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The Bone Spindle

Leslie Vedder

Sleeping Beauty meets Indiana Jones in this thrilling fairytale retelling for fans of Sorcery of Thorns and The Cruel Prince.

Fi is a bookish treasure hunter with a knack for ruins and riddles, who definitely doesn’t believe in true love.

Shane is a tough-as-dirt girl warrior from the north who likes cracking skulls, pretty girls, and doing things her own way.

Briar Rose is a prince under a sleeping curse, who’s been waiting a hundred years for the kiss that will wake him.

Cursed princes are nothing but ancient history to Fi—until she pricks her finger on a bone spindle while exploring a long-lost ruin. Now she’s stuck with the spirit of Briar Rose until she and Shane can break the century-old curse on his kingdom.

Dark magic, Witch Hunters, and bad exes all stand in her way—not to mention a mysterious witch who might wind up stealing Shane’s heart, along with whatever else she’s after. But nothing scares Fi more than the possibility of falling in love with Briar Rose.

Set in a lush world inspired by beloved fairytales, The Bone Spindle is a fast-paced young adult fantasy full of adventure, romance, found family, and snark.

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Vinyl Moon

Mahogany L. Browne

A teen girl hiding the scars of a past relationship finds home and healing in the words of strong Black writers. A beautiful sophomore novel from a critically acclaimed author and poet that explores how words have the power to shape and uplift our world even in the midst of pain.

"A true embodiment of the term Black Girl Magic.” –Booklist

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Single and Forced to Mingle

Melissa Croce

A laugh-out-loud, tongue-in-cheek guidebook filled with hilarious and helpful advice—from how to dodge family members’ unwanted questions about babies to successfully creating a fake partner during wedding season—for anyone trying to survive and thrive in the midst of singledom. Perfect for fans of Hey Ladies! and Single State of Mind.

So, you’re single. Whether existing sans partner is a new state of being or you’ve been on this solo journey for a while, the fact of the matter is this: being single is actually awesome.

You can do whatever you want, travel wherever you want, and be your truest, most free self. But there are a lot of people out there—your mom, your married best friend, the wedding industry, society—who see things differently. To them, singledom is something to avoid at all cost, no matter how many times you tell them you love your life the way it is. The limit does not exist when it comes to telling Aunt Carol you still don’t want to be set up with her neighbor’s ex-stepson.

Now, Melissa Croce gives you the tips, tricks, and sage advice you need to graciously endure all of the cringe-worthy scenarios your single self may dread, from awkward small talk with an ex to navigating well-meaning but insensitive relatives. And it helps you truly flourish in your singledom, offering activities like quizzes aimed at helping you find a new hobby and tarot spreads for that cozy Saturday night in. Part real-world guide, part commiseration, and part celebration, Single and Forced to Mingle will steer you through the ups and downs of being single, reminding you just how good it feels to be free.

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Eat Better, Feel Better

Giada De Laurentiis

Boost gut health and immunity with a delicious approach to wellness that nourishes mind, body, and spirit.

Get an inside look at Giada's approach to healthy, balanced living. In her newest book, Giada walks you through how to select food that can actually make you feel better and curate a personalized wellness routine to support a healthy mind and body. Find out how reconfiguring her diet to control inflammation can turn your life around and how to use complementary wellness tactics like intermittent fasting, meditation, and other self-care routines to optimize your well-being.

Giada devotes an entire chapter to her 3-day reboot (that she follows several times a year) and offers more than two dozen dairy-free, sugar-free, and gluten-free recipes to accompany the plan as well as a 21-day menu outline that makes cooking for good easy to implement at home. Eat Better, Feel Better features more than 100 new recipes like Quinoa Pancakes; Sheet Pan Parmesan Shrimp and Veggies; Roasted Cauliflower and Baby Kale Salad; Grilled Strip Steak with Scallion Salsa Verde; and Chocolate and Orange Brown Rice Treats along with plenty of Italian-influenced recipes fans will look forward to, from Fusilli with Chicken and Broccoli Rabe to Easy Chicken Piccata and Pan-Roasted Pork Chops with Cherry and Red Wine Sauce.

Eat Better, Feel Better is the perfect jumpstart to wellness. Your path to feeling better begins now.

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Four Hundred Souls

Ibram X. Kendi

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A chorus of extraordinary voices tells the epic story of the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post, Town & Country, BookPage, BookRiot, Booklist • “A vital addition to [the] curriculum on race in America . . . a gateway to the solo works of all the voices in Kendi and Blain’s impressive choir.”—The Washington Post
 
“From journalist Hannah P. Jones on Jamestown’s first slaves to historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Sally Hemings to the seductive cadences of poets Jericho Brown and Patricia Smith, Four Hundred Souls weaves a tapestry of unspeakable suffering and unexpected transcendence.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. 

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. 

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

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Neighbors

Danielle Steel

 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * In Danielle Steel's gripping new novel, a reclusive woman opens up her home to her neighbors in the wake of a devastating earthquake, setting off events that reveal secrets, break relationships apart, and bring strangers together to forge powerful new bonds.
Meredith White was one of Hollywood's most recognizable faces. But a personal tragedy cut her acting career short and alienated her from her family. For the last fifteen years, Meredith has been living alone in San Francisco with two trusted caretakers. Then, on a muggy late summer day, a massive earthquake strikes Northern California, plunging the Bay Area into chaos. Without a moment's hesitation, Meredith invites her stunned and shaken neighbors into her mostly undamaged home as the recovery begins.

These people did not even realize that movie star Meredith White was living on their street. Now, they are sharing her mansion, as well as their most closely kept secrets. Without the walls and privacy of their own homes, one by one, new relationships are forged. For every neighbor there is a story, from the doctor whose wife and children fear him, to the beautiful young woman dating a dishonorable man, to the aspiring writer caring for a famous blind musician.

In the heart of the crisis, Meredith finds herself venturing back into the world. And thanks to the suspicions and the dogged detective work of a disaster relief volunteer, a former military officer named Charles, a shocking truth about her own world is exposed. Suddenly Meredith sees her isolation, her estranged family, and even her acting career in a whole new light.

Filled with powerful human dramas, Neighbors is a penetrating look at how our world can be upended in a moment. In a novel of unforgettable characters and stunning twists, acts of love and courage become the most powerful forces of all.

 

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The Scorpion's Tail

Douglas Preston

From #1 bestselling authors Preston & Child comes a thrilling novel following archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson as they work together to solve a twisted crime that reaches far beyond any of their worst fears.
Following the acclaimed debut of Old Bones, this second "happily anticipated" new thriller in Preston & Child's series features Nora Kelly, archaeologist at the Santa Fe Archeological Institute, and rookie FBI Agent Corrie Swanson, as they team up to solve a mystery that quickly escalates into nightmare (Booklist).

A mummified corpse, over half a century old, is found in the cellar of an abandoned building in a remote New Mexico ghost town. Corrie is assigned what seems to her a throwaway case: to ID the body and determine cause of death. She brings archaeologist Nora Kelly to excavate the body and lend her expertise to the investigation, and together they uncover something unexpected and shocking: the deceased apparently died in agony, in a fetal position, skin coming off in sheets, with a rictus of horror frozen on his face.

Hidden on the corpse lies a 16th century Spanish gold cross of immense value.

When they at last identify the body -- and the bizarre cause of death -- Corrie and Nora open a door into a terrifying, secret world of ancient treasure and modern obsession: a world centered on arguably the most defining, frightening, and transformative moment in American history.

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Invisible

Danielle Steel

In this riveting novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel, a gifted young woman must grapple with the legacy of a troubled childhood in order to pursue her dreams.

Antonia Adams is the product of a loveless marriage between a beautiful young model and an aristocrat. As a child, she is abandoned in the abyss that yawns between them, blamed by her mother, ignored by her father, and neglected by both. Unprotected and unloved, she learns that the only way to feel safe is to hide from the dangers around her, drawing as little attention as possible to herself, to be "invisible."

In her isolation, books are her refuge and movies her escape. A day spent being carried away by an unforgettable film in a dark theater is her greatest thrill. Her love of the movies turns into a dream to become a screenwriter, and a summer job at a Hollywood studio. There, a famous British filmmaker notices her, and suddenly she can remain invisible no longer. He wants to put her in a movie and make her a star. It is a dazzling opportunity but a terrifying one, as it strips her of the camouflage that made her feel safe. She is suddenly thrust into the public eye--and even more so when they fall in love.

She will never let go of her true dream of becoming a filmmaker, though, and if she wants to make that leap, she will have to expose herself in ways she never has before. When tragedy strikes, she must decide whether she will remain center stage or become invisible again, where she feels safest. Will she face her demons, or run and hide?

