“Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy.” – Tommy Orange, There There
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll
nonfiction / history.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons?
The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America’s disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America’s fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam’s rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam’s motives by way of his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members, and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader—a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies—even when the stakes were incredibly high.
Calling on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam’s own transcripts and audio files, Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, The Achilles Trap is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy, and vanity—on both sides—led to avoidable errors of statecraft, ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change the political landscape as we know it.
“[A] tour de force… Required reading for all conscientious citizens.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“The Achilles Trap is likely to be the best account of these developments we will ever have.” – Glenn C. Altschuler, Jerusalem Post
“[A] deep dive that illuminates previously unstudied and unexamined aspects of personalities, policies, events, and reactions of great consequence to both countries… powerful and compelling… Expertly researched and written, the latest from Pulitzer Prize–winner Coll is a cautionary tale for the ages.” – James Pekoll, Booklist
After Annie by Anna Quindlen
fiction.
When Annie Brown dies suddenly, her husband, her children, and her closest friend are left to find a way forward without the woman who has been the lynchpin of all their lives. Bill is overwhelmed without his beloved wife, and Annemarie wrestles with the bad habits her best friend had helped her overcome. And Ali, the eldest of Annie’s children, has to grow up overnight, to care for her younger brothers and even her father and to puzzle out for herself many of the mysteries of adult life.
Over the course of the next year what saves them all is Annie, ever-present in their minds, loving but not sentimental, caring but nobody’s fool, a voice in their heads that is funny and sharp and remarkably clear. The power she has given to those who loved her is the power to go on without her. The lesson they learn is that no one beloved is ever truly gone.
Written in Quindlen’s emotionally resonant voice and with her deep and generous understanding of people, After Annie is about hope, and about the unexpected power of adversity to change us in profound and indelible ways.
“Throughout her career, Quindlen’s fiction and nonfiction alike have showcased her attention to detail and ability to weave compelling narratives from the common experiences that comprise life. After Annie is a heartfelt, nuanced portrait of life after loss.” – BookPage
“…Quindlen makes the magnitude of her characters’ loss feel palpable to the reader. It’s another acute portrait of family life from a virtuoso of the form.” – Publishers Weekly
“A master of exploring human frailty and resilience in the face of domestic tragedy, best-selling Quindlen plumbs the depths of Annie’s survivors’ individual and collective grief in scenes that are both subtle and sharp. Exquisite in its sensitivity, breathtaking in its compassion, Quindlen’s exploration of loss and renewal will provoke both weeping and wonder.” – Carol Haggas, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
fiction / historical fiction.
Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.
“Readers won’t be able to resist this stirring story of freedom by any means necessary.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Black women as agents—literally—of their own liberation. Who wouldn’t be inspired?” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“A sobering yet liberatory portrayal of American slavery and of the courage, determination, and intelligence required to survive it.” – Lesley Williams, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher
nonfiction / memoir / history / technology / business / journalism.
Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.
When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”
While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.
Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.
Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.
“…incendiary… Swisher skewers many of the once-idealistic tech moguls who, when she met them as entrepreneurs decades ago, promised to change the world for the better but often chose a path of destructive disruption instead.” – Michael Liedtke, Associated Press
“In [Burn Book], Swisher slashes her way through the tech world like John Wick with a word processor, vanquishing vain CEOs and clueless legacy media bosses and emerging without a scratch.” – Steven Levy, Wired
“[A] highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world… She spills so much tea that several napkins will be needed to mop it all up… Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles.” – Ilene Cooper, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn
nonfiction / biography / writing.
V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance… Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure…” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.”
She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time.
While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast.
“Digging into McCullers’ private life and how it factored into her artistry, this is a window into a staple of the literary landscape that you’ve never seen before.” – Barnes & Noble
“[A] necessary book… It’s to Dearborn’s credit that she also suggests McCullers’s deep humanity, her subversive talents as a writer and lonely observer, and a strong sense of what McCullers herself called ‘her sad, happy life.’” – Dwight Garner, New York Times
“Dearborn deepens our appreciation for McCullers herself and her daring, resonant works, chronicling their writing and reception, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and A Member of the Wedding, each shaped by the author’s profound understanding of ‘otherness,’ unbound imagination, lyricism, and ‘intensity.’ A landmark biography.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley ★
nonfiction / memoir / psychology.
