Time's 100 Books 2025

Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at fourteen as the “orphan hacker,” is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a quiet Boston suburb.But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk: she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is a oneirofex, a dream artist who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s memories and providing an emotionally resonant narrative experience. While these collective dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also dreaming one-on-one with the head of an international criminal enterprise, who is demanding the return of his dreams in exchange for Elli.Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.Award-winning author Ken Liu returns with his first sci-fi thriller in a brand-new series following former “orphan hacker” Julia Z as she is thrust into a high-stakes adventure where she must use her AI-whispering skills to unravel a virtual reality mystery, rescue a kidnapped dream artist, and confront the blurred lines between technology, selfhood, and the power of shared dreams.

Now comes another book—about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.What if the love of your life—and the person you most trusted in the world—became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? An essential, universally resonant new memoir. All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love—or to any other passion, substance, or craving—and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.

From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. 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.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.EndorsementsFrom the #1 New York Times bestselling author — Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, 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 best.One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . . Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves—never to return.Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace.

Drawing on extensive new archival material, this spellbinding biography reveals how James Baldwin's relationships shaped his work. A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of James Baldwin’s most sustaining with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac. This biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the Civil Rights Movement and on Black and queer literary history. Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin’s public story and his lucid discussion of his work are underpinned by what he calls “a search for the truth about Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate relationships and how they had shaped his life and art, which in turn has had such an indelible impact on the literary and political landscape of the twentieth century and continues to influence and even offer some measure of hope for the world today. It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that Irealized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story."

A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani PerryThroughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.” The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.

Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court, where nothing is more powerful than a secret. And power rests on the edge of a tyrant King’s sword.She wears many masks – loving wife, devoted sister, and obedient spy. It’s what a woman must do to survive.The only weapon she has is her voice.They say Jane’s whispers sealed the fate of two queens. They called her a liar and a traitor.But the truth is far more dangerous…Philippa Gregory brings the Boleyn traitor out of the shadows in an explosive story of one woman’s survival in the deadly dance of the Tudor Court.Sister. Liar. Spy. Traitor. Her secrets shaped a kingdom. Her loyalty was deadly.

How does one of the greatest storytellers of our time write her own life? The long-awaited memoir from one of our most lauded and influential cultural figures.‘Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.’Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents – entomologist father, dietician mother – Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: ‘It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.’), but also thrilling and beautiful.From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel year that spawned Cat’s Eye to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.

Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?Lina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series.In this mysterious and shape-shifting building, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her unusual Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and through their stories, she comes to understand the role of fate in history and the way that ideas can shape the world, and to face up to the cost wrought on her family and others by her father's betrayals.Profound, adventurous, and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores our search for home and the place of faith and humanity in our world. A work of huge originality and heft, it shows the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most ambitious and enriching.

God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex, described in Dickensian terms — consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairy tales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, “Dancing Barefoot” and “Because the Night.”She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred "Sonic" Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, an inkwell, and a fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again—the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.A radiant memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith.

A diary written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that goes back to 217 Blackfeet found dead in the snow. It is told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits.This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.A chilling historical horror novel set in the American West in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. This version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together.In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization.The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

Claire McCardell forever changed American fashion. In fact, much of what we wear today can be traced back to ballet flats, mix-and-match separates, wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim in womenswear, and more. She was compared to Albert Einstein for the prophetic original creations that she made over her three-decade career. But most importantly, she designed clothes to support a woman’s independence. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look. She insisted on pockets, during a time when male designers didn’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because, as she said, a woman “may live alone and like it, but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.”After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette that was championed by predominantly male designers. Leading the charge was Christian Dior, who favored tightly cinched waists and towering high heels. Dior claimed that he wanted to “save women from nature.” McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” And yet it is Dior’s name that we remember today.This book tells the forgotten story of Claire McCardell and offers an unprecedented look inside a savvy mind that was steadily building an empire at a time when women rarely made it to the upper echelons of business. She was one of the first American designers to have her name carried on the clothing that she designed. McCardell defied gender expectations not just in her professional life, but her personal life as well. She was raised to be a homemaker, yet she chose to remain single until nearly forty years old and didn’t have any children of her own.As entertaining as it is enlightening, this book illuminates how Claire McCardell became a global sensation who imagined and created something that wasn't yet fully present in American sportswear. This book is, at its core, the story of our bodies and our rights to choose how we dress, which is a symbol of our right to choose how we live.The riveting hidden history of feminist trailblazer Claire McCardell—the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of.