In this extraordinary novel, Danielle Steel tells the story of a woman who must decide how high a price she is willing to pay to pursue her passion--and whether it is possible to stay true to herself while she does.

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China: the novel

Edward Rutherfurd

"Edward Rutherfurd has enthralled millions of people with his grand, sweeping historical sagas that tell the history of an iconic place over multiple generations. Now, in China: The Novel, Rutherfurd takes readers into the rich and fascinating milieu of the Middle Kingdom. The story begins in 1839, at the dawn of the first Opium War. An English merchant arrives in the restricted port of Canton (Guangzhou), seeking to make his fortune trading opium. But the tide of addiction is decimating the Chinese population--a young scholar accompanies his Mandarin master on a mission from the emperor to shut down the trade. Thus begins an epic tale chronicling China's struggle to regain their ancient land and culture from the domination of the Western powers, which culminates in the revolution of 1911, and the ultimate rise of the Communist regime. We meet a young village wife struggling with the rigid traditions of her people, Manchu empresses and warriors, the powerful eunuchs of the Forbidden City, rapacious English opium dealers and savvy Chinese pirates, artists, concubines, scoundrel's and heroes. Rutherfurd chronicles the rising and falling fortunes of members of Chinese, British, and American families, as they negotiate the tides of history. Along the way, in his signature style, Rutherfurd provides a deeply researched portrait of Chinese history and society, its ancient traditions and great upheavals, and China's emergence as a rising global power. We are treated to romance and adventure, battles and intrigues, grinding struggle and incredible fortune. China: The Novel brings to life the rich terrain of this vast and constantly evolving country. From Shanghai to Beijing to the Great Wall, Rutherfurd chronicles the turbulent rise and fall of empires as the colonial West meets the opulent and complex East in a dramatic struggle between cultures and people. Extraordinarily researched and majestically told, Rutherfurd paints a thrilling portrait of one of the most singular and remarkable countries in the world"--

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Who Were Stanley and Livingstone?

Jim Gigliotti

Join the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley on his amazing quest to find David Livingstone, England's most celebrated explorer, in this new addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling series!

The world was fascinated and concerned. Dr. David Livingstone's 1866 expedition to find the source of the Nile River in Africa was only supposed to last two years. But it had been almost six years since anyone had heard from the famous British explorer. That's when a young American newspaper reporter named Henry Morton Stanley decided to go on his own expedition to find Dr. Livingstone. Author Jim Gigliotti chronicles the lives of both of these men and details the dangerous two-year journey that would eventually bring them face-to-face.

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What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

Sherri L. Smith

In this book from the #1 New York Times bestselling series, learn how this vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans--the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem's history all the way to its seventeenth-century roots, and explains how the early-twentieth-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance.

With 80 fun black-and-white illustrations and an engaging 16-page photo insert, readers will be excited to read this latest addition to Who HQ!

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The Stolen Lady

Laura Morelli

From the acclaimed author of The Night Portrait comes a stunning historical novel about two women, separated by five hundred years, who each hide Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa--with unintended consequences.
 



France, 1939

At the dawn of World War II, Anne Guichard, a young archivist employed at the Louvre, arrives home to find her brother missing. While she works to discover his whereabouts, refugees begin flooding into Paris and German artillery fire rattles the city. Once they reach the city, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre's art collection. Anne is quickly sent to the Castle of Chambord, where the Louvre's most precious artworks--including the Mona Lisa--are being transferred to ensure their safety. With the Germans hard on their heels, Anne frantically moves the Mona Lisa and other treasures again and again in an elaborate game of hide and seek. As the threat to the masterpieces and her life grows closer, Anne also begins to learn the truth about her brother and the role he plays in this dangerous game.

Florence, 1479

House servant Bellina Sardi's future seems fixed when she accompanies her newly married mistress, Lisa Gherardini, to her home across the Arno. Lisa's husband, a prosperous silk merchant, is aligned with the powerful Medici, his home filled with luxuries and treasures. But soon, Bellina finds herself bewitched by a charismatic monk who has urged Florentines to rise up against the Medici and to empty their homes of the riches and jewels her new employer prizes. When Master Leonardo da Vinci is commissioned to paint a portrait of Lisa, Bellina finds herself tasked with hiding an impossible secret.

When art and war collide, Leonardo da Vinci, his beautiful subject Lisa, and the portrait find themselves in the crosshairs of history.

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The Last Checkmate

Gabriella Saab

A PopSugar Best Book of the Year!

Readers of Heather Morris's The Tattooist of Auschwitz and watchers of The Queen's Gambit won't want to miss this amazing debut set during World War II. A young Polish resistance worker, imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, plays chess in exchange for her life, and in doing so fights to bring the man who destroyed her family to justice.

Maria Florkowska is many things: daughter, avid chess player, and, as a member of the Polish underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a young woman brave beyond her years. Captured by the Gestapo, she is imprisoned in Auschwitz, but while her family is sent to their deaths, she is spared. Realizing her ability to play chess, the sadistic camp deputy, Karl Fritzsch, decides to use her as a chess opponent to entertain the camp guards. However, once he tires of exploiting her skills, he has every intention of killing her.

Befriended by a Catholic priest, Maria attempts to overcome her grief, vows to avenge the murder of her family, and plays for her life. For four grueling years, her strategy is simple: Live. Fight. Survive. By cleverly provoking Fritzsch's volatile nature in front of his superiors, Maria intends to orchestrate his downfall. Only then will she have a chance to evade the fate awaiting her and see him punished for his wickedness.

As she carries out her plan and the war nears its end, she challenges her former nemesis to one final game, certain to end in life or death, in failure or justice. If Maria can bear to face Fritzsch--and her past--one last time.

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Black Food

Bryant Terry

A beautiful, rich, and groundbreaking book exploring Black foodways within America and around the world, curated by food activist and author of Vegetable Kingdom Bryant Terry.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time Out - NPR - Vice - Publishers Weekly - "Mouthwatering, visually stunning, and intoxicating, Black Food tells a global story of creativity, endurance, and imagination that was sustained in the face of dispersal, displacement, and oppression."--Imani Perry, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University

In this stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork.

As much a joyful celebration of Black culture as a cookbook, Black Food explores the interweaving of food, experience, and community through original poetry and essays, including Jollofing with Toni Morrison by Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Queer Intelligence by Zoe Adjonyoh, The Spiritual Ecology of Black Food by Leah Penniman, and Foodsteps in Motion by Michael W. Twitty. The recipes are similarly expansive and generous, including sentimental favorites and fresh takes such as Crispy Cassava Skillet Cakes from Yewande Komolafe, Okra & Shrimp Purloo from BJ Dennis, Jerk Chicken Ramen from Suzanne Barr, Avocado and Mango Salad with Spicy Pickled Carrot and Rof Dressing from Pierre Thiam, and Sweet Potato Pie from Jenné Claiborne. Visually stunning artwork from such notables as Black Panther Party creative director Emory Douglas and artist Sarina Mantle are woven throughout, and the book includes a signature musical playlist curated by Bryant.

With arresting artwork and innovative design, Black Food is a visual and spiritual feast that will satisfy any soul.

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Memento Mori - Farmington, Connecticut

Andres Verzosa

Memento Mori, the "ancient burial ground" of Farmington, Connecticut, is home to over 868 former residents of the town. This book considers twenty-two individuals -- early settlers, farmers, soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War and the Revolution, tavern-keepers, teachers, silversmiths -- some well-known in Farmington history, others less so, all a reminder of the challenges of life in colonial New England. The biographies are accompanied by rich photos of the subjects' gravestones and, in some cases, implements from that person's livelihood, all part of the collection at Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut.

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Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

Diana Gabaldon

#1 New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon returns with the newest novel in the epic Outlander series.

The past may seem the safest place to be . . . but it is the most dangerous time to be alive. . . .

Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same.

It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser's Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible.

Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt. Tensions in the Colonies are great and local feelings run hot enough to boil Hell's teakettle. Jamie knows loyalties among his tenants are split and it won't be long until the war is on his doorstep.

Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. Sometimes they question whether risking the perils of the 1700s--among them disease, starvation, and an impending war--was indeed the safer choice for their family.

Not so far away, young William Ransom is still coming to terms with the discovery of his true father's identity--and thus his own--and Lord John Grey has reconciliations to make, and dangers to meet . . . on his son's behalf, and his own.

Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War creeps ever closer to Fraser's Ridge. And with the family finally together, Jamie and Claire have more at stake than ever before.

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The Cat Who Saved Books

Sosuke Natsukawa

"Cats, books, young love, and adventure: catnip for a variety of readers!" -Kirkus

"Bibliophiles will dote on this charming import from Japan, smoothly translated by Louise Heal Kawai." - Library Journal

From the #1 bestselling author in Japan comes a celebration of books, cats, and the people who love them, infused with the heartwarming spirit of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles.

Bookish high school student Rintaro Natsuki is about to close the secondhand bookstore he inherited from his beloved bookworm grandfather. Then, a talking cat appears with an unusual request. The feline asks for--or rather, demands--the teenager's help in saving books with him. The world is full of lonely books left unread and unloved, and the cat and Rintaro must liberate them from their neglectful owners.

Their mission sends this odd couple on an amazing journey, where they enter different mazes to set books free. Through their travels, the cat and Rintaro meet a man who leaves his books to perish on a bookshelf, an unwitting book torturer who cuts the pages of books into snippets to help people speed read, and a publishing drone who only wants to create bestsellers. Their adventures culminate in one final, unforgettable challenge--the last maze that awaits leads Rintaro down a realm only the bravest dare enter . . .

An enthralling tale of books, first love, fantasy, and an unusual friendship with a talking cat, The Cat Who Saved Books is a story for those for whom books are so much more than words on paper.

Translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai.

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Never

Ken Follett

 

 

New York Times Bestseller

The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it’s an action-packed, globe-spanning drama set in the present day.
 
“A compelling story, and only too realistic.” —Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary
“Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Follett’s nerve-racking drama of international tension.
 
A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis.
 
Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival for the next president election.

Never is an extraordinary novel, full of heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries. It brims with cautionary wisdom for our times, and delivers a visceral, heart-pounding read that transports readers to the brink of the unimaginable.

 

 

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Wish You Were Here

Jodi Picoult

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and The Book of Two Ways comes "a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit" (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising)

Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She's an associate specialist at Sotheby's now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She's not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos--days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time.

But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It's all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes.

Almost immediately, Diana's dream vacation goes awry. Her luggage is lost, the Wi-Fi is nearly nonexistent, and the hotel they'd booked is shut down due to the pandemic. In fact, the whole island is now under quarantine, and she is stranded until the borders reopen. Completely isolated, she must venture beyond her comfort zone. Slowly, she carves out a connection with a local family when a teenager with a secret opens up to Diana, despite her father's suspicion of outsiders.

In the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was formed, Diana finds herself examining her relationships, her choices, and herself--and wondering if when she goes home, she too will have evolved into someone completely different.

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The Sentence

Louise Erdrich

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

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Heard It in a Love Song

Tracey Garvis Graves

From Tracey Garvis Graves, the bestselling author of The Girl He Used to Know comes a love song of a story about starting over and second chances in Heard It in a Love Song.

Love doesn’t always wait until you’re ready.

Layla Hilding is thirty-five and recently divorced. Struggling to break free from the past—her glory days as the lead singer in a band and a ten-year marriage to a man who never put her first—Layla’s newly found independence feels a lot like loneliness.

Then there's Josh, the single dad whose daughter attends the elementary school where Layla teaches music. Recently separated, he's still processing the end of his twenty-year marriage to his high school sweetheart. He chats with Layla every morning at school and finds himself thinking about her more and more.

Equally cautious and confused about dating in a world that favors apps over meeting organically, Layla and Josh decide to be friends with the potential for something more. Sounds sensible and way too simple—but when two people are on the rebound, is it heartbreak or happiness that’s a love song away?

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Our Country Friends

Gary Shteyngart

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

“A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York Times

Eight friends, one country house,
and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post)

In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.

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The Collective

Alison Gaylin

The USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author of Never Look Back and If I Die Tonight plumbs the dark side of justice and the depths of diabolical revenge in this propulsive novel of psychological suspense that melds the driving narrative of Then She Was Gone with the breathtaking twists of The Chain and the violent fury of Kill Bill.

"Alison Gaylin's The Collective is an astonishing feat. In the tradition of Ira Levin's unforgettable social thrillers (Rosemary's Baby, Stepford Wives), it's a nerve-shredding, emotionally harrowing ride that also speaks volumes about our current moment, the dangers of our digital world, the potency of female rage. Don't miss it." --Megan Abbott

Just how far will a grieving mother go to right a tragic wrong?

Camille Gardener is a grieving--and angry--mother who, five years after her daughter's death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible.

When her rash actions draw the attention of a secret group of women--the collective-- Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability. Fueled by mutual rage, the collective members devise and act out retribution fantasies via precise, anonymous, highly coordinated revenge killings.

As Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters. Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective--and about herself--that she may not be able to survive

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A Certain Appeal

Vanessa King

A sparkling contemporary retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in the tantalizing world of New York City burlesque, perfect for fans of The Kiss Quotient and The Roommate.

After a betrayal derailed her interior design career, Liz Bennet found a fresh start in New York. Now an executive assistant by day and stage kitten by night, she’s discovered a second home with the performers at Meryton, Manhattan’s top-tier burlesque venue. Love’s the last thing on her mind when she locks eyes with Will Darcy across the crowded club, yet the spark between them is undeniable—that is, until she overhears the uptight wealth manager call her merely “tolerable.”

Bennet is determined to write Darcy off, but once their besties fall head-over-heels, they’re thrown into each other’s orbit again and again. Each encounter begins to feel more heated than the last, but is their chemistry enough to topple that terrible first impression? What’s more, when a charming newcomer arrives on the scene with accusations against Darcy, and a sudden development leaves Meryton’s fate in jeopardy, Bennet will have to decide who to trust in time to salvage her design dreams, her heart, and the stage she shares with her found family…

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Noor

Nnedi Okorafor

From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria.

Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the "reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist" and the "saga of the wicked woman and mad man" unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.

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A Marvellous Light

Freya Marske

An Indie Next Pick!
A LibraryReads Pick!
With Four Starred Reviews


Red, White & Royal Blue meets Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in debut author Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light, featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies.

Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He’s struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known.

Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it—not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else.

Robin’s predecessor has disappeared, and the mystery of what happened to him reveals unsettling truths about the very oldest stories they’ve been told about the land they live on and what binds it. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles—and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.

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Vespertine

Margaret Rogerson

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sorcery of Thorns and An Enchantment of Ravens comes a thrilling new YA fantasy about a teen girl with mythic abilities who must defend her world against restless spirits of the dead.

The dead of Loraille do not rest.

Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on; otherwise, they will rise as spirits with a ravenous hunger for the living. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who trade whispers about her scarred hands and troubled past.

When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. It is a revenant, a malevolent being that threatens to possess her the moment she drops her guard. Wielding its extraordinary power almost consumes her—but death has come to Loraille, and only a vespertine, a priestess trained to wield a high relic, has any chance of stopping it. With all knowledge of vespertines lost to time, Artemisia turns to the last remaining expert for help: the revenant itself.

As she unravels a sinister mystery of saints, secrets, and dark magic, her bond with the revenant grows. And when a hidden evil begins to surface, she discovers that facing this enemy might require her to betray everything she has been taught to believe—if the revenant doesn’t betray her first.

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Everything Within and in Between

Nikki Barthelmess

Color Me In meets I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter in Everything Within and In Between, a deeply honest coming-of-age story about reclaiming a heritage buried under assimilation, the bonds within families, and defining who you are for yourself.

For Ri Fernández's entire life, she's been told, "We live in America and we speak English." Raised by her strict Mexican grandma, Ri has never been allowed to learn Spanish.

What's more, her grandma has pulled Ri away from the community where they once belonged. In its place, Ri has grown up trying to fit in among her best friend's world of mansions and country clubs in an attempt try to live out her grandmother's version of the "American Dream."

In her heart, Ri has always believed that her mother, who disappeared when Ri was young, would accept her exactly how she is and not try to turn her into someone she's never wanted to be. So when Ri finds a long-hidden letter from her mom begging for a visit, she decides to reclaim what Grandma kept from her: her heritage and her mom.

But nothing goes as planned. Her mom isn't who Ri imagined she would be and finding her doesn't make Ri's struggle to navigate the interweaving threads of her mixed heritage any less complicated. Nobody has any idea of who Ri really is--not even Ri herself.

Everything Within and In Between is a powerful new young adult novel about one young woman's journey to rediscover her roots and redefine herself from acclaimed author Nikki Barthelmess.

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Walking in Two Worlds

Wab Kinew

An Indigenous teen girl is caught between two worlds, both real and virtual, in the YA fantasy debut from bestselling Indigenous author Wab Kinew. Perfect for fans of Ready Player One and the Otherworld series.

