear, it's all about staying alive.

This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts seventeen-year-old Alex Messenger's near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra. The story follows Alex and his five companions as they paddle north through harrowing rapids and stunning terrain. Twenty-nine days into the trip, while out hiking alone, Alex is attacked by a barren-ground grizzly. Left for dead, he wakes to find that his summer adventure has become a struggle to stay alive. Over the next hours and days, Alex and his companions tend his wounds and use their resilience, ingenuity, and dogged perseverance to reach help at a remote village a thousand miles north of the US-Canadian border.

The Twenty-Ninth Day is a coming-of-age story like no other, filled with inspiring subarctic landscapes, thrilling riverine paddling, and a trial by fire of the human spirit.

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One Last Shot

Susan May Warren

When country music star Oaken Fox joins survivalist Mike Grizz's new adventure show in the Alaskan wilderness, he just wants to boost his fan base. But when tragedy strikes and Air One Rescue must save them, Oaken wants to quit. Too bad his producer has other plans--signing him on with Air One Rescue as a recruit and making a reality show.

EMT Boo Kingston did not join Air One Rescue to train a celebrity. But she's a rookie to the team, so yes, she'll train Oaken and keep him alive and not for a minute pay attention to his charm.

And then five women go missing from a resort during a bachelorette weekend gone wrong. Now, Air One and the rescue team will have to use all their skills and manpower--including Oaken--to find them before a blizzard settles in. But can they work together before tragedy strikes?

Book one in the compelling saga about the heroes who will stop at nothing to bring you home.

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First Wilderness

Sam Keith

The story behind the best-selling book One Man's Wilderness and how author Sam Keith and Dick Proenneke met and forged an everlasting friendship.

"Sam, you know right well you don't want to leave this country. Don't give up on it. Me and you got to figure something out."

After serving as a US Marine during World War II and attending college on the GI Bill, Sam Keith decided to seek adventure in Alaska as a laborer on the Adak Navy base. There he befriended Dick Proenneke, whose shared love of the outdoors, hard work, and self-reliance quickly bonded an alliance between the two. Together they explored the wilds of South Central Alaska while working on the Navy base, hunting and fishing with friends and breathing in the great outdoors. Keith was ready to leave after three years of finding almost everything he sought--not realizing then how his fate was intrinsically tied to his friend's and how it would lead to writing the best-selling book One Man's Wilderness.

Sam Keith passed away in 2003. But in 2013, his son-in-law and children's book author/illustrator Brian Lies discovered in an archive box in their garage a book manuscript, originally written in 1974 after the publication of One Man's Wilderness. First Wilderness is the story of Keith's own experiences, at times harrowing, funny, and fascinating. Along with the original manuscript are photos and excerpts from his journals, letters, and notebooks, woven in to create a compelling and poignant memoir of search and discovery. Foreword by Nick Jans, one of Alaska's foremost authors and photographers, and Afterword by Keith's daughter Laurel Lies.

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Raft of Stars

Andrew J. Graff

It's the summer of 1994 in Claypot, Wisconsin, and the lives of ten-year-old Fischer "Fish" Branson and Dale "Bread" Breadwin are shaped by the two fathers they don't talk about.

One night, tired of seeing his best friend bruised and terrorized by his no-good dad, Fish takes action. A gunshot rings out and the two boys flee the scene, believing themselves murderers. They head for the woods, where they find their way onto a raft, but the natural terrors of Ironsforge gorge threaten to overwhelm them.

Four adults track them into the forest, each one on a journey of his or her own. Fish's mother Miranda, a wise woman full of fierce faith; his granddad, Teddy, who knows the woods like the back of his hand; Tiffany, a purple-haired gas station attendant and poet looking for connection; and Sheriff Cal, who's having doubts about a life in law enforcement.

The adults track the boys toward the novel's heart-pounding climax on the edge of the gorge and a conclusion that beautifully makes manifest the grace these characters find in the wilderness and one another. This timeless story of loss, hope, and adventure runs like the river itself amid the vividly rendered landscape of the Upper Midwest.

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Atmosphere

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars.

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The Story She Left Behind

Patti Callahan Henry

In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, vanishes off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her disappearance leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beloved mother.

By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s disappearance, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.

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Annapolis Goes to War

Craig L. Symonds

America's preeminent naval historian offers a history of the Second World War based on the experiences of the young officers--fresh out of the United States Naval Academy--who served on its front lines.

They arrived in Annapolis as teenagers the year Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland and graduated as young men the week the British Army evacuated Dunkirk. Annapolis Goes to War tells the story of their four transformative years at the Naval Academy, and then four more annealing years in the cauldron of war. More than a hundred of them were on duty in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Ten of them died that day-seven remain entombed in the USS Arizona still. Over the next four years, these former Midshipmen participated in virtually every significant engagement in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, from North Africa to Normandy. They were at the front edge of the war in battleships, carriers, destroyers, submarines, and airplanes, and led Marine Corps units ashore. Some experienced the war as prisoners of the Japanese. Fifty-six of them died in the Second World War, the greatest wartime loss any service academy ever experienced.