From the award-winning biographer of Elvis Presley, The Colonel and the King is a groundbreaking dual portrait of the relationship between the iconic artist and his legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker, drawing on a wealth of Parker's never-before-seen correspondence to reveal that this oft-reviled figure was in fact a confidant, friend, and architect of his client's success.In early 1955, Colonel Tom Parker—the manager of the number-one country musician of the day—heard that an unknown teenager from Memphis had just drawn a crowd of more than 800 people to a Texas schoolhouse, and headed south to investigate. Within days, Parker was sending out telegrams and letters to promoters and booking “We have a new boy that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest things in the business in a very short time. His name is Elvis Presley.” Later that year, after signing with RCA, the young man sent a telegram of his “Dear Colonel, Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me.... I love you like a father.”The close personal bond between Elvis and the Colonel proved impossible for outside observers to understand—not during their lifetimes, and not in the decades since. It was a long-standing, deeply committed relationship, founded on mutual admiration and support. As the Colonel wrote to Elvis in July 1973, several years before the star’s tragic death, “Without a doubt you are by far the greatest artist I have ever known, and can be even greater if you just believe in yourself half as much as I believe in you.” From the outset, the Colonel defended Elvis fiercely and indefatigably against RCA executives, Elvis’ own booking agents, and movie moguls. But in their final years together, the story grew darker, and the relationship strained, as the Colonel found himself unable to protect Elvis from himself—or to control growing problems of his own.Featuring troves of never-before-seen correspondence from the Colonel’s own archives, revelatory both for their insights and—particularly with respect to Elvis—their emotional depth, The Colonel and the King provides a unique perspective on not one but two American originals. A tale of the birth of the modern-day superstar (an invention almost entirely of Parker’s making) by the most acclaimed music writer of his generation, it presents these two misunderstood icons as they’ve never been seen with all of their brilliance, humor, and flaws on full display.

When a husband asks his reluctant wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.There is also the matter of the family “No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace...” which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof.When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With its unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition.Endorsements“A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious.” — New York Times

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.The 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, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her novel The Fraud. She asks us to look at the young Michael Jackson 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.A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays.EndorsementsTár — Pulitzer Prize finalist.The Fraud — New York Times bestseller.

Don’t call me a fixer. This isn’t HBO.In her job as unofficial “problem solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s gotten used to playing for high stakes. Even if none of those tech-bro millions she’s so good at wrangling ever make it into her pockets.But this time, she’s in way over her head—or so it seems.The lightning-rod CEO of tech’s hottest startup has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money” frozen in his will. As the company’s chief investor, Mackenzie’s boss has a fortune on the line—and with the police treading water, it’s up to Mackenzie to step up and resolve things, fast.Mackenzie’s a lawyer, not a detective. Cracking this fiendishly clever killing, with its list of suspects that reads like a who’s-who of Valley power players, should be way out of her league.Except that Mackenzie’s used to being underestimated. In fact, she’s counting on it.Because the way she sees it, this isn’t an investigation. It’s an opportunity. And she’ll do anything it takes to seize it.Anything at all.Featuring jaw-dropping twists and a wily, outsider heroine you can’t help rooting for, Dead Money is a brilliant sleight-of-hand mystery. Written by a longtime insider, it is also a dead-on snapshot of the Valley’s rich and famous—and a glimpse at the darkness lurking behind the tech world’s cheery facade.Endorsements“A stone-cold banger of a novel—a twisty journey through Silicon Valley’s dark side, wrapped in a stunning mystery package with some wild surprises along the way.” — Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life—she decides to write a book very unlike her others: a science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.The future of storytelling is here.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most, her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended.Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.From Laila Lalami comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance. Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.EndorsementsPulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist.“maestra of literary fiction” — NPR

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that's as much about celibacy as about its pleasure, desire, and fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.An examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.

Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing — formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness — are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory.

