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How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty
By Null Bonny Reichert. 2025
A moving culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family—and sustenance and survival—from a chef, award-winning Canadian journalist, and…
daughter of a Holocaust survivor.When you&’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father&’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head on. Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Tracing the defining moments of her life, from her colorful childhood in the restaurant business to the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef and that life-altering visit to Poland, the author recounts a tale of scarcity and plenty, stepping into the kitchen to connect her past to her future. Whether it's the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her Baba Sarah&’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman's search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.
The Antidote: A Novel
By Karen Russell. 2025
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust…
bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan townThe Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,&” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples&’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch&’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town&’s secrets and its fate.Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation&’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
The Riveter: A Novel
By Null Jack Wang. 2025
A cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe in WWII. Vancouver, 1942. Josiah…
Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to serve his country in the war against fascism, but Chinese Canadians are barred from joining the army out of fear they might expect citizenship in return. So, Josiah heads to the shipyard to find work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships. One night, Josiah spots Poppy singing at a navy club. Despite their different backgrounds, they fall for each other instantly and begin a starry-eyed romance that lasts until the harsh reality of their situation is made clear. Determined to prove himself, Josiah takes a train to Toronto where he’s finally given the chance to enlist. After volunteering for the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion and jumping into Normandy on D-Day, he must fight through the battlefields of Europe to make it back to the woman he loves. By turns harrowing and exhilarating, The Riveter explores what one man must sacrifice to belong to the only country he has ever called home.
How to End a Story: Collected Diaries
By Helen Garner. 2021
'I revere Helen Garner's writing, and it's in her diaries that she's at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best'Nigella Lawson'I come…
back again and again to Garner's diaries and always find something new to admire. Her wit and observations are brilliant and her thoughts on writing are a guide'Daisy Johnson'I love Helen Garner's diaries. I would read her grocery lists'Fatima Bhutto'The diaries are the apotheosis of Helen Garner's entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published . . . Beautiful, riveting, formally electrifying'Lit HubLooking out the window at the two big gum trees, as it gets dark, I think: the only way I can go on keeping a diary - the bits about myself, anyway, i.e. most of it - is to conceive of it as a record of soul.Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best.Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.
We, the Kindling: A Novel
By null Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. 2025
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were…
school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
By John U. Bacon. 2025
"A work of spectral beauty destined to be a classic. Readers of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Erik Larsen’s Dead…
Wake, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea will love this deeply reported tale." —Hampton Sides, New York Times best-selling author of The Wide Wide Sea and In the Kingdom of Ice "The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ has been told and retold by authors and bards. But never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful and compelling book.... Dead men tell no tales, but their loved ones do. Mr. Bacon tracked them down and listened." —John J. Miller, Wall Street Journal On the fiftieth anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking, the bestselling author of The Great Halifax Explosion tells the definitive story of the "Mighty Fitz." 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.
Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
By Patrick McGee. 2025
&“Phenomenal…a jaw-dropping book.&” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show Named by both The New York Times and The Economist as one…
of the best books of the year so far, this &“scrupulously reported&” (The New Yorker) and &“astonishing&” (The Daily Telegraph, London) book rivets with its portrayal of how Apple allowed itself to become dependent on China for a huge percentage of its manufacturing, making it vulnerable and unwittingly laying the groundwork for the Asian superpower to rival the US in technological expertise.After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China&’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world&’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century&’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit. Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized. In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple&’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the &“Gang of Eight&” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino&’s operational demands and Xi Jinping&’s war on civil society. Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised &“rebels&” and &“troublemakers&”—the company that encouraged us all to &“Think Different&”—devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
What We Can Know: A Novel
By Ian McEwan. 2025
From the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday, a genre-bending new novel full of secrets and surprises; an…
immersive exploration, across time and history, of what can ever be truly known.2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife&’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, &‘A Corona for Vivien&’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, &‘A Corona for Vivian&’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem&’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
Mother of God: A Novel
By Sara Peters. 2025
A landmark literary novel of psychological horror from the author of I Become a Delight to My Enemies.Marlene calls herself…
a psychic wound healer, but really, her paranormal abilities are restricted to visions. In fact, they&’re restricted to visions of just one person. Her mother, Darlene. The visions started when Marlene was nine: a symbol and a symptom of an unfathomably deep maternal connection; a mental and emotional escape hatch; evidence of a bond so intense that a rupture was perhaps inevitable. And yet, years of estrangement later, when Marlene receives a message from Darlene asking her to come home, she packs up her life in Vancouver and drives across the country to small-town Nova Scotia. It&’s a trip fraught with vivid, oppressive memories—of childhood betrayals, the distant decades that followed, and the malevolent presence of Darlene&’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, Ed. Still, the opportunity is overwhelming—the chance to become the centres of each other&’s universes once again. But when she arrives, Darlene is not where she should be. Figures from the past materialize as reality&’s thin membrane begins to give way, and Marlene is forced to confront the incomprehensible as she is sent down a path of terrors, to the very end of human feeling, to the very end of her mind. Sinister and surreal, ghastly and full of grace, Mother of God is a singular story of love and dread from one of the great writers of their generation.
The City Changes Its Face: A Novel
By Eimear McBride. 2025
A MUST-READ NOVEL OF 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, STYLIST, AND MANY OTHERS From the winner of…
the Women's Prize—an intense story of a passionate love affair arriving at its first test.So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.
Audition: A Novel
By Katie Kitamura. 2025
“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR “Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The…
Boston Globe One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
Dead and Alive: Essays
By Zadie Smith. 2025
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.In the past two decades, few…
writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith&’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.With an eye towards the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
By Cory Doctorow. 1201
Enshittification: it’s not just you—the internet sucks now. Here’s why, and here’s how we can disenshittify it.We’re living through the…
Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying.Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution.When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say “things are getting worse.” He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die.Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror.Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Black Wolf: A Novel (Chief Inspector Gamache Novel)
By Louise Penny. 2025
The 20th mystery in the #1 New York Times-bestselling Armand Gamache series.Somewhere out there, in the darkness, a black wolf…
is feeding.Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf.But their relief is short-lived. In a sickening turn of events, Gamache has realized that plot, as horrific as it was, was just the beginning. Perhaps even a deliberate misdirection. One he fell into. Something deeper and darker, more damaging, is planned. Did he in fact arrest the Black Wolf, or are they still out there? Armand is appalled to think his mistake has allowed their conspiracy to grow, to gather supporters. To spread lies, manufacture enemies, and feed hatred and division.Still recovering from wounds received in stopping the first attack, Armand is confined to the village of Three Pines, leading a covert investigation from there. He must be careful not to let the Black Wolf know he has recognized his mistake. In a quiet church basement, he and his senior agents Beauvoir and Lacoste, pore over what little evidence they have. Two notebooks. A few mysterious numbers on a tattered map of Québec. And a phrase repeated by the person they had called the Grey Wolf. A warning…In a dry and parched land where there is no water.Gamache and his small team of supporters realize that for the Black Wolf to have gotten this far, they must have powerful allies, in law enforcement, in industry, in organized crime, in the halls of government.From the apparent peace of his little village, Gamache finds himself playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with an invisible foe who is gathering forces and preparing to strike.
Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)
By Heather Fawcett. 2025
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar…
of folklore and the fae prince she lovesEmily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project yet: studying the inner workings of a faerie realm—as its queen.Along with her former academic rival—now fiancé—the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell&’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal world: How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell&’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell&’s magic—and Emily&’s knowledge of stories—to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.Book Three of the Emily Wilde SeriesDon&’t miss any of Heather Fawcett&’s charming Emily Wilde series:EMILY WILDE&’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES • EMILY WILDE&’S MAP OF THE OTHERLANDS • EMILY WILDE&’S COMPENDIUM OF LOST TALES
Nightshade: A Novel (A Catalina Novel #1)
By Michael Connelly. 2025
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Introducing Detective Stilwell: a cop relentlessly following his mission in the seemingly idyllic setting of…
Catalina Island. Los Angeles County Sheriff&’s Detective Stilwell has been &“exiled&” to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor—a Jane Doe identifiable at first only by a streak of purple dye in her hair. At the same time, a report of poaching on a protected reserve turns into a case fraught with violence and danger as Stilwell digs into the shady past of an island bigwig. Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, Stilwell doggedly works both cases. Though hampered by an old beef with an ex-colleague determined to thwart him at every turn, he is convinced he is the only one who can bring justice to the woman known as &“Nightshade.&” Soon, his investigation uncovers closely guarded secrets and a dark heart to the serene island that was meant to be his escape from the evils of the big city. Propulsive and atmospheric, Nightshade launches a brand new character into the Connelly universe, and proves without question that Michael Connelly is &“the undisputed master of the modern crime novel&” (Real Book Spy).
How to Survive a Bear Attack: A Memoir
By Claire Cameron. 2025
*NATIONAL BESTSELLER**Winner of the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-fiction*In this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The…
Bear and The Last Neanderthal, Claire Cameron confronts the rare genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her. Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, &“the ideal exposure to UV light is none.&” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate. Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
By Margaret Atwood. 2025
How does the greatest writer of our time tell her own story?Raised by scientifically minded parents, Margaret Atwood spent most…
of each year in the wild forests of northern Quebec, where her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother created an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful.From this unconventional start, Margaret unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would inspire Cat&’s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid&’s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points, and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars, and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.As she explores her past, Margaret reveals more and more about her writing, the connections between real life and art—and the workings of one of our very greatest imaginations.
We Could Be Rats: A Novel
By Emily Austin. 2025
Instant Bestseller A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the…
power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid&’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society. But Sigrid&’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She&’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta&’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward. What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.
Pick a Colour: A Novel
By Souvankham Thammavongsa. 2025
*Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize*From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about…
loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name. "One of the greatest novels I have ever read." RITA BULLWINKEL"A knockout: every punch lands." ELEANOR CATTONNing is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound depth. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complicated power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange. As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning. Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.