Bugz is caught between two worlds. In the real world, she's a shy and self-conscious Indigenous teen who faces the stresses of teenage angst and life on the Rez. But in the virtual world, her alter ego is not just confident but dominant in a massively multiplayer video game universe.
Feng is a teen boy who has been sent from China to live with his aunt, a doctor on the Rez, after his online activity suggests he may be developing extremist sympathies. Meeting each other in real life, as well as in the virtual world, Bugz and Feng immediately relate to each other as outsiders and as avid gamers. And as their connection is strengthened through their virtual adventures, they find that they have much in common in the real world, too: both must decide what to do in the face of temptations and pitfalls, and both must grapple with the impacts of family challenges and community trauma.
But betrayal threatens everything Bugz has built in the virtual world, as well as her relationships in the real world, and it will take all her newfound strength to restore her friendship with Feng and reconcile the parallel aspects of her life: the traditional and the mainstream, the east and the west, the real and the virtual.

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Before We Disappear

Shaun David Hutchinson

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection!

It's a new star-crossed romance about the magic of first love from the acclaimed author of We Are the Ants and Brave Face, Shaun David Hutchinson.

Jack Nevin's clever trickery and moral flexibility make him the perfect assistant to the Enchantress, one of the most well-known stage magicians in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Europe. Without Jack's steady supply of stolen tricks, the Enchantress's fame would have burned out long ago.

But when Jack's thievery catches up to them, they're forced to flee to America to find their fortune. Luckily, the Enchantress is able to arrange a set of sold-out shows at Seattle's Alaska-Yukon-Pacific World's Fair Exposition. She's convinced they're going to rich and famous until a new magician arrives on the scene. Performing tricks that defy the imagination, Laszlo's show overshadows the Enchantress, leaving Jack no choice but to hunt for the secrets to his otherworldly illusions. But what Jack uncovers isn't at all what he expected.

Behind Laszlo's tricks is Wilhelm--a boy that can seemingly perform real magic. Jack and Wilhelm have an instant connection, and as the rivalry between the Enchantress and Laszlo grows, so too does Jack and Wilhelm's affection. But can Jack choose between the woman who gave him a life and the boy who is offering him everything?

It's a stirring tale about the magic of love from award-winning author Shaun David Hutchinson.

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The Woods Are Always Watching

Stephanie Perkins

New from bestselling author Stephanie Perkins, and the perfect companion to her New York Times bestseller There's Someone Inside Your House, coming to Netflix October 6!

"The scares here are authentic, and the details meticulous, driven by a smart, distinct narrative voice. Hand this to fans of the film Midsommar who will delight in the eerie world building, the disintegration and rebuilding of interpersonal relationships, and the unseen forces of evil that threaten to break two friends apart." -Booklist

Bears aren't the only predators in these woods.
Best friends Neena and Josie spent high school as outsiders, but at least they had each other. Now, with college and a two-thousand-mile separation looming on the horizon, they have one last chance to be together--a three-day hike deep into the woods of the Pisgah National Forest.

Simmering tensions lead to a detour off the trail and straight into a waking nightmare ... and then into something far worse. Something that will test them in horrifying ways.

Stephanie Perkins, the bestselling author of There's Someone Inside Your House, returns with a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching novel about friendship, survival, and navigating unmarked paths even as evil watches from the shadows.

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The Taking of Jake Livingston

Ryan Douglass

An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

Get Out meets Holly Jackson in this YA social thriller where survival is not a guarantee.

Sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston sees dead people everywhere. But he can't decide what's worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments on a loop or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep. Both are a living nightmare he wishes he could wake up from. But things at St. Clair start looking up with the arrival of another Black student--the handsome Allister--and for the first time, romance is on the horizon for Jake.

Unfortunately, life as a medium is getting worse. Though most ghosts are harmless and Jake is always happy to help them move on to the next place, Sawyer Doon wants much more from Jake. In life, Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he's a powerful, vengeful ghost and he has plans for Jake. Suddenly, everything Jake knows about dead world goes out the window as Sawyer begins to haunt him. High school soon becomes a different kind of survival game--one Jake is not sure he can win.

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You'd Be Home Now

Kathleen Glasgow

From the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces comes a stunning novel that Vanity Fair calls "impossibly moving" and "suffused with light". In this raw, deeply personal story, a teenaged girl struggles to find herself amidst the fallout of her brother's addiction in a town ravaged by the opioid crisis.

For all of Emory's life she's been told who she is. In town she's the rich one--the great-great-granddaughter of the mill's founder. At school she's hot Maddie Ward's younger sister. And at home, she's the good one, her stoner older brother Joey's babysitter. Everything was turned on its head, though, when she and Joey were in the car accident that killed Candy MontClaire. The car accident that revealed just how bad Joey's drug habit was.

Four months later, Emmy's junior year is starting, Joey is home from rehab, and the entire town of Mill Haven is still reeling from the accident. Everyone's telling Emmy who she is, but so much has changed, how can she be the same person? Or was she ever that person at all?

Mill Haven wants everyone to live one story, but Emmy's beginning to see that people are more than they appear. Her brother, who might not be cured, the popular guy who lives next door, and most of all, many ghostie addicts who haunt the edges of the town. People spend so much time telling her who she is--it might be time to decide for herself.

A journey of one sister, one brother, one family, to finally recognize and love each other for who they are, not who they are supposed to be, You'd Be Home Now is Kathleen Glasgow's glorious and heartbreaking story about the opioid crisis, and how it touches all of us.

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Kingdom of the Cursed

Kerri Maniscalco

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stalking Jack the Ripper series comes the sizzling, sweepingly romantic sequel to Kingdom of the Wicked.

One sister.
Two sinful princes.
Infinite deception with a side of revenge . . . Welcome to Hell.

After selling her soul to become Queen of the Wicked, Emilia travels to the Seven Circles with the enigmatic Prince of Wrath, where she's introduced to a seductive world of vice.

She vows to do whatever it takes to avenge her beloved sister, Vittoria . . . even if that means accepting the hand of the Prince of Pride, the king of demons.

The first rule in the court of the Wicked? Trust no one. With back-stabbing princes, luxurious palaces, mysterious party invitations, and conflicting clues about who really killed her twin, Emilia finds herself more alone than ever before. Can she even trust Wrath, her one-time ally in the mortal world . . or is he keeping dangerous secrets about his true nature?

Emilia will be tested in every way as she seeks a series of magical objects that will unlock the clues of her past and the answers she craves . . .

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Blood Like Magic

Liselle Sambury

“High stakes, big heart, and lots of Black Girl Magic…unputdownable.” —Aiden Thomas, New York Timesbestselling author of Cemetery Boys

A rich, dark urban fantasy debut following a teen witch who is given a horrifying task: sacrificing her first love to save her family’s magic. The problem is, she’s never been in love—she’ll have to find the perfect guy before she can kill him.

After years of waiting for her Calling—a trial every witch must pass to come into their powers—the one thing Voya Thomas didn’t expect was to fail. When Voya’s ancestor gives her an unprecedented second chance to complete her Calling, she agrees—and then is horrified when her task is to kill her first love. And this time, failure means every Thomas witch will be stripped of their magic.

Voya is determined to save her family’s magic no matter the cost. The problem is, Voya has never been in love, so for her to succeed, she’ll first have to find the perfect guy—and fast. Fortunately, a genetic matchmaking program has just hit the market. Her plan is to join the program, fall in love, and complete her task before the deadline. What she doesn’t count on is being paired with the infuriating Luc—how can she fall in love with a guy who seemingly wants nothing to do with her?

With mounting pressure from her family, Voya is caught between her morality and her duty to her bloodline. If she wants to save their heritage and Luc, she’ll have to find something her ancestor wants more than blood. And in witchcraft, blood is everything.

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A Dark and Starless Forest

Sarah Hollowell

When her siblings start to go missing, a girl must confront the dark thing that lives in the forest--and the growing darkness in herself--in this debut YA contemporary fantasy for fans of Wilder Girls.

Derry and her eight siblings live in an isolated house by the lake, separated from the rest of the world by an eerie and menacing forest. Frank, the man who raised them after their families abandoned them, says it's for their own good. After all, the world isn't safe for people with magic. And Derry feels safe--most of the time.

Until the night her eldest sister disappears. Jane and Derry swore to each other that they'd never go into the forest, not after their last trip ended in blood, but Derry is sure she saw Jane walk into the trees. When another sibling goes missing and Frank's true colors start to show, feeling safe is no longer an option. Derry will risk anything to protect the family she has left. Even if that means returning to the forest that has started calling to Derry in her missing siblings' voices.

As Derry spends more time amidst the trees, her magic grows more powerful . . . and so does the darkness inside her, the viciousness she wants to pretend doesn't exist. But saving her siblings from the forest and from Frank might mean embracing the darkness. And that just might be the most dangerous thing of all.