Taking readers into and through the lives of these young men in wartime, Craig Symonds offers a poignant and powerful story of adjustment, growth, pain, loss, and eventually triumph. Using their diaries, memoirs, and letters, he evokes unforgettably their trials and bonds, their loss of innocence and their discovery of the meaning of sacrifice. Annapolis Goes to War is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the experience of fighting the bloodiest war in human history.

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Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Grady Hendrix

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, frightened, and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by the adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid . . . and it’s usually paid in blood.

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Sisters in the Wind

Angeline Boulley

Ever since Lucy Smith’s father died five years ago, “home” has been more of an idea than a place. She knows being on the run is better than anything waiting for her as a “ward of the state”. But when the sharp-eyed and kind Mr. Jameson with an interest in her case comes looking for her, Lucy wonders if hiding from her past will ever truly keep her safe.

Five years in the foster system has taught her to be cautious and smart. But she wants to believe Mr. Jameson and his “friend-not-friend”, a tall and fierce-looking woman who say they want to look after her. They also tell Lucy the truth her father hid from her: She is Ojibwe; she has – had – a sister, and more siblings, a grandmother who’d look after her and a home where she would be loved.

But Lucy is being followed. The past has destroyed any chance at safety she had. Will the secrets she's hiding swallow her whole and take away any hope for the future she always dreamed of?

When the past comes for revenge, it’s fight or flight.

Angeline Boulley's award-winning canon of books puts compelling characters and fast-paced action at the center of narratives rich in historical context. Read Firekeeper's Daughter; Warrior Girl Unearthed; and the soon-to-be-released Sisters of the Wind in any order; but like the world itself, there are echoes within each for the other stories.

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Splinter Effect

Andrew Ludington

In Splinter Effect, an action-packed debut by Andrew Ludington, time traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward maneuvers through the past to recover a long-lost, precious menorah hidden in ancient Rome.

Smithsonian archaeologist Rabbit Ward travels through time on sponsored expeditions to the past to secure precious artifacts moments before they are lost to history. Although exceptional at his job, Rabbit is not without faults. In a spectacular failure twenty years ago, he lost both the menorah of the second temple and his hot-headed mentee, Aaron. So, when new evidence reveals the menorah’s reappearance in 6th century Constantinople, Rabbit seizes the chance for redemption.

But from the moment he arrives in the past, things start to go wrong. Rabbit quickly finds out that his prime competition, an unlicensed and annoyingly appealing “stringer” named Helen, is also in Constantinople hunting the menorah. And that’s only the beginning. The oppressed Jewish population of the city is primed for revolution, Constantinople’s leading gang seems to have it out for Rabbit personally, and someone local is interested enough in the menorah to kill for it.

As the past closes in on him and his previous failures compound, will Rabbit be able to recover the menorah before it's once again lost in time? With new and old dangers alike hiding behind every corner, time might just be up for Rabbit’s redemption—and possibly his life.

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The Correspondent

Virginia Evans

“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.

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Culpability

Bruce Holsinger

When the Cassidy-Shaws' autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie's future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei's odd behavior tugs at Noah's suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident--suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet's teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI. 

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.

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Happy Land

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, due to a mysterious estrangement between her mother and grandmother, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen. 

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

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Junie

Erin Crosby Eckstine

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.

When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.

With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?

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Strange Houses

Uketsu

From the bestselling author of the wildly inventive Strange Pictures and a phenomenon in Japan--unnatural layouts, trap doors, windowless rooms-- a sinister conspiracy is concealed within a house's warped and unsettling floor plans

When a writer fascinated by the macabre is approached by an acquaintance, he finds himself investigating an eerie house for sale in Tokyo. At first, with its bright and spacious interior, it seems the perfect first home. But upon closer inspection, the building's floor plans reveal a mysterious "dead space" hidden between its walls. Seeking a second opinion, the writer shares the floor plans with his friend Kurihara, an architect, only to discover more unnerving details throughout.

What is the true purpose behind the house's disturbing design? And what happened to the former owners who disappeared without a trace? When a body suddenly appears and a young woman reaches out about a second house, it soon becomes clear that the writer and his friend may be in over their heads. Structured around a series of chilling floorplans, with Strange Houses, mystery-horror YouTube sensation Uketsu casts readers in the role of detective, inviting them to help map out the truth hidden within these puzzling floor plans . . . and the terrifying plot behind it all.

 

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The Love Haters

Katherine Center

Katie Vaughn has been burned by love in the past—now she may be lighting her career on fire. She has two choices: wait to get laid off from her job as a video producer or, at her coworker Cole’s request, take a career-making gig profiling Tom “Hutch” Hutcheson, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West. The catch? Katie’s not exactly qualified. She can’t swim—but pretends that she can. 

Plus, Cole and Hutch are brothers. And they don’t get along. Next stop: paradise! But paradise is messier than it seems. As Katie gets entangled with Hutch (the most scientifically good-looking man she has ever seen . . . but maybe a bit of a love hater), along with his colorful aunt Rue and his rescue Great Dane, she gets trapped in a lie. Or two. 

