“People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.” – Francine Prose, Goldengrove
1974: A Personal History by Francine Prose
nonfiction / memoir / history.
During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories–and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York.
What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women’s liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.
“A moving tale, from an expert storyteller, about growing up.” – David Keymer, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
“Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn’t easy to forget.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Novelist and critic Prose brings all her artistry and astuteness to her first memoir… With Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a touchstone, freshly relevant ruminations on the antiwar and free-speech activism of the 1970s, and illumination of the first steps in Prose’s dynamic writing life, this is a rueful and affecting look-back.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
fiction / horror / fantasy.
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.
Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
“Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted.” – Misha Rai, The Kenyon Review
“[O]ne of the most dazzlingly innovative and intricate books of 2024… fascinating… as slippery in its categorization as it is satisfying to read; a blend of novel, short story, and fable that builds to something wholly new… one of our favorite books we read this year.” – Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
“…one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year. A captivating, alluring, and, at times, illicit book that is conscious of the craft of the storytelling process without sacrificing an extraordinary reading experience.” – Becky Spratford, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier
fiction / historical fiction.
It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.
Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is spellbinding: a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city as everlasting as their glass.
“History flows like molten glass in this stunning novel that borders on fantasy.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Chevalier’s whirlwind tour of the histories of Venice and Murano, as well as the glassmaking trade, is fascinating — and told in such detail that it feels like an apprenticeship.” – Jenny Shank, Star Tribune
“…Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental, while never losing sight of the tactile humanity that gives her work such pure, invigorating life… a potent, bewitching bright spot in a stellar career.” – Matthew Jackson, BookPage, STARRED REVIEW
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas
fiction.
After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.
Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
“[An] astonishingly accomplished novel… Just stunning.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“…magnificent… Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“…prose unlike anything I’d previously encountered, prose that felt at times unruly but always athletic in its meta pursuit of clarity… there is a great deal of genius in the novel’s sprawl… absurd, heartbreaking and pitch perfect.” – Danez Smith, New York Times
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
fiction / suspense.
One weekend.
The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city.
A party that goes awry.
A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed.
Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.
“Readers in search of a decadent good time will find it here.” – Publishers Weekly
“Emezi is a genius, IMHO… disturbing and unflinching, Emezi’s latest will leave you uncomfortably questioning morality, power, sex and, well, humanity as a whole.” – Karla J. Strand, Ms.
“Forget any notions of lyrical prose and be ready for a roller-coaster ride through the desperate and depraved world of the Nigerian elite.” – Enobong Tommelleo, Booklist
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller
fiction / comedy.
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the “pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need.
What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula’s library with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books, Judy Blume novels, and more. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor.
That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. That’s when the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town… and change it forever.
“[A] witty celebration of the power of reading…” – Michael Giltz, Parade
“[An] incisive comedy… a clever send-up of book banners’ misplaced fears. Miller’s fans will flock to her latest page-turner as social critique.” – Publishers Weekly
“This timely tale shows how hate is banished and books can better your life when not restricted.” – Judy G. Sebastian, Library Reads
Middle of the Night by Riley Sager
fiction / suspense / mystery / horror.
The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.
Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul-de-sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?
The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed ghosts roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.
The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.
“Beware! This nail-biting thriller will make you question everything you think you know about your neighbors.” – Isabelle McConville, B&N Reads
“Bestseller Sager expertly doles out chills and pathos in his mesmerizing latest… This standout work of psychological suspense confirms that Sager has few equals when it comes to merging creepiness and compassion.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“[Sager] has devised a genuinely frightening story and populated it with characters who feel as real as anyone you might encounter in the ‘real world.’ He is a master craftsman, and Middle of the Night is a superlative novel.” – David Pitt, Booklist
The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley
fiction / mystery / suspense / horror.
It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.
But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.
THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP
It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at… The Midnight Feast.
“The Midnight Feast is classic Foley: readable, packed full of twists and turns, and guaranteed to keep you glued to your sunlounger until the last page.” – Clara Strunck, Harper’s Bazaar
“Perfect for anyone who was convinced they saw the twist coming in The Glass Onion.” – Isabelle McConville, B&N Reads
“[A] tantalizing riff on the classic locked-room mystery… a chilling, exciting, and hugely satisfying novel.” – David Pitt, Booklist
The Next Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine
fiction / suspense / mystery.
Amber Patterson Parrish has come a long way. Hard work and immaculate planning turned her from invisible wallflower to prominent socialite, though there have been bumps along the way. Less than a year after her husband Jackson’s tax-evasion scandal, Amber reigns supreme over the Bishops Harbor community. But with Jackson being released from prison, Amber’s free time—and money—is vanishing.
Meanwhile, Daphne Parrish left Bishops Harbor after her divorce from Jackson, swearing she would never go back. But when one of her daughters runs away from home, desperate to see her father, Daphne agrees to return for the summer for their daughters’ sake. Jackson swears he’s a changed man, but Daphne knows all too well that he can’t be trusted.