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Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either.

Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa--the "Waldorf of Harlem"--and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

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Apples Never Fall

Liane Moriarty

From Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, comes Apples Never Fall, a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest.

The Delaney family love one another dearlyit’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?

This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

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Voices from the Pandemic

Eli Saslow

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, a powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic--from fear and overwhelm to extraordinary resilience--told through voices of people from all across America

The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans, capturing their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after forty-six years; an Arizona teacher wrestling with her fears and her obligations to her students; rural citizens adamant that the whole thing is a hoax, and retail workers attacked for asking people to wear masks; patients struggling to breathe and doctors desperately trying to save them.

Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts make for cathartic reading, as we see Americans at their worst, and at their resilient best.

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The Reckoning

Mary L. Trump

The instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller

America is suffering from PTSD—The Reckoning diagnoses its core causes and helps us begin the healing process.

For four years, Donald J. Trump inflicted an onslaught of overlapping and interconnected traumas upon the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as being an “other” or an enemy. Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were demonized and discriminated against, and money was elevated above all else. In short, he transformed our country into a macro version of his malignantly dysfunctional family.

How can we make sense of the degree to which our institutions and leaders have let us down? How can we negotiate a world in which all sense of safety and justice seems to have been destroyed? How can we—as individuals and as a nation—confront, process, and overcome this loss of trust and the ways we have been forever altered by chaos, division, and cruelty? And when the dust finally settles, how can we begin to heal, in the midst of ongoing health and economic crises and the greatest political divide since the Civil War?

Mary L. Trump is uniquely positioned to answer these difficult questions. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology specializing in trauma, has herself been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and happens to be Donald J. Trump’s only niece. In The Reckoning, she applies her unique expertise to the task of helping us confront an all-encompassing trauma, one that has taken an immense toll on our nation’s health and well-being.

A new leader alone cannot fix us. Donald J. Trump is only the latest symptom of a disease that has existed within the body politic since America’s inception—from the original sin of slavery through our unceasing, organized commitment to inequality. Our failure to acknowledge this, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Now, we are confronted with the limits of our own agency on a daily basis. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the unspeakable stress of living in a country we no longer recognize has affected all of us for a long time, in ways we may not fully understand. An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild our lives, our faith in leadership, and our hope for this nation. It starts with The Reckoning.

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Food Saved Me

Danielle Walker

When doctors told Danielle Walker that food didn't cause her autoimmune disease and couldn't help control it, she set out to prove them wrong.

Diagnosed with an extreme form of ulcerative colitis at 22, Danielle was terrified she'd never be able to eat all the wonderful, great-tasting foods she loved growing up or host warm, welcoming gatherings with family and friends. So when the medicine she was prescribed became almost as debilitating as the disease itself, Danielle took matters into her own hands, turned her kitchen into a laboratory, and set to work creating gut-healthy versions of the foods she thought she'd never be able to enjoy again. Three New York Times bestselling cookbooks later, Danielle has become a beacon of hope for millions around the world suffering from autoimmune diseases, food allergies, and chronic ailments.

Now for the first time, with stunning transparency about the personal toll her illness took on her physically, emotionally, and spiritually, Danielle reflects on everything she's learned during her decade-long journey toward healing--including the connection between gut health and overall well-being, the development of her favorite recipes, and the keys for not simply surviving her autoimmune disease but thriving despite it. Through her resilience, Danielle tells a story that provides hope--hope that despite your ailments or hardships, you can live a full, happy, and healthy life without ever feeling excluded or deprived.

Food saved Danielle Walker. And it can save you, too.

Includes six fan-favorite recipes and the stories behind them!

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All in

Billie Jean King

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - An inspiring and intimate self-portrait of the champion of equality that encompasses her brilliant tennis career, unwavering activism, and an ongoing commitment to fairness and social justice.

"A story about the personal strength, immense growth, and undeniable greatness of one woman who fearlessly stood up to a culture trying to break her down."--Serena Williams

In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life's journey to find her true self. She recounts her groundbreaking tennis career--six years as the top-ranked woman in the world, twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine grand-slam titles, and her watershed defeat of Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes. She poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of those years and the profound impact on her worldview from the women's movement, the assassinations and anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and, eventually, the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

She describes the myriad challenges she's hurdled--entrenched sexism, an eating disorder, near financial peril after being outed--on her path to publicly and unequivocally acknowledging her sexual identity at the age of fifty-one. She talks about how her life today remains one of indefatigable service. She offers insights and advice on leadership, business, activism, sports, politics, marriage equality, parenting, sexuality, and love. And she shows how living honestly and openly has had a transformative effect on her relationships and happiness.

Hers is the story of a pathbreaking feminist, a world-class athlete, and an indomitable spirit whose impact has transcended even her spectacular achievements in sports.

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Bourdain

Laurie Woolever

An unprecedented behind-the-scenes view into the life of Anthony Bourdain from the people who knew him best



When Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the life of an inimitable man who had dedicated his life to traveling nearly everywhere (and eating nearly everything), shedding light on the lives and stories of others. His impact was outsized and his legacy has only grown since his death.

Now, for the first time, we have been granted a look into Bourdain's life through the stories and recollections of his closest friends and colleagues. Laurie Woolever, Bourdain's longtime assistant and confidante, interviewed nearly a hundred of the people who shared Tony's orbit--from members of his kitchen crews to his writing, publishing, and television partners, to his daughter and his closest friends--in order to piece together a remarkably full, vivid, and nuanced vision of Tony's life and work.

From his childhood and teenage days, to his early years in New York, through the genesis of his game-changing memoir Kitchen Confidential to his emergence as a writing and television personality, and in the words of friends and colleagues including Eric Ripert, José Andrés, Nigella Lawson, and W. Kamau Bell, as well as family members including his brother and his late mother, we see the many sides of Tony--his motivations, his ambivalence, his vulnerability, his blind spots, and his brilliance.

Unparalleled in scope and deeply intimate in its execution, with a treasure trove of photos from Tony's life, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography is a testament to the life of a remarkable man in the words of the people who shared his world.

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Peril

Bob Woodward

The transition from President Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history.

But as # 1 internationally bestselling author Bob Woodward and acclaimed reporter Robert Costa reveal for the first time, it was far more than just a domestic political crisis.

Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the turmoil, resulting in more than 6,000 pages of transcripts—and a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink.

This classic study of Washington takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 campaign, and the Pentagon and Congress, with vivid, eyewitness accounts of what really happened.

Peril is supplemented throughout with never-before-seen material from secret orders, transcripts of confidential calls, diaries, emails, meeting notes and other personal and government records, making for an unparalleled history.

It is also the first inside look at Biden’s presidency as he faces the challenges of a lifetime: the continuing deadly pandemic and millions of Americans facing soul-crushing economic pain, all the while navigating a bitter and disabling partisan divide, a world rife with threats, and the hovering, dark shadow of the former president.

“We have much to do in this winter of peril,” Biden declared at his inauguration, an event marked by a nerve-wracking security alert and the threat of domestic terrorism.

Peril is the extraordinary story of the end of one presidency and the beginning of another, and represents the culmination of Bob Woodward’s news-making trilogy on the Trump presidency, along with Fear and Rage. And it is the beginning of a collaboration with fellow Washington Post reporter Robert Costa that will remind readers of Woodward’s coverage, with Carl Bernstein, of President Richard M. Nixon’s final days.

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Forever Young

Hayley Mills

Iconic actress Hayley Mills shares personal memories from her storied childhood, growing up in a famous acting family and becoming a Disney child star, trying to grow up in a world that wanted her to stay forever young.

The daughter of acclaimed British actor Sir John Mills was still a preteen when she began her acting career and was quickly thrust into the spotlight. Under the wing of Walt Disney himself, Hayley Mills was transformed into one of the biggest child starlets of the 1960s through her iconic roles in Pollyanna, The Parent Trap, and many more. She became one of only twelve actors in history to be bestowed with the Academy Juvenile Award, presented at the Oscars by its first recipient, Shirley Temple, and went on to win a number of awards including a Golden Globe, multiple BAFTAs, and a Disney Legacy Award.

Now, in her charming and forthright memoir, she provides a unique window into when Hollywood was still 'Tinseltown' and the great Walt Disney was at his zenith, ruling over what was (at least in his own head) still a family business. This behind-the-scenes look at the drama of having a sky-rocketing career as a young teen in an esteemed acting family will offer both her childhood impressions of the wild and glamorous world she was swept into, and the wisdom and broader knowledge that time has given her. Hayley will delve intimately into her relationship with Walt Disney, as well as the emotional challenges of being bound to a wholesome, youthful public image as she grew into her later teen years, and how that impacted her and her choices--including marrying a producer over 30 years her senior when she was 20! With her regrets, her joys, her difficulties, and her triumphs, this is a compelling read for any fan of classic Disney films and an inside look at a piece of real Hollywood history.