Swim lessons, helicopter flights, conga lines, drinking contests, hurricanes, and stolen kisses ensue—along with chances to tell the truth, to face old fears, and to be truly brave at last.

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The Missing Half

Ashley Flowers

Nicole “Nic” Monroe is in a rut. At twenty-four, she lives alone in a dinky apartment in her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana, she’s just gotten a DWI, and she works the same dead-end job she’s been working since high school, a job she only has because her boss is a family friend and feels sorry for her. Everyone has felt sorry for her for the last seven years—since the day her older sister, Kasey, vanished without a trace.

On the night Kasey went missing, her car was found over a hundred miles from home. The driver’s door was open and her purse was untouched in the seat next to it. The only real clue in her disappearance was Jules Connor, another young woman from the same area who disappeared in the same way, two weeks earlier. But with so little for the police to go on, both cases eventually went cold.

Nic wants nothing more than to move on from her sister’s disappearance and the state it’s left her in. But then one day, Jules’s sister, Jenna Connor, walks into Nic’s life and offers her something she hasn’t felt in a long time: hope. What follows is a gripping tale of two sisters who will do anything to find their missing halves, even if it means destroying everything they’ve ever known.

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Good Spirits

B K. Borison

He's the Ghost of Christmas Past. She's not exactly Scrooge.


Ghost of Christmas Past Nolan Callahan intends to spend this holiday haunting like every other--get in, get out, return to his otherwise aimless existence as a ghost awaiting the afterlife. But when he's faced with Harriet York, the sweetest assignment he's ever had, he suddenly finds himself wishing for a future.


Harriet York has no idea why she's being haunted. She's a good person--or, at least, she tries to be. A people pleaser to her core, she always does what's expected of her. But as she and Nolan begin to examine her past, they discover there are threads that bind them together-- and realize there might be more to moving on than expected.


With the deadline of Christmas Eve fast approaching, will they find the key to their futures in each other's pasts? Or will they stay firmly in the present, indulging in their unexpected, spirited connection?


Filled with magic, mayhem, and cozy holiday charm, this swoony romance is B.K. Borison's best yet!
 

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The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah

Jean Meltzer

Can these exes rekindle their love this Hanukkah?

Evelyn Schwartz has the perfect Hanukkah planned: eight jam-packed days producing the live-action televised musical of A Christmas Carol. Who needs family when you've got long hours, impossible deadlines, and your dream job? That is, until an accident on set lands her in the medical bay with one of her chronic migraines, and she's shocked to find her ex-husband, David Adler, filling in for the usual studio doctor.

It's been two years since David walked away from Evelyn and their life in Manhattan, and his ex-wife is still the same workaholic who puts her career before everything else--especially her health. But when Evelyn begins hallucinating "ghosts" tied to her past heartbreaks, and every single one leads to David, he finds himself spending much more time with her than he anticipated. And denying the still-smoldering chemistry between them becomes impossible.

As Evelyn revisits her ghosts of Hanukkah past, she and David both begin to wonder if they can have a Hanukkah future. But with a high-stakes production ramping up the pressure on Evelyn, and troublesome spirits forcing them both to confront their most difficult shared memories, it might just take a Hanukkah miracle for these two exes to light the flame on their second-chance at love.

 

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The Goldens

Lauren Wilson

A delicious, intoxicating debut thriller about a young woman who is swept into a glamorous world of fascinating influencers, glittering parties—and possibly murder.

Chloe has always dreamed of becoming a bestselling writer. Then she meets Clara Holland, a prominent influencer, socialite, and model. Clara is enigmatic, dazzling, gorgeous. And at last, ordinary Chloe has something to write about.

Bonding instantly, Chloe moves into Clara’s grand family estate. They spend long afternoons together, writing Clara’s memoir, polishing social media posts, and planning sumptuous, decadent parties: fairy lights in the orangery, themed cocktails, sequined backdrops, roaring bonfires. But as Clara opens her home to more girls who want to live like her and inspire one another, the media calls them a cult.

As life becomes more claustrophobic, Chloe begins to hear unsettling rumors about Clara. When a girl goes missing after a spectacular New Year’s Eve party, the rumors take on a sinister new meaning. If she can’t escape Clara’s influence, everything Chloe holds dear may be in danger.

Dark, gut-wrenching, and simmering with danger and atmosphere, The Goldens is about to be your newest obsession.

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A Christmas Witness

Charles Todd

Inspector Ian Rutledge investigates a possible attempted murder in this seasonal mystery novella from New York Times bestseller Charles Todd.

December 1921: Being single and a new Chief, Inspector Rutledge of Scotland Yard gets the short straw at Christmastime and is called upon by Chief Superintendent Markum to go to the Kentish home of a lord recovering from an attempt on his life. In bed with a concussion, the man is convinced someone is trying to kill him after he claims he was struck by the hoof of a running horse whose rider never stopped to check on him.

Struggling with his own demons from the war and misgivings about helping a man who, as a colonel, oversaw the suffering of those on the frontlines from afar, Rutledge undertakes an uneasy investigation. And as the winter holiday approaches, he becomes increasingly convinced that nothing is as it seems...

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