In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace, overthrowing Argentina’s leader. To many, it seemed like just another coup in a continent troubled by them, amid political violence and Cold War tensions. But there was something darker about this new regime. Quietly supported by the United States and much of Argentina itself, which was sick of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta quickly launched the “National Reorganization Process” or El Proceso—a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with “Western, Christian” values. The dictatorship, which continued until 1983, decimated a generation.One of the military’s most diabolical acts was the disappearance of hundreds of pregnant women. Patricia Roisinblit was among them, a mother and leftist revolutionary labeled “subversive” and abducted while eight months pregnant with her second child. Patricia gave birth in captivity, making one last call to her mother, Rosa, before vanishing. Her newborn son was also taken, one of hundreds given to police, military families, and dictatorship supporters, while their biological parents were secretly executed and their bodies disposed of. For Rosa and the other mothers in her same situation, the loss was unimaginable; their only solace was the hope that their grandchildren were still alive. United by this faith, a group of fierce grandmothers formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen children and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them.A Flower Traveled in My Blood is Rosa and the Abuelas’ extraordinary story, told by a journalist with unique access. With authority and compassion, Haley Cohen Gilliland brings this tale to life, tracing the lives of Patricia, Rosa, and her stolen grandson, Guillermo. As the Abuelas transform into detectives, they confront military officers, sift through government documents, assume aliases to see suspected grandchildren, and even pioneer a groundbreaking genetics test with an American scientist.A compelling mystery and deeply researched account of a pivotal era in world history, A Flower Traveled in My Blood takes readers on a journey of love, resilience, and redemption, revealing new truths about memory, identity, and family.For readers of Say Nothing and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the epic, true story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, grandmothers who fought to find their stolen grandchildren during Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.

“An antidote to the loneliness of our species.”—ROBIN WALL KIMMERER“A master class in how to love the world.”—MARGARET RENKLA thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.

After we first launched Americans into space but before we touched down on the moon’s surface, there was the Gemini program. It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program — the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it.But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. With a war raging in Vietnam and lawmakers calling for cuts to NASA’s budget, the success of the Gemini program — or the space program in general — was never guaranteed. Yet against all odds, the remarkable scientists and astronauts behind the project persevered, and their efforts paid off. Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program.Told with Jeffrey Kluger’s signature cinematic storytelling and in-depth research and interviews, Gemini is an edge-of-your-seat narrative chronicling the history of the least appreciated — and most groundbreaking — space program in American history. Finally, Gemini’s story will be told, and we'll learn the truth of how we landed on the moon.Without Gemini, there would be no Apollo.

After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly starting to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.This wise and tenderhearted novel explores the nature of our deepest friendships as seriously as it does the dizzying terror and thrill of falling in love, and the complications of trying to live a life that matches your ideals.For readers of Elif Batuman and Sally Rooney, a beguiling debut novel about finding oneself after heartbreak.

When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.The book identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.From The Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences.EndorsementsSophie Gilbert — staff writer at The Atlantic; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel.EndorsementsNew York Times bestselling author of Black CakeRead with Jenna Book Club Pick

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.Written with superb wit and emotional sensitivity, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise and unforgettable, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience.Endorsements“Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.” — Madeline MillerFrom the New York Times bestselling author.

In Berlin's underground, where techno rattles buildings still scarred with the violence of the last century, nineteen-year-old Nila finds her tribe. In their company she can escape the parallel city that made her, the public housing block packed with refugees and immigrants, where the bathrooms are infested with silverfish and the walls outside are graffitied with swastikas.Escaping into the clubs, Nila tries to outrun the shadow of her dead mother, once a feminist revolutionary; her catatonic, defeated father; and the cab-driver uncles who seem to idle on every corner. To anyone who asks, her family is Greek, not Afghani.And then Nila meets American writer Marlowe Woods, whose literary celebrity, though fading, opens her eyes to a world of patrons and festivals, one that imbues her dreams of life as an artist with new possibility. But as she finds herself drawn further into his orbit and ugly, barely submerged tensions begin to roil and claw beneath the city's cosmopolitan veneer, everything she hopes for, hates, and believes about herself will be challenged.A portrait of the artist as a young woman in a Berlin that can't escape its past — an electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery.Endorsements'Kaleidoscopic, full of style and soul' — Raven Leilani'A beautiful coming-of-age story about identity and discovery' — Elle'A no-bullshit must-read debut' — Kaveh Akbar'Rarely has the wildness and bewilderment of youth been conveyed with such richly textured heat' — Garth Greenwell

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.Megha Majumdar’s electrifying novel. A piercing and propulsive tour de force. A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

Love her or hate her, Gwyneth Paltrow has managed to stay on the A-list, her influence spanning entertainment, fashion, and the modern wellness industry. Paltrow was born to parents viewed as Hollywood royalty; that immense privilege made her a target of backlash when, at just twenty-six, she won an Oscar. However, rather than crumble in the face of criticism, she leveraged the attention for endorsement deals and film roles and eventually founded her controversial wellness and lifestyle company, Goop.Over the decades Paltrow has participated in countless carefully managed interviews, but the real Gwyneth Paltrow—the basis of her motives, desires, strengths, faults, and vulnerabilities—has never been fully revealed until now. Based on exclusive conversations with more than 220 sources, including close current and former friends and colleagues, this deeply researched biography provides insight and behind-the-scenes details of her relationships, family, friendships, iconic films, and tenure as the CEO of Goop. Gwyneth: The Biography offers a fascinating, definitive look at how Paltrow rose to prominence, stayed in the limelight, and shaped culture for so long.

In a raw and unflinching memoir, Eli Sharabi, a survivor of 491 days in Hamas captivity, recounts the harrowing ordeal of his abduction from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7th, 2023, the loss of his wife and daughters, and his unyielding resolve to survive.“I refuse to let myself drown in pain. I am surviving. I am a hostage. In the heart of Gaza. A stranger in a strange land. In the home of a Hamas-supporting family. And I'm getting out of here. I have to. I’m getting out of here. I’m coming home.” — Eli SharabiOn October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Be’eri, shattering the peaceful life Eli Sharabi had built with his British wife, Lianne, and their teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel. Dragged barefoot out his front door while his family watched in horror, Sharabi was plunged into the suffocating darkness of Gaza’s tunnels where he endured 491 days in captivity. As war raged above him, Sharabi held onto the hope that he would be reunited with his loved ones.In the first memoir by a released Israeli hostage, Sharabi offers a searing firsthand account of survival under unimaginable conditions—starvation, isolation, physical beatings, and psychological abuse at the hands of his captors.Eli Sharabi’s story is one of hunger and heartache, of physical pain, longing, loneliness and a helplessness that threatens to destroy the soul. But it is also a story of strength, of resilience, and of the human spirit’s refusal to surrender. It is about the camaraderie forged in captivity, the quiet power of faith, and one man’s unrelenting decision to choose life, time and time again.Reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Hostage is a profound witness to history, so that it shall be neither forgotten nor erased.

The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs.Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before.The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it.As relevant today as any time before, The Hounding celebrates the wild breaks from convention we’re all sometimes pulled toward, and wonders if, in a world like this one, it isn’t safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl.

In The Idea of an Entire Life, queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide. Belcourt's collection is both rigorous in research and thought and accessible in language and imagery. What he calls 'the long twentieth century' is marked by assaults on Indigenous life and his peoples' enduring resistance to them. Through lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments, Belcourt delivers a poignant examination of anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking and other times sly and humorous, put to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt's body of work. By its close, the collection argues that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe. His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt's The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history and pulled toward a more flourishing future. A poetry collection that combines lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine 21st-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility for Indigenous life and resistance.

The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by an award-winning Palestinian American writer, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, shaping the stories that will build her future.After a decade of yearning for a child, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—her husband wants to leave; her mental health grows brittle; the city of her youth, Beirut, is collapsing. She turns to the stories of her family, of her grandmothers long gone, and maps their jagged paths from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, summoning memories and tales of invading armies, midnight escapes across deserts, places of refuge that proved temporary. She recalls the contradictions of a Midwestern childhood and years spent throughout the Arab world; the identities she tried on like outfits; the stories of men who walked away and those of women who disappeared in less obvious ways; the decisions they’d all have to make again and again—what to take and what to leave behind.Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to that of a grain of rice, then a lime, and on and on, Hala gathers these stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that no longer serve her, holding close those that will set her free. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are much larger, extending beyond her own existence. How does one impart love for people who are no longer here, for places that one cannot touch? How to become someone else’s home, someone else’s safe place, when home and safety have eluded you?A stunningly lyrical, raw, and powerful quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is an indelible story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book, which answers a resounding "yes" to the question of its title. Is a River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance.Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

At the heart of this funny, acerbic, and bravely honest book of essays is Maris Kreizman, a former rule follower and ambition monster who once believed the following to be true: that working very hard would lead to admission to a good college, which would lead to a good job at a good company, which would then lead to personal fulfillment and a sense of purpose, along with adequate health care, eventual home ownership, and plenty of money waiting in a retirement account. Like any good Democrat and feminist, she believed that if she just worked hard and played by the rules, she was guaranteed a safe and comfortable life.Now in her forties, the only thing Maris Kreizman knows for sure is that she no longer has faith in American institutions or any of their hollow promises. Now she knows that the rules are meant to serve some folks better than others; and, actually, they serve no one all that well—not even Kreizman. Disturbed by the depth and scope of the liberal myths in which she once so fervently believed, Kreizman takes readers on an intimate journey that revisits some of her most profound revelations, demonstrating that it’s never too late to become radicalized.With Kreizman’s signature wit and blunt self-reflection, and more than a little transformative rage, I Want to Burn This Place Down is a book for anyone who wishes they could go back in time to give their younger selves the real truth about the fractured country they have inherited—and the encouragement to rebuild something better in its place.A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.

“The story of my life is the story of my stories,” writes Susan Orlean in this extraordinary, era-defining memoir from one of the greatest practitioners of narrative nonfiction of our time. Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean’s life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile (“The American Man Age Ten”) to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing the routine magic of Saturday night to climbing Mt. Fuji.Not only does Orlean’s account of a writing life offer a trove of indispensable gleanings for writers, it’s also an essential and practical guide to embracing any creative path. She takes us through her process of dreaming up ideas, managing deadlines, connecting with sources, chasing every possible lead, confronting writer’s block and self-doubt, and crafting the perfect lede—a Susan specialty.While Orlean has always written her way into other people’s lives in order to understand the human experience, Joyride is her most personal book ever—a searching journey through finding her feet as a journalist, recovering from the excruciating collapse of her first marriage, falling head-over-heels in love again, becoming a mother while mourning the decline of her own mother, sojourning to Hollywood for films based on her work including Adaptation and Blue Crush, and confronting mortality. Joyride is also a time machine to a bygone era of journalism, from Orlean’s bright start in the golden age of alt-weeklies to her career-making days working alongside icons such as Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick, Anna Wintour, Sonny Mehta, and Jonathan Karp—forces who shaped the media industry as we know it today.From the beloved New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, Joyride is a masterful memoir of finding her creative calling and purpose that invites us to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and an irrepressible sense of delight. Infused with Orlean’s signature warmth and wit, Joyride is a must-read for anyone who hungers to start, build, and sustain a creative life. Orlean inspires us to seek out daily inspiration and rediscover the marvels that surround us.EndorsementsNew York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book.“a national treasure” — The Washington Post

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworldAlice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him because his recommendation could hold her future in his now-incorporeal hands, and even death will not stop the pursuit of her dreams.Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies… or lead to their doom.Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this dark academia fantasy.EndorsementsThe #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface.

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or to suppress them.Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin that they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak—the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each become more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.Back in India, Sonia and Sunny's extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.The spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. Behind every love story are the myriad stories of two families. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas.EndorsementsBooker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early '90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel that grapples with grief, motherhood, and myths—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream — as we all dream — of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked — a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits. Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.Endorsements“A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love. A dazzling book.” — Patrick Radden Keefe

The Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed that we had discovered intelligent life on Mars. The Martians—a truly bizarre tale reconstructed through newly discovered clippings, letters, and photographs by bestselling science writer David Baron—begins in the 1890s with Percival Lowell, a wealthy Harvard scion who was so certain of his Mars discovery that he (almost) convinced a generation of astronomers that grainy telescopic photographs of the red planet revealed meltwater and an intricate canal system, declaring “there can be no doubt that living beings inhabit our neighboring world” (New York Times). So frenzied was the reaction that international controversies arose. Tesla announced he had received Martian radio signals. Biologists debated whether Martians were winged or gilled. Martians headlined Broadway shows, and a new genre called science fiction arose. While Lowell’s claims were savagely debunked, his influence sparked a compulsive interest in Mars and life in outer space that continues to this day.Endorsements“There Is Life on the Planet Mars” — New York Times, December 9, 1906

In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour of Europe. One night, as Ivan and Eddie experiment with heroin, things go horribly wrong. In a panic, Ivan rushes Eddie to a crowded local ER and, believing his friend is about to die, makes the awful choice to leave him there.This one act of abandonment haunts Ivan his entire life. He keeps this secret from his friends and later his family, forever searching for mercy from “a remorse that never dies.” Ivan’s decision also ripples across time through an extended community, affecting a host of other people unknowingly connected to that night.Following a bold cast of characters across decades, and set against the changing social and sexual mores from the 1970s onward, Mercy is Silber’s most ambitious and expansive novel yet, proving once again how we are all connected in mysterious and often unknown ways.A rich and nuanced story beginning with a moment of fear and abandonment that will reverberate across decades and change the course of many lives.EndorsementsPEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author

Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places: she’s getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground—the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider—she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction.Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family's problems with money and mobility. She doesn't have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all—she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now Chief Product Officer) and slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.A bold and inventive novel about real romance in the virtual workplace—bringing Castillo's trademark wit and sharp cultural criticism to an irresistible story about the possible future of love.

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, an exploration of Indigenous identity that builds on the author’s experiences and questions as an Aquinnah Wampanoag from Martha’s Vineyard.Growing up Aquinnah Wampanoag, Joseph Lee grappled with what it means to be an Indigenous person in the world today, especially as tribal land, culture, and community face new threats. Starting with the story of his own tribe, which is from the iconic Martha’s Vineyard, Lee tackles key questions around Indigenous identity and the stubborn legacy of colonialism. Lee weaves his own story—and that of his family—with conversations with Indigenous leaders, artists, and scholars from around the world about everything from culture and language to climate change and the politics of belonging. As he unpacks the meaning of Indigenous identity, Lee grants us a new understanding of our nation and what a better community might look like.

A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life.In “Machine City,” a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,” a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,” a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ’80s that neither seems to remember all that well.In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives.

In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He's entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in America, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son's troubled homophobic brother pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they've last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.Separated only by the son's cat, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions — the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar — the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where 'home' really is — and whether they can find it even in each other.Endorsements'Such a joy' — Ocean Vuong'It'll break and remake your heart' — Andrew Sean Greer'You want this gorgeous book' — R. O. Kwon

“I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka SchoolA strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

People Like Us is Jason Mott’s electric new novel. It is not a memoir, yet it has deeply personal connections to Jason’s life. And while rooted in reality, it explodes with dreamlike experiences that pull a reader in and don’t let go, from the ability to time travel to sightings of sea monsters and peacocks, and feelings of love and memory so real they hurt.In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven by gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. As their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.People Like Us is wickedly funny and achingly sad all at once. It is an utter triumph bursting with larger-than-life characters who deliver a very real take on our world. This book features characters experiencing deep loss and longing; it is also buoyed by riotous humor and by characters who share the deepest love. It is the newest creation of a writer whose work amazes, delivering something utterly new yet instantly recognizable as a Jason Mott novel.Finishing the novel will leave you absolutely breathless and, at the same time, utterly filled with joy for life, changed forever by characters who are people like us.

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Raymond Antrobus uses life writing, criticism, biography, and a poet's sense of images that bind and unbind argument to create a groundbreaking and daring examination of deafness.Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at age seven. He discovered he had missing sounds: bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. His teachers thought he was slow and disruptive. Some friends didn't believe he was deaf.Moving from London to Jamaica and the United States, The Quiet Ear tells the story of Raymond's upbringing by an English mother and Jamaican father, his first experience using hearing aids, his troubled adolescence navigating his deaf identity, and the parallel mainstream and deaf education systems. It also explores how masculinity and race complicate the shame of miscommunication, his formative introduction to literature as a way to connect with the world, and how the deaf body is 'performed'.Throughout, Raymond sets his remarkable story alongside those of D/deaf cultural figures, historic and contemporary, the famous and under-recognised—the models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end. This happened to me.When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself the custodian of a newborn hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival.Raising Hare chronicles their journey together and the challenges of caring for the leveret and preparing for its return to the wild. We witness an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, rekindling our sense of awe towards nature and wildlife.This improbable bond of trust serves to remind us that the most remarkable experiences, inspiring the most hope, often arise when we least expect them.

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what’s available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we’re attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet?In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body’s failings. When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a “superclean” xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell “hair nursery” in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International.A rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy. Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.EndorsementsFrom the New York Times—bestselling author

Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly.Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.An unexpected road trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel.

A revelatory and powerful memoir by the Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, detailing her tumultuous childhood and groundbreaking activism in the aftermath of her rape at Harvard.At a Harvard fraternity party in 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen’s life was changed forever when she was raped.The American-born child of Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen had long dreamed of attending Harvard, and it had become a place of refuge from a childhood filled with turmoil and trauma. Determined to not let her rape derail the life she’d worked so hard to create, she opted for her rape kit to be filed under Jane Doe, knowing that an active court case tied to her name could hurt her odds of working for NASA after graduation, a goal she’d been working toward for years.But she was shocked to learn this choice meant she had only six months to take action before the state of Massachusetts destroyed her kit, rendering any future legal action impossible. Nguyen knew then that she had two surrender to a law that effectively silenced survivors of sexual assault, or fight for a change.A deeply affecting memoir of grief, survival, and hope, Saving Five details Nguyen’s winding journey of recovery and action, which ultimately led her to create the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, one of the only unanimously passed laws in the history of the United States. Both a tribute to resilience and a lesson on healing, Saving Five is an inspirational story for the ages.

Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.EndorsementsFrom a generational voice that “earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve Ewing, Nicole Sealy, and Airea D. Matthews” — Booklist

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case: locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and, of course, no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them—none of which Hicks is qualified to deal with; forget about being paid. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and, as it happens, he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges in her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could. Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes—nor can she reveal her belief her destiny is to “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, thereby uniting her with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.

Mariana Enríquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager, visiting them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walked among the headstones. But in 2013, when the body of a friend's mother who was disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship was found in a common grave, she began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.In this vivid, cinematic book, Enríquez travels North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting the catacombs of Paris, Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery, Elvis's grave at Graceland, the above-ground mausoleums of New Orleans, her hometown of Buenos Aires's Recoleta, and more. She investigates each cemetery's history, architecture, its dead (famous and not), its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, folklore, musicology, and literature, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enríquez's obsession with cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she walks among. Exhilarating, unsettling, and unlike anything else, Enríquez's first work of nonfiction is as original and enthralling as the stories and novels for which she's become so admired and beloved.An enchanting, illuminating, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the world—part travelogue, part memoir, part hauntology.Endorsements"Enriquez is a queen of horror." — Los Angeles Times"One of Latin America’s most exciting authors." — Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide.A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit—from celebrated author Tash Aw.

The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how “your death place / is the birthplace you choose.” With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”In Stay Dead, Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.

From New Yorker writer Michael Luo comes a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America that traces the sorrowful theme of exclusion and documents their more than century-long struggle to belong.Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan—Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late 1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first people to be undocumented, hounded, counted, suspected, and surveilled.In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as “strangers in the land.” Only in 1965 did America’s gates swing open to people like Luo’s parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the “stranger” label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer’s style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.EndorsementsTime: A most anticipated book of 2025.“A story about aspiration and belonging that is as universal as it is profound.” — Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing“A gift to anyone interested in American history. I couldn't stop turning pages.” — Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown“What history should be—richly detailed, authoritative, and compelling.” — David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Three years after their break-up, Kiki's worked hard to forget her first love. But just as she thinks she's got her life under control—jumping into the distractions of her romance-by-calendar-invite boyfriend, and plans for her best friend, Aminah's, wedding—Kiki's career implodes, the family business teeters on collapse, and Malakai returns. As Malakai takes up his role as best man opposite her maid of honour, suddenly Kiki can think of nothing but their simmering chemistry, what went wrong, and why it is now impossible to act normal around each other. Juggling a new job, the prospect of her parents' restaurant being sold, and keeping her best friend from going full bridezilla, dealing with The Ex is the last thing she needs. But somehow the spark between them is only getting hotter—and threatening to ruin everything.

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?” So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our storiesEndorsementsOprah's Book Club pick“A beautiful account of the journey of courage it takes to face the truth of one’s past.” — Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score

The new novel from the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature - 'a maestro' (Guardian). A captivating story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial East Africa What are we given, and what do we have to take for ourselves? It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people – Karim, Fauzia and Badar – are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed. Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life – and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. Even when a shattering false accusation sees Badar sent away, Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend. But as the three of them take their first steps in love, infatuation, work and parenthood, their bond is tested – and Karim is tempted into a betrayal that will change all of their lives forever.

Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge — an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, and receive the inheritance.One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting with dysfunctional chaos: her older sister’s secret love affair; her brother’s incessant mansplaining; her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed; her younger sister’s obsession with "vibes"; her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.Sarah MacLean’s first foray into contemporary fiction, with a sharp, sexy novel about a wealthy New England family's long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart.EndorsementsNew York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean.

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen; James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she calls "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

Who is Cate Kay?Cate Kay is the most famous author on the planet. But it's just a name. Somehow, despite her bestselling novels and the record-breaking film franchise, the writer has remained completely anonymous.Anne Marie Callahan is the name nobody knows. Only the people she left behind. And Annie knows there's no one there anymore who could connect the dots between the girl who ran away all those years ago and the famous novelist.If you asked, she'd say her name was Cass Ford. That's what her barista shouts each morning. And it's how she introduces herself to the woman she'll eventually call the love of her life.Three names, three lives. But Cate Kay is finally ready to tell you who she really is. And when the truth is out, will everyone's favourite novelist hold on to her place in our hearts or are some betrayals impossible to forgive?EndorsementsKate Fagan is the author of several New York Times bestselling nonfiction books.

When Rosa, a depressed and drifting twenty-something, meets Paul, a middling art critic, an off-kilter romance commences. Paul longs to be dominated by physically powerful women and convinces Rosa to fulfill one of his fantasies: that she become a wrestler. Soon, Rosa joins a women's wrestling team and embarks on a tour of the South, befriends her horny teammates and their jealous boyfriends, and learns to hold her own among a crew of seedy coaches and greedy promoters. Through wrestling, Rosa learns to articulate the kind of life she wants and to wriggle free of Paul's attempts to possess her.

A child of the civil rights era, Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But in Jones’s first semester of college, a Black Studies classmate challenged her right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of “Who do you think you are?”Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her own family’s past for answers, only to find a story that archives alone can’t tell, a story of race in America that takes us beyond slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights. Ever since her great-great-great-grandmother Nancy emerged from bondage in 1865 determined to raise a free family, skin color has determined Jones’s ancestors’ lives. But color and race are not the same, and through her family’s story, Jones discovers the uneven, unpredictable relationship between the two.Drawing readers along the shifting and jagged path of America’s color line, The Trouble of Color is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.Endorsements“assiduous scholar and absorbing writer” — New York Times

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews—all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.Marking the first time Toews has written her own story in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing a brilliant literary form to contain it.An astonishing masterwork of memoir from one of our most renowned and acclaimed writers, telling pieces of her own story in nonfiction for the first time.

In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities— a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage give him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child; it nods to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society.A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country that's rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter.Endorsements"In its swirls of emotion, its humor and its pathos, the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that’s been let out of its bottle and set free. It begins to seem that there’s nothing Gary Shteyngart can’t do." —Michael Cunningham"one of his generation's most exhilarating writers." —The New York Times

From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance.Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering,it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film. A writer’s affair with a married artist tests the line between fact and fiction, self-victimization and the victimization of others.In these six singular stories and a novella that pivot from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the slipperiness of truth in storytelling. With razor-sharp precision and psychological acuity, she peels back the tales we tell ourselves to peer beneath them: at our treacherous desires, our self-deceptions and our capacity for cruelty, both to ourselves and each other. Expansive and provocative, Where Are You Really From is a visionary achievement.From the critically acclaimed author of Disorientation, a multi-genre story collection that explores the limits and possibilities of storytelling.Endorsements“Scintillating … These expressive and atmospheric tales mesmerize” — Publishers Weekly“Chou is gifted at storytelling with a surrealistic bent … Sharp storytelling that bends and blurs genre expectations.” — Kirkus

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.Endorsements"Wonderfully ambitious... Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book." — Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning both “care” and “worry”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. A series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of food and water. A proposition was put forward: save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves — by throwing 140 people, mostly women and children, overboard.What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a notorious case that boiled down to a simple but profound question: Were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo?The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history. In this book, Siddharth Kara utilizes primary source research, masterful storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mystery of who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.EndorsementsPulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author

A spellbinding narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history, 1929 unravels the greed, blind optimism, and human folly that led to an era-defining collapse—one with ripple effects that still shape our society today.In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin.With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivete in an endless boom led to disaster. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again.This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late.Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time—with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.EndorsementsNamed a Most Anticipated Book by New York Times Book Review, TIME, Washington Post, Associated Press, Town & Country, New York Post, and more.New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin

An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, but the weight of expectations from his family of doctors, lawyers, and college presidents only pushes him further into his downward spiral. When his close friend Carolyn goes off the rails, Smith decides to return to New York to find out what happened to her and Elle. But it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life, drawn back into the city’s underworld where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

A son returning home. A dangerous debt. Secrets about to ignite... and a family consumed by flames.Roman Carruthers left the smoke and fire of his family's crematory business behind in his hometown of Jefferson Run, Virginia. He is enjoying a life of shallow excess as a financial adviser in Atlanta until he gets a call from his sister, Neveah, telling him their father is in a coma after a hit-and-run accident. When Roman goes home, he learns the accident may not be what it seems. His brother, Dante, is deeply in debt to dangerous, ruthless criminals.And Roman is willing to do anything to protect his family. Anything.A financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, Roman must use all his skills to try to save his family while dealing with a shadow that has haunted them all for twenty years: the disappearance of their mother when Roman and his siblings were teenagers. It's a mystery that Neveah, who has sacrificed so much of her life to hold her family together, is determined to solve once and for all.As fate and chance and heartache ignite their lives, the Carruthers family must pull together to survive or see their lives turn to ash. Because, as their father counseled them from birth, nothing lasts forever.Everything burns.

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the West, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries — America, the UK, France and Germany. It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order’ — a generation that understands the West can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the Western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future.