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Vanderbilt

Anderson Cooper

New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty--his mother's family, the Vanderbilts.

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires--one in shipping and another in railroads--that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by "the Commodore," subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers--the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius's grandson and namesake had built--the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all.

Now, the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family's empire, basked in the Commodore's wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other.

Written with a unique insider's viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

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Like Other Girls

Britta Lundin

"What if I played football?" I ask. As soon as it's out of my mouth, I feel stupid. Even suggesting it feels like I've overstepped some kind of invisible line we've all agreed not to discuss. We don't talk about how Mara is different from other girls. We don't talk about how Mara is gay but no one says so. But when I do stuff like this, I worry it gets harder for us all to ignore what's right in front of us. I direct my gaze to Quinn. "What do you think?""I think it's frickin' genius," he says.

After getting kicked off the basketball team for a fight that was absolutely totally not her fault (okay maybe a little her fault), Mara is dying to find a new sport to play to prove to her coach that she can be a team player. A lifelong football fan, Mara decides to hit the gridiron with her brother, Noah, and best friend, Quinn--and she turns out to be a natural. But joining the team sets off a chain of events in her small Oregon town--and within her family--that she never could have predicted.


Inspired by what they see as Mara's political statement, four other girls join the team. Now Mara's lumped in as one of the girls--one of the girls who can't throw, can't kick, and doesn't know a fullback from a linebacker. Complicating matters is the fact that Valentina, Mara's crush, is one of the new players, as is Carly, Mara's nemesis--the girl Mara fought with when she was kicked off the basketball team. What results is a coming-of-age story that is at once tear-jerking and funny, thought-provoking and real, as Mara's preconceived notions about gender, sports, sexuality, and friendship are turned upside down.

Britta Lundin's sophomore novel will give readers all the feels, and make them stand up and cheer.

 

 

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy

Emmanuel Acho

Adapted from Emmanuel Acho's New York Times bestseller Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, comes an essential young readers edition aimed at opening a dialogue about systemic racism with our youngest generation.

Young people have the power to affect sweeping change, and the key to mending the racial divide in America lies in giving them the tools to ask honest questions and take in the difficult answers.

Approaching every awkward, taboo, and uncomfortable question with openness and patience, Emmanuel Acho connects his own experience with race and racism—from attending majority-white prep schools to his time in the NFL playing on majority-black football teams—to insightful lessons in black history and black culture.
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy is just one way young readers can begin to short circuit racism within their own lives and communities.

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When We Were Strangers

Alex Richards

"An exquisitely told story of grief, growing up, and the glorious complexities of love and life." - Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces and You'd Be Home Now

"A sparkling, stirring ode to love, art, and unexpected human connection." - Jeff Zentner, Morris Award-winning author of The Serpent King

From the author of Accidental comes a gripping story about a teen grieving her father's sudden death--and grappling with the shocking secrets he left behind.

Seventeen-year-old Evie Parker is devastated in the wake of her father's sudden death. But she knows something her mother doesn't: the day of his heart attack, her dad was planning to move out. After finding his packed bags, an impulsive Evie puts everything away to spare her mom more heartache.

To make matters worse, Evie soon learns the reason her father was going to leave: he had been dating his twenty-two-year-old receptionist, Bree, who is now six months pregnant. Desperate to distract herself, Evie signs up for a summer photography class, where she meets a motley crew of students, including quirky and adorable Declan. Still, Evie can't stop thinking about her father's mistress. Armed with a telephoto lens, she caves in to her curiosity, and what starts as a little bit of spying on Bree quickly becomes full-blown stalking. And when an emergency forces Evie to help Bree, she learns there's more to the story than she ever knew . . .

Alex Richards crafts a riveting new story about betrayal, complicated family secrets, and getting to the heart of what matters--ultimately asking readers how far they'd be willing to go to unravel the truth.

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The Girl in the Headlines

Hannah Jayne

The headlines say she killed her family. The truth? She doesn't remember.

Andrea McNulty goes to sleep on her eighteenth birthday with a near-perfect life: she's a high school field hockey star, a doted-upon big sister, the beloved daughter of two happy parents. But when she wakes up in a motel room the next morning, unable to remember what happened the previous night and covered in blood, Andi is a fugitive.

According to the news, Andi's parents were brutally attacked in the middle of the night. Her father is dead, her mother is in a coma, her little brother Josh is missing--and Andi is the prime suspect. Terrified and on the run from the police, Andi teams up with Nate, the sympathetic boy working the motel's front desk, to find the real murderer. But while the police are getting further from the killer, the killer is getting closer to Andi--closer than she could ever have imagined.

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The Challenger

Taran Matharu

The stakes are higher than ever in The Challenger, the second book in the Contender YA trilogy by the New York Times bestselling author of the Summoner series, Taran Matharu.

The first battle is over, but the Game is just beginning...

Cade Carter and his friends have survived the qualifying round of the mysterious overlords' twisted games, decimated by the loss of so many of their comrades during the fight. But they have no time to mourn, for the next round of trials is about to begin.

When the group discovers that their next foe will be even more ferocious than the last, Cade leads them on a quest out into their strange new world to find anything that might give them an edge. But what they find in the wilds could prove to be even more dangerous than the impending battle...

The stakes are higher than ever in this thrilling sequel to The Chosen.

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The Champion

Taran Matharu

In Taran Matharu's The Champion, the explosive final book in the Contender trilogy, Cade and his friends wage the ultimate battle for their lives—and the fate of Earth itself—in the Game set by the cruel and mysterious Pantheon...

Cade has managed to survive the duel with the Hydra Alpha—barely. But the Games are far from over.

By order of their cruel and mysterious overlord, Abaddon, Cade and his friends are sent off to war against the Greys, a humanoid race who have far surpassed humans in technology on their home planet. This attempt to move up the leaderboard, however, leads Cade to a game-changing revelation: The Pantheon—the millennia-old alien masterminds behind the Games—have a weakness.

With the right artifacts scavenged from the land of Acies and a heavy dose of courage and luck, Cade has exactly one chance to end their tyranny forever. But if he fails, the lives of his friends—and the survival of Earth itself—will be forfeit.

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Averee

Stephanie Phillips

A world where social rank rules and your status setsyour inevitable course in life - sound familiar? Just imagine if it was allcontrolled by an app! In Averee's world, the usual trials of making your wayinto adulthood come with the added stress of Ranked, a ubiquitous andall-knowing tech innovation that awards you points for socially acceptablebehavior and takes them away when you don't conform. It seems fun enough atfirst, but it becomes much more than a game when Averee's rank suddenly dropsovernight. Now she's getting hassled at school, blocked from her favoriterestaurants, and her mom is out of a job.

Luckily for our hero, she has Zoe - abottom-ranked BFF - whose open disdain for all things Ranked makes her theperfect accomplice on what's about to be the heist of the century: they'restaging a raid on the app's corporate HQ to set things right and itsspokesperson, the virtual popstar Pretty Kitty, is in their sights. WithAveree's crush Luke in tow, these friends are in way over their heads andthey're about to learn that the "right" they're fighting for may beon a global scale.

AVEREE is one averagegirl's mission through a world of near-future tech to take back control of herlife, in a fun philosophical adventure!

 

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Happily Ever Afters

Elise Bryant

Jane the Virgin meets To All the Boys I've Loved Before in this charming debut romantic comedy filled with Black Girl Magic. Perfect for fans of Mary H. K. Choi and Nicola Yoon, with crossover appeal for readers of Jasmine Guillory and Talia Hibbert romances.

Sixteen-year-old Tessa Johnson has never felt like the protagonist in her own life. She's rarely seen herself reflected in the pages of the romance novels she loves. The only place she's a true leading lady is in her own writing--in the swoony love stories she shares only with Caroline, her best friend and #1 devoted reader.

When Tessa is accepted into the creative writing program of a prestigious art school, she's excited to finally let her stories shine. But when she goes to her first workshop, the words are just...gone. Fortunately, Caroline has a solution: Tessa just needs to find some inspiration in a real-life love story of her own. And she's ready with a list of romance novel-inspired steps to a happily ever after. Nico, the brooding artist who looks like he walked out of one of Tessa's stories, is cast as the perfect Prince Charming.

But as Tessa checks each item off Caroline's list, she gets further and further away from herself. She risks losing everything she cares about--including the surprising bond she develops with sweet Sam, who lives across the street. She's well on her way to having her own real-life love story, but is it the one she wants, after all?