When a ghost from Amber’s past emerges looking for revenge, these three figures find unlikely allies in one another. But who is playing who? When all is said and done, they’ll have to fight tooth and nail for everything they have left in this zero-sum game.
With shocking turns and entertaining characters, The Next Mrs. Parrish will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about duplicity and betrayal.
“The Real Housewives have nothing on the women in this sequel to 2017’s The Last Mrs. Parrish… With scheming worthy of the soapiest television drama, readers will enjoy watching the match of wits and wills in this entertaining beach read.” – Julie Ciccarelli, Library Journal
“[A] wicked sequel… Constantine lays the glamour and nastiness on thick, resulting in an acidic thriller that delights with every twist of the knife. Fans of the first book will eat this up.” – Publishers Weekly
“There’s no manipulative unreliable narrator, no contrived backstory shoehorned in at the eleventh hour, and the over-the-topness—like Amber meeting a shady diamond dealer named Mr. Stones—reads as funny and intentional. You go, ladies.” – Kirkus Reviews
Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles
nonfiction / biography / history.
Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.
Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
“[A] world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations.” – Danielle Amir Jackson, The American Scholar
“Miles is one of our greatest living historians and a beautiful writer to boot… As in all her work, Miles fleshes out the complexity, humanity, and social and emotional world of her subject.” – Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions
“Bridging theology, environmental writing, and history, Miles leaves readers with a truly unique analysis of how Tubman positioned herself within the world.” – Zeja Z. Copes, Booklist
Parade by Rachel Cusk ★
fiction.
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.
At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.
“[Cusk] pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat.” – Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
“Cusk’s prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk’s new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see.” – Herman Sutter, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
“[A] serious, challenging, cerebral novel of ideas, which doubles as an exegesis on the relationship of art to reality and (often, but not always) the female condition… breathtaking and beautiful… Nearly every sentence is a fresh thought, and thus worth thinking about. There is an idea to unpack in practically every one… Parade is the rare book (or movie or painting) that sees the world and its relationships in so singular a way that it changes the way you see.” – Scott Pfeiffer, New City
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera ★
fiction / science fiction / fantasy / romance.
Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.
Annelid and Leveret met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. They found each other in a torn-up nation, peering through propaganda to grasp a deeper truth. And in a demon-haunted wood, another act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey throughout the ages. No world can hold them, no life can bind them, and they’ll never leave each other behind.
Tracing two souls through endless lifetimes, Rakesfall is a virtuosic exploration of what stories can be. As Annelid and Leveret reincarnate ever deeper into the future, they will chase the edge of human possibility, in a dark science fiction epic unlike anything you’ve read before.
“…beautiful… [a] rich and sweeping epic.” – Publishers Weekly
“…one of the best political novels I have read… the work of a master of prose… Rakesfall speaks its own language, and, for the reader willing to listen, it offers great rewards.” – Misha Grifka Wander, Ancillary Review of Books
“…Rakesfall is not a book to be devoured. It’s one to be consumed in slow and wondering bites, chewed over for days or years or perhaps millions of eons… Chandrasekera’s got an incredible talent for speaking to unthinkably massive themes, and smoothly adding modern bites of humor to passages of gorgeous prose.” – Leah Ning, Apex
“In Chandrasekera’s newest, the characters’ journey through fantastical worlds across millennia is reminiscent of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Recommended for fans of ambitious speculative fiction that tackles systems of oppression in fresh ways.” – Erin Niederberger, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo ★
fiction.
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. But Julia has never navigated the world with the equanimity of her current privileged class. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty-seven, that she has a firm handle on things.
She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.
Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.
“…astute and often moving… Ms. Lombardo’s psychological acuity and her compassion for her characters amply reward attention.” – Joanne Kaufman, Wall Street Journal
“[Lombardo] has an uncanny and unmatched ability to really dive deep into familial relationships and the complexities that exist in a way that feels so authentic it hurts… packs a powerful punch…” – Novel Gossip
“Lombardo skillfully moves back and forth in Julia’s life with an incredible gift for writing seemingly mundane but charged moments in her characters’ lives.” – Alisa Stanfield, Library Reads
“Lombardo returns with the pitch-perfect tale of a complicated friendship and the fallout from an extramarital affair… Lombardo is compulsively readable and consistently funny, and it’s impossible to look away as Julia continues to self-sabotage. This domestic drama hits all the right notes.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
fiction.
For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.
This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.
It’s one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.
“A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
”[A] quick yet moving read that will stay with readers long after the last page.” – Cari Dubiel, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“Women’s fiction readers will gobble this delicious (though at times heartbreaking) sandwich right up.” – Carrie Voliva, Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracies, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
nonfiction / history / politics.
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.
In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan’s and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.
In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.
“…lively and kaleidoscopic…” – Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
“A significant, provocative work that joins an ugly past to an uglier present in American democracy’s continued decline.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“[A] lucid and propulsive narrative… woven throughout with astute analysis… This is a revelation.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
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