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Creation lake: A novel
By Rachel Kushner. 2024
From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and "one of the most gifted authors of…
her generation" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France - a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor. Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump" - making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts" - shadowy figures in business and government - instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story. Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure
Songs for the brokenhearted: A novel
By Ayelet Tsabari. 2024
A young Yemeni Israeli woman learns of her mother's secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing…
the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter in the debut novel of an award-winning literary voice. 1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha'ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren't supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man. 1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida's daughter, has been living in New York City - a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother's Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn't looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni's childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket. Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family - including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future
The safekeep
By Yael van der Wouden. 2024
An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch…
countryside during the summer of 1961 - a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past. A house is a precious thing... It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be-led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel's doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn't. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl - Isabel's suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to infatuation - leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva - nor the house in which they live - are what they seem. Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won't soon forget
Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Novel
By Kate Atkinson. 2024
WELCOME TO ROOK HALL. THE STAGE IS SET. THE PLAYERS ARE READY. BY NIGHT’S END, A MURDERER WILL BE REVEALED.Ex-detective…
Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting.But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted to a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends.As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet, one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to the modern era of Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building. Brilliantly inventive, with all of Atkinson’s signature wit, wordplay and narrative brio, Death at the Sign of the Rook may be Jackson Brodie’s most outrageous and memorable case yet.
Invisible Prisons: Jack Whalen's Tireless Fight for Justice
By Lisa Moore, Jack Whalen. 2024
Riveting nonfiction from multi-award-winning author Lisa Moore, based on the shocking true story of a teenaged boy who endured abuse…
and solitary confinement at a reform school in Newfoundland, but survived through grit and redemptive love.Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack's case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts.The story has parallels with Unholy Orders by Michael Harris about the Mount Cashel orphanage, and with the many horrific stories about residential schools—all of which expose a paternalistic state causing harm and a larger society looking away. Yet two powerful qualities set this story apart. As much as it is about an abusive system preying on children, it is also a tender tale of love between Jack and his wife Glennis, who saw the good man inside a damaged person and believed in him. And it is written in a novelistic way by the great Lisa Moore, who makes vividly real every moment and character in these pages.
Playground
By Richard Powers. 2024
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZEFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic…
tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure.When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths. Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go.Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.
Intermezzo: A Novel
By Sally Rooney. 2024
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.Aside from the fact that they…
are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
What I Know About You
By Éric Chacour. 2024
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo. In…
a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek's entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family's strong women, he starts to do just that ́ until a patient's son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men's unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background. The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time? From Cairo's grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal's grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a family torn apart by an epic love. "This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montr©♭al, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame." ́ Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter. A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
Love, betrayal, and a secret war: the untold story of two elite agents, one Canadian, one British, who became one…
of the most decorated couples of WWII.On opposite sides of the pond, Sonia Butt, an adventurous young British woman, and Guy d’Artois, a French-Canadian soldier and thunderstorm of a man, are preparing for war.From different worlds, their lives first intersect during clandestine training to become agents with Winston Churchill’s secret army, the Special Operations Executive. As the world’s deadliest conflict to date unfolds, Sonia and Guy learn how to parachute into enemy territory, how to kill, blow up rail lines, and eventually . . . how to love each other. But not long after their hasty marriage, their love is tested by separation, by a titanic invasion—and by indiscretion.Writing in vivid, heart-stopping prose, Ayed follows Sonia as she plunges into Nazi-occupied France and slinks into black market restaurants to throw off occupying Nazi forces, while at the same time participating in sabotage operations against them; and as Guy, in another corner of France, trains hundreds into a resistance army.Reconstructed from hours of unpublished interviews and hundreds of archival and personal documents, the story Ayed tells is about the ravaging costs of war paid for disproportionately by the young. But more than anything, The War We Won Apart is a story about love: two secret agents who were supposed to land in enemy territory together, but were fated to fight the war apart.
Patriot: A memoir
By Alexei Navalny. 2024
The powerful and moving memoir of a fearless political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs. Alexei…
Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come. In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime. Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life. “This book is a testament not only to Alexei’s life, but to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship—a fight he gave everything for, including his life. Through its pages, readers will come to know the man I loved deeply—a man of profound integrity and unyielding courage. Sharing his story will not only honor his memory but also inspire others to stand up for what is right and to never lose sight of the values that truly matter." —Yulia Navalnaya
The grey wolf (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #19)
By Louise Penny. 2024
Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Though the tiny Québec village is…
impossible to find on any map, someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning. That's only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin THE GREY WOLF, the nineteenth novel in Louise Penny's #1 New York Times -bestselling series. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you", a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list—and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching. Armand Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his son-in-law and second in command, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends. Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate, even frantic, as the enormity of the creature they're chasing becomes clear. If they fail the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages. Including Three Pines
Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories
By Shashi Bhat. 2024
From the Governor General&’s Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth comes a breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday…
trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.What would have happened if she&’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away. A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man&’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend&’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers. With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman&’s relationships with others and with herself.