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A Vow So Bold and Deadly

Brigid Kemmerer

Kingdoms will clash. Choose your side.

The incredible conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Brigid Kemmerer's Cursebreaker series.

Face your fears, fight the battle.
Emberfall is crumbling fast, torn between those who believe Rhen is the rightful prince and those who are eager to begin a new era under Grey, the true heir. Grey has agreed to wait two months before attacking Emberfall, and in that time, Rhen has turned away from everyone--even Harper, as she desperately tries to help him find a path to peace.

Fight the battle, save the kingdom.
Meanwhile, Lia Mara struggles to rule Syhl Shallow with a gentler hand than her mother. But after enjoying decades of peace once magic was driven out of their lands, some of her subjects are angry Lia Mara has an enchanted prince and a magical scraver by her side. As Grey's deadline draws nearer, Lia Mara questions if she can be the queen her country needs.

As the two kingdoms come closer to conflict, loyalties are tested, love is threatened, and an old enemy resurfaces who could destroy them all, in this stunning conclusion to bestselling author Brigid Kemmerer's Cursebreaker series.

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What She Found in the Woods

Josephine Angelini

Overmedicated and shipped off to live with her grandparents, Magda just wants to forget what happened at her old school. Wandering the woods, she discovers a wild boy who sees the real her. But there's also a nightmare lurking--and it's coming for her... Perfect for fans of books featuring unreliable narrators and mental health books for teens!

This is Magda's last chance. Recovering from a scandal at her elite New York City private school that threw life into a tailspin, she's shipped off to live with her grandparents in the Pacific Northwest for the summer.

Medicated and uninspired, Magda spends her days in a fog wandering the forest behind the house. But then she stumbles upon Bo. He's wild and free, and he can see the real her. Magda starts believing she might be able to move on from her past and feel something again.

But there's more to this sleepy town than she thought. And what Magda finds in the woods near Bo's forest home is the beginning of a whole new nightmare...

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Dark Waters

Katherine Arden

New York Times bestselling author Katherine Arden returns with another creepy, spine-tingling adventure in this follow-up to the critically acclaimed Small Spaces and Dead Voices.

Until next time. That was chilling promise made to Ollie, Coco and Brian after they outsmarted the smiling man at Mount Hemlock Resort. And as the trio knows, the smiling man always keeps his promises. So when the lights flicker on and off at Brian's family's inn and a boom sounds at the door, there's just one visitor it could be. Only, there's no one there, just a cryptic note left outside signed simply as --S.

The smiling man loves his games and it seems a new one is under way. But first, the three friends will have to survive a group trip to Lake Champlain where it's said Vermont's very own Loch Ness monster lives. Brian is thrilled. He hasn't sailed since visiting his family in Jamaica and even the looming threat of the smiling man can't put a damper on what is guaranteed to finally be a day of fun--even if it is awkward being stuck on a boat with both his old best friend, Phil and his new best friends, Coco and Ollie. But when a misstep from Phil causes a tragedy onboard and leaves them shipwrecked on an island haunted by a monster on both land and sea, Brian's survival instincts kick in and it's up to him to help everyone work together and find a way to escape.

One thing is for sure, the smiling man is back and he wants a rematch. And this time Brian is ready to play.

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Redemptor (Raybearer Book 2)

Jordan Ifueko

"Immersive and gorgeously written." --Buzzfeed

The highly anticipated sequel to Raybearer, the instant New York Times bestselling fantasy sensation that set the world on fire

For the first time, an Empress Redemptor sits on Aritsar's throne. To appease the sinister spirits of the dead, Tarisai must now anoint a council of her own, coming into her full power as a Raybearer. She must then descend into the Underworld, a sacrifice to end all future atrocities.

Tarisai is determined to survive. Or at least, that's what she tells her increasingly distant circle of friends. Months into her shaky reign as empress, child spirits haunt her, demanding that she pay for past sins of the empire.

With the lives of her loved ones on the line, assassination attempts from unknown quarters, and a handsome new stranger she can't quite trust . . . Tarisai fears the pressure may consume her. But in this finale to the Raybearer duology, Tarisai must learn whether to die for justice . . . or to live for it.

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Freddy Vs. School, Book #1 (Library Edition)

Neill Cameron

There's something different about Freddy. And it might just be because he's a super-powered robot-which is pretty cool! But when his school clamps down on his powers, Freddy will have to figure out a way to act human without caving from the peer pressure. He has three strikes until expulsion. But what's so wrong with being himself?

Freddy is a superhero robot . . . stuck in school. Most robots get to build cars and save the world. But Freddy's mom says he has to go to school and learn stuff the human way. The only problem is that it's really hard to be human. And when he breaks the rules too many times, Principal Javid is forced to create a ROBOTIC CODE OF CONDUCT:

NO Super-Strength

NO Lasers

NO Rocket Boosters

Now Freddy has three strikes until game over: expulsion.

What will life be like with all of the pointing and whispering, but none of the fun? Will his friends even still like him? And who will be able to stop Henrik from terrorizing the other kids?

The only good thing about school was that it's where his friends are and now even that's changed. But Freddy being a superhero robot might be the only thing that could save everybody . . .

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Poet, Pilgrim, Rebel

Katie Munday Williams

The inspiring story of a Puritan woman whose passion for writing poetry broke barriers.

Late at night, with her children tucked into bed and her husband away on business, Anne Dudley Bradstreet composed poems by candlelight. She let her thoughts from the day tumble out, memorizing each poem line by line before daring to shape the words onto scraps of scarce parchment. Puritan women in the 1600s weren't allowed to be writers. But when the world learned about Anne's poetry, even she was astonished by what happened next.

This charmingly illustrated picture book tells the inspiring story of how a Puritan woman overcame the obstacles facing women of her era to become one of the most famous poets in history. A gifted writer of deep faith, Anne Bradstreet blazed a trail for the rights of women to study, write, and achieve.

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Mightier Than the Sword

Rochelle Melander

Throughout history, people have picked up their pens and wielded their words--transforming their lives, their communities, and beyond. Now it's your turn! Representing a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, Mightier Than the Sword connects over forty inspiring biographies with life-changing writing activities and tips, showing readers just how much their own words can make a difference. Readers will explore nature with Rachel Carson, experience the beginning of the Reformation with Martin Luther, champion women's rights with Sojourner Truth, and many more. These richly illustrated stories of inspiring speechmakers, scientists, explorers, authors, poets, activists, and even other kids and young adults will engage and encourage young people to pay attention to their world, to honor their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace the transformative power of words to bring good to the world.

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Pete the Cat's Groovy Imagination

James Dean

When a cloudy gray sky cancels Pete the Cat's beach day plans, a big box is all he needs to beat the rainy-day blues.

Pete the Cat wants to go surfing, but he looks outside and--oh no!--it's gray and rainy. Does Pete get sad? No, he doesn't! Instead, he finds a really big and GROOVY box. Find out in this epic adventure just where Pete's imagination takes him.

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestselling Pete the Cat series, James and Kimberly Dean, this out-of-the-box picture book is reminiscent of Pete favorites like Magic Sunglasses and perfect for fans of Not a Box by Antoinette Portis.

Don't miss Pete's other adventures, including Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses, Pete the Cat and the Bedtime Blues, Pete the Cat and the New Guy, Pete the Cat and the Cool Cat Boogie, Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes, and Pete the Cat and the Perfect Pizza Party, and Pete the Cat: Crayons Rock!.

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My Heart Flies Open

Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis

Written and illustrated by Omileye Achikeobi-Lewis, My Heart Flies Open is an inclusive, empowering, and uplifting picture book for girls of color about yoga, meditation, and coming home to self-love. All children will be charmed by this book.

In every situation I can blossom. Breathing in and breathing out, I know...I AM PEACEFUL.

Beautifully and brightly illustrated, My Heart Flies Open takes readers on a yoga journey of mindful reflection, self-discovery, and self-love. Starting with Easy Pose (I AM LOVE) and moving through Mountain Pose (I AM STILLNESS), Triangle Pose (I AM ME), and more, My Heart Flies Open guides young readers through a grounding sequence of 15 yoga poses and affirmations.

More than just another yoga or mindfulness book, My Heart Flies Open transports young readers to a magical world where they learn to overcome negative emotions and move dynamically through their feelings--shining bright and connecting to the peace, laughter, love, grounding, and spirit that live inside all along.

With every yoga pose, each breath in, and each breath out, My Heart Flies Open brings young readers home to themselves: they are life, love, joy, and kindness; bold, fierce, peaceful, and whole. Written for children, and especially girls of color, ages 4 - 8.