How do we live without the ones we love? Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.
When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic.
Sloane Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is a category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.
“…poignant… [Crosley] elegantly processes her grief over two seemingly unconnected traumas in her life.” – Time
“[Crosley’s] characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide… a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss. A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Grief has deepened Crosley’s craft. This memoir is the funniest book of the year, as any of her readers would expect, but it’s also profound and heartbreaking. She is our Nora Ephron; we’re lucky to have her.” – Sarah McNally, Indie Next
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
fiction / science fiction.
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency.
Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how – no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope – we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.
“…one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read for ages… Transcendent.” – Alison Flood, New Scientist
“…extraordinary… Thought-provoking, elegant, and riveting, In Ascension frames the search for our beginnings as a challenging voyage into the unknown.” – Bridget Thoreson, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“…astonishing… Beautifully written, richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail, never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vast mysteries, but also capturing a numinous, vatic strangeness that hints at genuine profundities about life.” – Adam Roberts, The Guardian
Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
fiction / horror / science fiction.
For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.
Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the “land where the birch trees grow by the big water” in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature.
But it isn’t just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence.
“[Moon of the Turning Leaves] is gripping, to say the least, and it’s a haunting read that’ll linger in the recesses of your mind for quite some time.” – Anne Mai Yee Jansen, Book Riot
“…harrowing and hopeful… The humanity and heart on offer here make this a showstopper.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Rice writes about this fraught journey with evocative, deliberate language as the travelers trek through the forest and eventually encounter the ruins of towns. He creates a constant, low-level tension that contrasts with the occasional pulse-pounding, harrowing moments, which will keep readers glued to the page.” – Melissa DeWild, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory
nonfiction / history / biography.
Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior?
These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage.
Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The “normal women” you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot.
A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural change—from 1066 to modern times—powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of women.
“A triumph of popular history.” – Helen Carr, The Spectator
“This ambitious book is a rich contribution to women’s public history—and a powerful reminder that normal women have long made history.” – BBC History
“Stunning… Full of surprises… A brilliant, essential read.” – Martin Chilton, The Independent
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
fiction / science fiction / fantasy.
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.
When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present.
Edme—who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile—is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.
A breathlessly moving “unique take on the intersection of fate and free will” (Nikki Erlick, author of The Measure), The Other Valley is “a stellar debut, full of heartbreak and hope wrapped up in gorgeous prose” (Christina Dalcher, author of Vox).
“A lyrical, thought-provoking coming-of-age story that probes the question of self-determination… The premise is strikingly unusual and provocative; the climax, after a long, subtle build, is electrifying. With beautiful prose, a compelling protagonist, and serious fodder for thought, The Other Valley is a remarkable debut.” – Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
“This gripping speculative novel will make for wonderful book club discussions.” – Mary E. Butler, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
“A thought-provoking exploration of ethics, power, love, and time travel that is perfect for fans of Ishiguro and McEwan.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
Piglet by Lottie Hazell ★
fiction.
Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.
But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly… hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.
A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.
“…delicious… an appealing cautionary tale.” – Publishers Weekly
“…addictive… A novel that you will devour first and savor later.” – Kirkus Reviews
“[A] compelling debut. Hazell’s writing moves quickly, and she excels in setting scenes and describing food and cooking. An instance in which Piglet chaotically assembles croquembouche, willing the towers not to fall apart, is taut enough that you might hold your breath just reading along.” – Bettina Makalintal, Eater
“Lottie Hazell manages to brilliantly articulate the societal pressures placed on women to be the perfect cook, the perfect wife, the perfect friend, the perfect daughter: to be and do it all. A timeless story told in a new, unique way.” – Lauren Nopenz Fairley, Indie Next
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange ★
fiction / historical fiction.
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.
“One of my favorites of the year… an engrossing story…” – Christina Ianzito, AARP
“[A] tender yet eviscerating history of a family’s survival… there is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel.” – Annie Bostrom, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“…poignant… explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history.” – Liv Albright, The Millions
“With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters’ memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange’s essential place in the canon of Native American literature.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
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