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Learned By Heart: A Novel
By Emma Donoghue. 2023
A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love…
at boarding school in nineteenth century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.
The Islands: Stories
By Dionne Irving. 2022
Powerful stories that explore the legacy of colonialism, and issues of race, immigration, sexual discrimination, and class in the lives of…
Jamaican women across London, Panama, France, Jamaica, Florida and moreThe Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or thedescendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call the Island. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to unearth the cracks in their marriage. In another, the only Jamaican mother—who is also a touring comedienne—at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer in the school&’s International Day. Meanwhile, in a third story, a travel writer finally connects with the mother who once abandoned her.Set in locations and times ranging from 1950s London to 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey, Dionne Irving reveals the intricacies of immigration and assimilation in this debut, establishing a new and unforgettable voice in Caribbean-American literature. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves—to grow where they find themselves planted—in a world in which the tension between what&’s said and unsaid can bend the soul.
Really Good, Actually: A Novel
By Monica Heisey. 1996
“Hilarious, heart-warming, wise.” — Paula HawkinsA hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one woman’s messy search for joy and…
meaning in the wake of an unexpected breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica HeiseyMaggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™.Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there” sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call “happiness”. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
Yellowface: A Novel
By R. F Kuang. 2023
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling…
authorWhite lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Yara
By Tamara Faith Berger. 2023
FEATURED IN QUILL & QUIRE'S 2023 FALL PREVIEWTHE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023CBC BOOKS CANADIAN FICTION TO READ…
IN FALL 2023PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL 2023From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000sDistraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires. But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us."Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger's revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners"Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it's Berger's best book yet." – Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind"Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster." – Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings
The Adult
By Bronwyn Fischer. 2023
An engrossing, page-turning story about an introverted student and the mysterious older woman whose unexpected interest in her sparks an…
insidious, all-consuming love affair.Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived for her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for an unfamiliar city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. Chatty, confident Clara from down the hall, who wants to be her friend; intense, determined Rachel from her poetry class, who is going to be a writer. Natalie doesn't know what she wants. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone.Just as she is trying to find her footing, she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her. Natalie is drawn magnetically into Nora's orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off campus at Nora's home, enveloped by the intensity of her feelings and the version of adulthood she imagines Nora leads. Worried about how her floormates will react to news of her relationship with a woman, Natalie explains her absence by inventing a secret boyfriend called Paul; she carefully protects the intimate, sacred adulthood she is building for herself. But when it becomes clear that Nora is lying, too, her secrets begin to take an alarming shape in Natalie's life, even as Natalie tries to look away. What, or who, is Nora hiding?The Adult is a startlingly gorgeous and perceptive debut novel examining identity, love, insecurity, desire, and deceit.
Bright Young Women: A Novel
By Jessica Knoll. 2023
Don&’t miss this &“breakneck thriller&” examining &“our culture&’s obsession with serial killers and true crime&” (Harper&’s Bazaar) following two women…
on the pursuit of justice against all odds. &“A fascinating look at true crime and tabloid culture that's as thoughtful as it is gripping&” (People). A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 New York Times Editors&’ Choice Instant New York Times Bestseller A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, Harper&’s Bazaar, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, Booklist, and more! An Edgar Award Finalist for Best NovelMasterfully blending elements of psychological suspense and true crime, Jessica Knoll—author of the bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive and the writer behind the Netflix adaption starring Mila Kunis—delivers a new and exhilarating thriller in Bright Young Women. The book opens on a Saturday night in 1978, hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house with deadly results. The lives of those who survive, including sorority president and key witness, Pamela Schumacher, are forever changed. Across the country, Tina Cannon is convinced her missing friend was targeted by the man papers refer to as the All-American Sex Killer—and that he&’s struck again. Determined to find justice, the two join forces as their search for answers leads to a final, shocking confrontation. Blisteringly paced, Bright Young Women is &“Jessica Knoll at her best—an unflinching and evocative novel about the tabloid fascination with evil and the dynamic and brilliant women who have the real stories to tell&” (Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me); and &“a compelling, almost hypnotic read and I loved it with a passion&” (Lisa Jewell, New York Times bestselling author of None of This Is True).
All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel
By S. A. Cosby. 2023
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA Today Bestseller • Washington Post’s The Twelve Best Thrillers of the Year •…
TIME’s 100 Must Read Books of the Year • Goodreads Choice Award Nominee • USA Today’s Best Reviewed Books of the Year • BookPage's Best Mystery of the Year • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year • New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Cover of the New York Times Book Review • Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List • The Financial Times’s Best Crime Books of the Year • ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlist • SIBA’s 2024 Southern Book Prize Finalist • Starred Publishers Weekly • Starred Library Journal • Starred BookPage • Starred Booklist “Fresh and exhilarating. . . Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book ReviewA Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.The new novel from New York Times bestselling and Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author S. A. Cosby, "one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction.” —Washington Post.“An atmospheric pressure cooker.” —PeopleTitus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.Charon is Titus’s home and his heart. But where faith and violence meet, there will be a reckoning. Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction” (The Washington Post).
Daughter: A Novel
By Claudia Dey. 2023
A searing and hypnotic tour de force about a woman, long caught in her charismatic father's web, who strives to…
make a life—and art—of her own.To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.So says Mona Dean--playwright, actress and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights--painfully, parasitically--in his attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.Mona&’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humour. A novel as volatile and far-reaching as its title, Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create and to break free.
None of This Is True: A Novel
By Lisa Jewell. 2023
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Over 1 million copies sold! This unputdownable psychological thriller by New York Times bestselling author…
Lisa Jewell follows a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix&’s children&’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix&’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life. Josie&’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can&’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix&’s life—and into her home. But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family&’s lives under mortal threat. Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
The MANIAC
By Benjamin Labatut. 2023
From one of contemporary literature&’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann,…
tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AIBenjamín Labatut&’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times&’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.A world of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
August Blue: A Novel
By Deborah Levy. 2023
The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming HomeIf she was my double and…
I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching.At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson—former child prodigy, now in her thirties—walks off the stage in Vienna, midperformance.Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy&’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.
A Death at the Party: A Novel
By Amy Stuart. 2023
In this tense, spellbinding thriller set over the course of a single day, a woman prepares for a party that…
goes dreadfully wrong—for fans of Ashley Audrain and Lisa Jewell.Nadine Walsh&’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbors all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything&’s going according to plan. But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this? Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother&’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns, and her mother—only her mother knows that today isn&’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well. Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they&’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it&’s hard to forget when Nadine&’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happen when her guests unite.
The Whispers: The propulsive new novel from the author of THE PUSH
By Ashley Audrain. 2023
From the #1 bestselling author of The Push, a propulsive page-turner about four suburban families whose lives are changed when…
the unthinkable happens—and what is lost when good people make unconscionable choicesOn Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son&’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney&’s best friend, suspects something isn&’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whitney&’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone&’s world unravel from her front porch.Exploring envy, women&’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent.
Kairos
By Jenny Erpenbeck. 2021
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR…
collapses and an old world evaporates. The story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s: the passionate yet difficult long-running affair of Katharina and Hans hits the rocks as a whole world—the socialist GDR—melts away. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of his period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel.
Victory City: A Novel
By Salman Rushdie. 2023
The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over…
the centuries—from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie &“A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers . . . It does not resemble any other novel I could name.&”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: TIME, The Toronto Star, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times, The Week, CNBC, Business Insider, Kirkus Reviews, and Literary HubIn the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl&’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana&’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—&“victory city&”—the wonder of the world.Over the next 250 years, Pampa Kampana&’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga&’s, from its literal sowing from a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry—with Pampa Kampana at its center.Brilliantly narrated in the style of an ancient epic, Victory City is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.
Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
By Margaret Atwood. 2023
A dazzling collection of fifteen short stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and…
The Testaments.Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood&’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; &“Impatient Griselda&” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and &“My Evil Mother&” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.
Murder at Haven's Rock: A Novel (Haven's Rock #1)
By Kelley Armstrong. 2023
New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton Novels had one of the most unique towns in crime fiction. Murder…
at Haven's Rock is a spinoff, a fresh start... with a few new dangers that threaten everything before it even begins.Haven’s Rock, Yukon. Population: 0Deep in the Yukon wilderness, a town is being built. A place for people to disappear, a fresh start from a life on the run. Haven’s Rock isn’t the first town of this kind, something detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, know first-hand. They met in the original town of Rockton. But greed and deception led the couple to financing a new refuge for those in need. This time around, they get to decide which applicants are approved for residency.There’s only one rule in Haven’s Rock: stay out of the forest. When two of the town's construction crew members break it and go missing, Casey and Eric are called in ahead of schedule to track them down. When a body is discovered, well-hidden with evidence of foul play, Casey and Eric must find out what happened to the dead woman, and locate those still missing. The longer Casey and Eric don’t know what happened, the more danger everyone is in.