All Fours: A Novel
By Miranda July. 2024
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEARA WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARONE OF TIME MAGAZINE&’S…
TOP 10 FICTION BOOKS OF 2024 ONE OF NPR&’S &“BOOKS WE LOVE&” 2024NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY:THE NEW YORKER ● VOGUE ● FINANCIAL TIMES ● OPRAH DAILY ● VULTURE ● VOXThe New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life&“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect . . . nothing short of riveting.&” —Vogue&“All Fours has spurred a whisper network of women fantasizing about desire and freedom. . . . It&’s the talk of every group text."—The New York Times&“All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible.&” —The CutA semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey.Miranda July&’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July&’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman&’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
This Strange Eventful History
By Claire Messud. 2024
*A TIME MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 **AN OPRAH DAILY MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024**AN OBSERVER 2024 PICK**A GUARDIAN…
2024 PICK*'One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller' Yiyun LiJune 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.
The Ministry of Time: A Novel
By Kaliane Bradley. 2024
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA&’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF SUMMER 2024 • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST FOR…
BEST NOVEL • WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD FOR SCIENCE FICTION • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, VOX, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE INDEPENDENT, PARADE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND MORE… &“This summer&’s hottest debut.&” —Cosmopolitan • &“Witty, sexy escapist fiction [that] packs a substantial punch...Fresh and thrilling.&” —Los Angeles Times • &“Electric...I loved every second.&” —Emily Henry &“Utterly winning...Imagine if The Time Traveler&’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow...Readers, I envy you: There&’s a smart, witty novel in your future.&” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she&’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering &“expats&” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a &“bridge&”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as &“1847&” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin&’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he&’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as &“washing machines,&” &“Spotify,&” and &“the collapse of the British Empire.&” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts. Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry&’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future. An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley&’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.
Long Island: A Novel
By Colm Toibin. 2024
OPRAH&’S BOOK CLUB PICK * Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington…
Post, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, and more.From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín&’s most popular work twenty years later.Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony&’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades. One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony&’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis&’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín&’s novel so riveting.Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis&’ life are thunderous and dangerous, and there&’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she&’d lost.
The Return of Ellie Black: A Novel
By Emiko Jean. 2024
A USA TODAY Bestseller | An NPR Best Book of 2024 | A Goodreads Best Thriller of 2024 In this…
&“page-turning suspense novel, shrewd character study, and captivating mystery&” (Stephen King) Detective Chelsey Calhoun&’s life is turned upside down when she gets the call that Ellie Black, a girl who disappeared years earlier, has resurfaced in the woods of Washington state—but her reappearance leaves Chelsey with more questions than answers.It&’s been twenty years since Detective Chelsey Calhoun&’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she&’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. But happy endings are rare in Chelsey&’s line of work. Then a glimmer: local teenager Ellie Black, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier, has been found alive in the woods of Washington state. But something is not right with Ellie. She won&’t say where she&’s been, or who she&’s protecting, and it&’s up to Chelsey to find the answers. She needs to get to the bottom of what happened to Ellie: for herself, and for the memory of her sister, but mostly for the next girl who could be taken—and who, unlike Ellie, might never return. The &“haunting and evocative&” debut thriller from New York Times bestselling author Emiko Jean, The Return of Ellie Black is both a feminist tour de force about the embers of hope that burn in the aftermath of tragedy and a &“gripping psychological thriller&” (The Seattle Times) that will shock you right up until the final page.
Blood Rubies
By Mailan Doquang. 2024
Rune Sarasin is about to learn just how quickly the life of a jewel thief can spiral out of control.……
Seven days are all it takes for Rune Sarasin’s life to completely derail. It starts with a routine heist: lifting a pouch of rubies from the Bangkok hotel room of wealthy smuggler Charles Lemaire. Rune nearly gets caught when Lemaire’s goons give chase, but she manages to escape with her boyfriend Kit. Then Kit delivers some terrifying news: his teenage sister Madee has gone missing. They track her cell phone to the dangerous Khlong Toei slum, but the trail ends there. The night gets even worse when Rune realizes she lost the pouch of gems somewhere in the slum while searching for Madee. Charles Lemaire is the wrong man to mess with. He is a perfectionist when it comes to both his attire and his crimes, and he isn’t afraid to kill to get what he wants. When he catches up to Rune and Kit, he gives Rune an ultimatum: return his rubies or she will never see her boyfriend again. Now Rune must race against time to either recover the lost gems or find something even more valuable with which to ransom Kit back from Lemaire. But she also still needs to find out what happened to Madee. As Rune investigates deeper into the shadows of the Khlong Toei slum, she uncovers a web of crime with consequences far more insidious than just one missing girl and a handful of stolen rubies. Hurtling from the back alleys of Bangkok to the glamorous auction houses of New York City, Mailan Doquang’s heart-pounding debut will leave readers questioning just how far they would go for the ones they love.
Glorious Exploits: A Novel
By Null Ferdia Lennon. 2024
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic FictionWinner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction PrizeShortlisted for Newcomer of the…
Year by the Irish Book AwardsShortlisted for the Nero Book Awards Debut Fiction PrizeNominated for the British Book Award for Debut Fiction Book of the YearLonglisted for the Carnegie Medal of ExcellenceLonglisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionNamed a Best Book of 2024 by Slate, The Guardian, and the New York Public LibraryAn utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history. On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.
Dayspring
By Anthony Oliveira. 2024
A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre—at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary…
coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild.In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved—his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound.Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life.Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, Dayspring is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse.