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The Lightness: A Novel
By Emily Temple. 2020
“A teen thriller in the vein of the ‘90s horror movie The Craft . . . A beautiful meditation on…
meditation . . . Frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout.” —The New York Times Book Review"The Lightness could be the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, but its savage, glittering magic is all Emily Temple’s own." —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists A Belletrist Book Club Pick!A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly • USA Today • Marie Claire • Elle • WSJ. Magazine • Glamour • Vulture • Bustle • Buzzfeed • The Millions • The Philadelphia Inquirer • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Daily Beast • Refinery 29 • Publishers Weekly • Literary Hub • Electric Literature • and more!A stylish, stunningly precise, and suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing—an audacious, darkly observant, and mordantly funny literary debut for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill.One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother—a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial—Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls”. Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment—and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness. But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body—and a girl—is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there’s a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people—even though you don’t, and can’t, know them at all.“A suspenseful debut.” –People PickMothtown
By Caroline Hardaker. 2023
Including illustrations from bestselling illustrator and political cartoonist, Chris Riddell, Mothtown is the unsettling and eerie new novel by Caroline…
Hardaker, perfect for fans of Midsommar and Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland.As a child, David could tell something was wrong.The kids in school spread rumours of missing people, nests of bones and bodies appearing in the mountains. His sister refused to share what she knew, and his parents turned off the TV whenever he entered the room. Protecting him, they said. Worse, the only person who shared anything at all with him, his beloved grandpa, disappeared without a goodbye. Mum and Dad said he was dead. But what about the exciting discovery Grandpa had been working on for his whole life? Now 26, David lives alone and takes each day as it comes. When a strange package arrives on his doorstep, one with instructions not to leave the Earth, a new world is unfurled before David, one he&’s been trying to suppress for years…Blending horror and literary fiction, Mothtown is the strange new novel from celebrated author Caroline Hardaker.The New Naturals
By Gabriel Bump. 2023
From the Ernest J. Gaines Award-winning author of Everywhere You Don't Belong, a touching, timely novel—called a "tour de force"…
by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Libertie) and "wry and astonishing" by Publishers Weekly—about an attempt to found an underground utopia and the interwoven stories of those drawn to it. *Included in Fall Preview & Most-Anticipated Lists: New York Times, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Vulture.com, Esquire.com, ELLE.com, The Millions, and Lit Hub* An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven—it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere safe, somewhere everyone can feel loved, wanted, and accepted, where the children learn actual history, where everyone has an equal shot. She locates a Benefactor and soon their utopia begins to take shape. Two unhoused men hear about it and immediately begin their journey by bus from Chicago to get there. A young and disillusioned journalist stumbles upon it and wants in. And a former soccer player, having lost his footing in society, is persuaded to check it out too. But no matter how much these people all yearn for meaning and a sanctuary from the existential dread of life above the surface, what happens if this new society can't actually work? What then? From one of the most exciting new literary voices out there, The New Naturals is fresh and deeply perceptive, capturing the absurdity of life in the 21st century, for readers of Paul Beatty&’s The Sellout and Jennifer Egan&’s The Candy House. In this remarkable feat of imagination, Bump shows us that, ultimately, it is our love for and connection to each other that will save us.The Helsinki Affair
By Anna Pitoniak. 2023
IT&’S THE CASE OF AMANDA&’S LIFETIME, BUT SOLVING IT WILL REQUIRE HER TO BETRAY ANOTHER SPY—WHO JUST SO HAPPENS TO…
BE HER FATHER.SPYING IS THE FAMILY BUSINESS. Amanda Cole is a brilliant young CIA officer following in the footsteps of her father, who was a spy during the Cold War. It takes grit to succeed in this male-dominated world—but one hot summer day, when a Russian defector walks into her post, Amanda is given the ultimate chance to prove herself. The defector warns of the imminent assassination of a US senator. Though Amanda takes the warning seriously, her superiors don&’t. Twenty-four hours later, the senator is dead. And the assassination is just the beginning. Corporate blackmail, covert manipulation, corrupt oligarchs: the Kremlin has found a dangerous new way to wage war. Teaming up with Kath Frost, a fearless older woman and legendary spy, Amanda races from Rome to London, from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, unraveling the international conspiracy. But as she gets closer and closer to the truth, a central question haunts her: Why was her father&’s name written down in the senator&’s notes? What does Charlie Cole really know about the Kremlin plot? The Helsinki Affair is a riveting, globe-trotting spy thriller—but this time, with a refreshing female-centric twist. Perfect for fans of John le Carré and Daniel Silva, this book introduces Pitoniak as a singular new talent in the world of spy fiction.The Girls
By John Bowen. 1986
A wry, macabre tale of simple living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple. In their lovely old Cotswolds village,…
Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as &“the girls&”—a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specializing in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life. So it&’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue&’s absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night. If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue&’s return to the nest, what&’s that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss? Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.The Homewood Trilogy
By John Edgar Wideman. 2023
From &“master of language&” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman, a reissue of the revered trilogy that launched his…
career—two novels and story collection all set in Wideman&’s own hometown.Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday provide a stunning introduction to the uncompromising work of John Edgar Wideman, whose literary achievements have inspired The New York Times to name him &“one of America&’s premier writers of fiction.&” Damballah&’s narratives examine the vexed history of Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood whose origins are rooted in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States of America. The novels Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday personalize and interrogate that history&’s presence in the contemporary lives of Homewood people and all Americans. Deeply concerned that designations such as &“economically oppressed&” or &“Black&” continue to dismiss and marginalize rather than embrace communities like the one in which he was raised, John Edgar Wideman—employing words on the page as his weapon—has dedicated himself to recording the weight, beauty, complexity, and justice that he believes Homewood&’s voices, stories, and lives have earned and deserve. In 1983, The Homewood Trilogy signaled the arrival of a major voice in American literature. Forty years later, this edition of the Trilogy celebrates Wideman&’s ongoing contribution by offering these masterworks to a new generation of readers.Death Comes for the Archbishop: Large Print
By Willa Cather. 2023
For the 150th anniversary of Willa Cather's birth, and for the first time in Penguin Classics, her quietly beautiful novel of…
one man's life as he encounters the harsh landscape of the New Mexico desert and the people who inhabit it, with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Kali Fajardo-AnstineA Penguin Vitae EditionIn 1848, following the US's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the unforgiving and seemingly-endless desert on mules in attempt to reclaim the region from corrupt priests who have taken mistresses, exhibited greed, and inflicted abuse and genocide on the Mexican and Indigenous residents. But as Father Latour spends more time in New Mexico with the people who have inhabited and influenced it for centuries, he begins to realize that the task he was sent to do is more complicated than anticipated. Rather than leave, though, Father Latour decides to stay and uphold his commitment to the Church and his faith, and gains an eye-opening perspective along the way. Written in 1927 at a time when Cather herself was expanding her own ideas of race, religion, and gender, Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a moving account of one man's physical and spiritual journey of understanding in naturalistic prose as sparse as the desert plains.The Favorites: A Campus Novel
By Rosemary Hennigan. 2023
A graduate student competes her way into a selective Law and Literature cohort and plots a takedown of its popular…
professor in this provocative campus novel about privilege, power, and obsession.&“A standout dark academia thriller, with shades of Donna Tartt&’s modern classic The Secret History and Emerald Fennell&’s revenge fantasy film Promising Young Woman.&” —BookPageMost students would kill to be accepted into the prestigious Law and Literature cohort at Franklin University. But for Jessie Mooney, enrollment in the course is about more than campus status, rigorous thought, and professional connections. It&’s her chance to get close to charismatic professor Jay Crane so she can expose who he really is.From the moment she discovered their secret relationship, Jessie's been convinced Crane is to blame for the events leading to her sister&’s death. Still haunted by their last email exchange—You know what you did—she'll cross any line to hold him accountable. But when Jessie finally earns Crane&’s trust and the coveted position as one of his &“favorites,&” attracting the other students&’ envy and suspicion, the truth becomes darkly twisted. Is it justice Jessie craves, or revenge? And what does she stand to lose if she gets her way?Shimmering with tension, The Favorites explores the ways that love, desire, and anger reveal the best, and worst, of us.Before We Say Goodbye: A Novel (Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series #4)
By Toshikazu Kawaguchi. 2023
The fourth novel in the internationally bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series The regulars at the magical Café Funiculi…
Funicula are well acquainted with its famous legend and extraordinary time-travel offer. Many patrons have reunited with old flames, made amends with estranged family and visited loved ones. But the journey is not without risks, and there are rules to follow. In the tradition of Toshikazu Kawaguchi&’s sensational Before the Coffee Gets Cold Series, readers will once again be introduced to a new set of visitors: the husband with something important left to say; the woman who couldn't bid her dog farewell; the woman who couldn't answer a proposal; and the daughter who drove her father away. Featuring signature heartwarming characters and wistful storytelling, in the beautifully haunting Before We Say Goodbye, Kawaguchi asks: Who would you visit if you could travel through time?The General and Julia: A Novel
By Jon Clinch. 2023
Ulysses S. Grant reflects on the crucial moments of his life as a husband, a father, a general, and a…
president while writing his memoirs and reckoning with his complicated legacy in this epic and intimate work of &“superb historical fiction&” (Booklist, starred review).Barely able to walk and rendered mute by the cancer metastasizing in his throat, Ulysses S. Grant is scratching out words, hour after hour, day after day. Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family might have some financial security and he some redemption, Grant journeys back in time. He had once been the savior of the Union, the general to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a twice-elected president who fought for the civil rights of Black Americans and against the rising Ku Klux Klan, a plain farmer-turned-business magnate who lost everything to a Wall Street swindler, a devoted husband to his wife Julia, and a loving father to four children. In this gorgeously rendered and moving novel, Grant rises from the page in all of his contradictions and foibles, his failures and triumphs. Moving from blood-stained battlefields to Gilded Age New York, the novel explores how Grant&’s own views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. &“A graceful, moving narrative&” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) from historical fiction master Jon Clinch, this evocatively crafted novel breathes fresh life into an American icon.Kinfolk
By Sean Dietrich. 2023
Sometimes it&’s the most unlikely meetings that give us life&’s greatest gifts.1970s, Southern Alabama. Sixty-two-year-old Jeremiah Lewis Taylor, or &“Nub,&”…
has spent his whole life listening to those he loves tell him he&’s no good—first his ex-wife, now his always-disapproving daughter. Sure, his escapades have made him, along with his cousin and perennial sidekick, Benny, just a smidge too familiar with small-town law enforcement, but he&’s never harmed anyone—except perhaps himself.Nub never meant to change his ways, but when he and fifteen-year-old Waffle House waitress Minnie form an unlikely friendship, he realizes for the first time that there may be some good in him after all. Six-foot-five Minnie has been dealt a full deck of bad luck—her father is a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, her mother is dead and buried, and she has a Grand Ole Opry–worthy singing voice with no place to perform. Oh, and there&’s the small fact that she&’s unexpectedly pregnant, courtesy of a no-good high-school boy.Gradually, Nub realizes the gift he&’s been given: a second chance to make a difference.Beloved Southern writer Sean Dietrich, also known as Sean of the South, once again brings people and places to life in this lyrical song-turned-story about found family, second chances, country music, and the poignant power of love and forgiveness.Heartwarming Southern fiction from Sean of the SouthStand-alone novelIncludes discussion questions for book clubsAlso by Sean Dietrich: The Incredible Winston Browne, Stars of Alabama, and You Are My SunshineSilver Beach: A Novel (Juniper Prize for Fiction)
By Claire Cox. 2021
It's been decades since Mara's family was last together, decades since the day her sister Allison drowned at Silver Beach.…
After the family tragedy, Mara's father took her to the opposite end of the country, where she made a tidy life for herself in western Massachusetts, with a good education, stable job, and loving girlfriend. Her half-sister, Shannon, was left behind with their mother in San Diego. Surviving on disability checks and handouts from family, Shannon can't remember a time when Linda wasn't drunk. When a heart attack lands Linda in the hospital, Shannon's first impulse is to skip town—to finally escape her mother's orbit and make her sister step up. While Mara gave up on Linda years ago and couldn't have less in common with her sister, an unemployed stoner, it's time for her to stop running from everything that makes her have feelings. This is a novel about the persistent, mystifying ties of family, the extravagant mess of addiction, and what it means to actually live inside your own life.Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles
By Fabio Bartolomei. 2012
A raucous debut novel of organized—and unorganized—crime. “A story that takes itself unseriously enough to be funny” (The Daily Beast,…
“This Week’s Hot Reads”).Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples.Their misconceived endeavor would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money, things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.A “miraculous” Italian comedy that will have readers laughing out loud, Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles marks Fabio Bartolomei’s vivid debut.“An entertaining and humorous debut.” —La Repubblica“A melancholy yet hopeful fable told with a smile.” —Internazionale“Left the kind of smile on my face that doesn’t go unnoticed and which people often mistake for a kind of facial paralysis.” —Valentina Aversano, SetteperunoMatters of Chance: A Novel
By Gail Albert. 1982
This searing novel, a National Book Award finalist, &“transforms one woman&’s experience with cancer into a work of vision and…
intelligence&” (The Washington Post). &“I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how.&” Mona&’s perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness—leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality. This stunning work was a finalist for the National Book Award for First Novel; now, its brilliant, ambitious exploration of an unfinished life is about to be discovered by a new generation of readers.The Trespassers
By Laura Z. Hobson. 1943
A World War II refugee family struggles to reach America in the debut novel from the #1 New York Times–bestselling…
author of Gentleman&’s Agreement. As World War II rips through Europe, the Vederles have found themselves in an impossible situation. In temporary exile in Switzerland, the Vederles are caught in a bureaucratic limbo, unable to return home and unable to move on to their dreamed-of life in America. Their sponsor in the United States, Vera Marriner, is embroiled in her own sort of conflict: an affair with Jasper Crown, a radio magnate and egotist of the highest order. Herself the child of Russian socialists who found asylum in the United States, Laura Z. Hobson paints a stark contrast between the sheltered comfort of Vera&’s life in New York and the tense, distant uncertainty of the complete strangers she hopes to rescue.The Gifts: A Novel
By Liz Hyder. 2023
"Remarkable...for fans of fantasy-inflected historicals such as Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review"A sumptuous reading experience." —BookPageIt…
will take something extraordinary to show four women who they truly are...October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in the English countryside as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders.In London, rumors of a "fallen angel" cause a frenzy across the city, and a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession, one that will place the women he seeks in the most terrible danger . . .The Gifts is an astonishing novel, a spellbinding tale told through five different perspectives and set against the luminous backdrop of nineteenth century London, it explores science, nature and religion, enlightenment, the role of women in society and the dark danger of ambition.Held: A Novel
By Anne Michaels. 2023
A breathtaking and mysterious new novel from the beloved Anne Michaels, internationally bestselling author of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter…
Vault.1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel&’s profound investigation. Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From the WW1 battlefield where the novel begins, and its opening lines, Held is alive with seeking: "We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?&”The Wreck of the Golden Mary (Hesperus Classics)
By Charles Dickens. 2023
Ingeniously conceived and brilliantly rendered, and set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush, The Wreck of the Golden…
Mary is a masterpiece of Victorian storytelling. En route to making their fortunes, the passengers of the Golden Mary suffer a terrifying ordeal when their vessel collides with an iceberg. Now the helpless victims of a shipwreck, they turn to the restorative powers of storytelling in a desperate attempt to raise morale. As each takes their turn, from the captain to the first mate, the Dickensian figures of miser and murderer, orphan and ghost, are brought onboard with most remarkable effect. Charles Dickens is one of England' s most important literary figures. His works enjoyed enormous success in his day and are still among the most popular classics of all time.The Bewdley Mayhem: Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, and Caesarea
By Tony Burgess. 2014
Together for the first time, the complete Bewdley trilogy will alter your imagination as it details the strange, dark happenings…
in a rural Ontario town.The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of 16 stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario&’s cottage country. Navigating through drunk and dead men, prisons and suicides and mad doctors, these short stories act as a halfway house for literary delinquents. Pontypool Changes Everything is the terrifying story of a devastating virus. Caught through conversation, once it has you, it leads you into another world where the undead chase you down the streets of the smallest towns and largest cities. In Caesarea, everybody&’s embarrassed and nobody is mentioning the mess. Caesarea, you see, is the town that can&’t get to sleep at night. Only Burgess demands answers to the really big question: Who&’s been sleeping in your bed? With a preface by Jonathan Ball.Praise for Tony Burgess &“These stories are universally dark and not for the timid or prudish. A subtle horror invades the fine writing; intimate biological details of violent death are revealed in a manner that suggests Stephen King having a confidential chat with Hieronymus Bosch in the north woods. What Burgess reveals is that the dark edges of humanity we stereotypically equate with the urban are present and even more threatening in areas with no 911 service.&” —Quill & Quire on The Hellmouths of Bewdley &“Pontypool Changes Everything may be one of the most genuinely horrifying horror novels—as opposed to simply discomforting, sickening or terrifying, although it is all of these as well—that I have ever read.&” —HorrorscopeWarlight: A novel (Vintage International Ser.)
By Michael Ondaatje. 2018
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set…
in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.