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ADA and the Galaxies

Alan Lightman

Stargazers rejoice! In his first book for children, renowned physicist Alan Lightman and collaborators, with help from the Hubble telescope, light up the night sky.

New York Times best-selling author Alan Lightman, in collaboration with Olga Pastuchiv, brings galaxies close in a stunning picture-book tribute to the interconnectedness of the natural world. Layering photographs taken from the Hubble telescope into charming and expressive art, illustrator Susanna Chapman zooms in on one child's experiences: Ada knows that the best place for star-gazing is on the island in Maine where she vacations with her grandparents. By day, she tracks osprey in the trees, paddles a kayak, and hunts for shells. But she's most in her element when the sun goes down and the stars blink to life. Will the fog this year foil her plans, or will her grandfather find a way to shine a spotlight on the vast puzzle of the universe . . . until the weather turns?

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Fast Pitch

Nic Stone

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Nic Stone comes a challenging and heartwarming coming-of-age story about a softball player looking to prove herself on and off the field.

Shenice Lockwood, captain of the Fulton Firebirds, is hyper-focused when she steps up to the plate. Nothing can stop her from leading her team to the U12 fast-pitch softball regional championship. But life has thrown some curveballs her way.

Strike one: As the sole team of all-brown faces, Shenice and the Firebirds have to work twice as hard to prove that Black girls belong at bat.

Strike two: Shenice's focus gets shaken when her great-uncle Jack reveals that a career-ending--and family-name-ruining--crime may have been a setup.

Strike three: Broken focus means mistakes on the field. And Shenice's teammates are beginning to wonder if she's captain-qualified.

It's up to Shenice to discover the truth about her family's past--and fast--before secrets take the Firebirds out of the game forever.

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Pax, Journey Home

Sara Pennypacker

From bestselling and award-winning author Sara Pennypacker comes the long-awaited sequel to Pax; this is a gorgeously crafted, utterly compelling novel about chosen families and the healing power of love.

It's been a year since Peter and his pet fox, Pax, have seen each other. Once inseparable, they now lead very different lives.

Pax and his mate, Bristle, have welcomed a litter of kits they must protect in a dangerous world. Meanwhile Peter--newly orphaned after the war, racked with guilt and loneliness--leaves his adopted home with Vola to join the Water Warriors, a group of people determined to heal the land from the scars of the war.

When one of Pax's kits falls desperately ill, he turns to the one human he knows he can trust. And no matter how hard Peter tries to harden his broken heart, love keeps finding a way in. Now both boy and fox find themselves on journeys toward home, healing--and each other, once again.

As he did for Pax, Jon Klassen, New York Times bestseller, Caldecott medalist, and two-time Caldecott Honoree, has created stunning jacket and interior illustrations.

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Black Boy Joy

Kwame Mbalia

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * FIVE STARRED REVIEWS

Celebrate the joys of Black boyhood with stories from seventeen bestselling, critically acclaimed Black authors
--including Jason Reynolds, Jerry Craft, and Kwame Mbalia!

★ "Pick up Black Boy Joy for a heavy dose of happiness." --Booklist, starred review

Black boy joy is...

Picking out a fresh first-day-of-school outfit.
Saving the universe in an epic intergalactic race.
Finding your voice--and your rhymes--during tough times.
Flying on your skateboard like nobody's watching.

And more! From seventeen acclaimed Black male and non-binary authors comes a vibrant collection of stories, comics, and poems about the power of joy and the wonders of Black boyhood.

Contributors include: B. B. Alston, Dean Atta, P. Djèlí Clark, Jay Coles, Jerry Craft, Lamar Giles, Don P. Hooper, George M. Johnson, Varian Johnson, Kwame Mbalia, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Tochi Onyebuchi, Julian Randall, Jason Reynolds, Justin Reynolds, DaVaun Sanders, and Julian Winters

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The Other Side of Luck

Ginger Johnson

Perfect for fans of Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale, this lyrical middle-grade fantasy follows two children from opposite circumstances as their fates cross and change both their lives forever.

Ever since her mother's death, Princess Una has suffered through years of loneliness in the royal palace, where girls are treated as an afterthought. She yearns for a different life but is unsure how to make anyone notice her. Then her father announces a special contest: Whoever finds the rare Silva Flower can present it to Una for her twelfth birthday and receive a reward. Frustrated by her father's grand but empty gesture, Una decides to take her fate into her own hands.

Julien, a young pauper, has tried his whole life to make something of nothing, alongside his hardworking Baba. When Baba is arrested by terrifying debt collectors, Julien's only hope to save his father is to win the palace contest--to find the elusive Silva Flower. Little does he know that Una has decided to embark on a journey to find the prize, as well. As Una and Julien search for the flower, their destinies intertwine and offer a reward greater than anything either could ever hope for: the feeling of belonging.

In this lively, heartfelt tale, Ginger Johnson treats readers to an emotionally satisfying adventure with a truly memorable cast of characters.

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Spy School at Sea

Stuart Gibbs

In the ninth and latest addition to the New York Times bestselling Spy School series, Ben Ripley faces his nemesis, Murray Hill, on the high seas.

Thanks to the evidence Ben uncovered in his investigation of the Croatoan, the CIA has tracked his nemesis, Murray Hill, to Central America, where they believe he is boarding the world’s biggest cruise ship, The Emperor of the Seas, on its maiden voyage around the world.

His mission: Pose as part of a family, with Alexander and Catherine Hale as his parents, Erica as his sister, and his best friend Mike as his brother, to find out what Murray is plotting.

At first, it sounds exciting to have a mission on the most glamorous ocean liner on earth, but as usual, nothing goes according to plan. There is action, danger, and plenty of surprises as Ben and his team quickly find themselves in hot water.

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Unsettled

Reem Faruqi

For fans of Other Words for Home and Front Desk, this powerful, charming own voices immigration story follows a girl who moves from Karachi, Pakistan to Peachtree City, Georgia, and must find her footing in a new world. Reem Faruqi is the ALA Notable author of award-winning Lailah's Lunchbox.

"A lyrical coming of age story exploring family, immigration, and most of all belonging." --Aisha Saeed, New York Times bestselling author of Amal Unbound

"This empowering story will resonate with people who have struggled to both fit in and stay true to themselves." --Veera Hiranandani, Newbery Honor author of The Night Diary

"A gorgeously written story, filled with warmth and depth." --Hena Khan, author of Amina's Voice

When her family moves from Pakistan to Peachtree City, all Nurah wants is to blend in, yet she stands out for all the wrong reasons. Nurah's accent, floral-print kurtas, and tea-colored skin make her feel excluded, until she meets Stahr at swimming tryouts.

And in the water Nurah doesn't want to blend in. She wants to win medals like her star athlete brother, Owais--who is going through struggles of his own in the U.S. Yet when sibling rivalry gets in the way, she makes a split-second decision of betrayal that changes their fates.

Ultimately Nurah slowly gains confidence in the form of strong swimming arms, and also gains the courage to stand up to bullies, fight for what she believes in, and find her place.

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The Peculiarities

David Liss

From popular historical fiction author David Liss (A Conspiracy of Paper) comes the tale of a clueless young man embroiled in a deadly supernatural mystery in Victorian London. Rooted in strange conspiracies and secret societies, this absurdist comedic romp combines strange bedfellows with murderous creatures, resulting in an unexpectedly delightful consequences.

"David Liss masterfully blends rich historical fiction with terrifying supernatural body horror . . . Highly recommended."
--Jonathan Maberry, author of
V-Wars and Ink


Thomas's problems are more serious than those of a typical young Victorian gentleman. His elder brother may be sabotaging the family's bank. His childhood friend has died under mysterious circumstances. Far worse, leaves are sprouting on Thomas's skin. Perhaps it is all the fault of the long-rumored "Peculiarities" lurking in London's grey fog?

Proper society scoffs at the notion of magic, even as it seeps into their buildings, transfiguring the rich and poor alike. If Thomas is going to save the family business --and stop turning into a tree--he'll need help from some rather improper companions. Desperate for counsel, he seeks the advice of a lycanthropic medium and London's unacceptable occult society...including a strange fellow named Aleister Crowley.

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The Last House on Needless Street

Catriona Ward

"The buzz...is real. I've read it and was blown away. It's a true nerve-shredder that keeps its mind-blowing secrets to the very end." —Stephen King

Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street is a shocking and immersive read perfect for fans of Gone Girl and The Haunting of Hill House.

“The new face of literary dark fiction.” —Sarah Pinborough, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes

In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three.

A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time.
A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory.
And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible.

An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.

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The Lighthouse Witches

C. J. Cooke

Two sisters go missing on a remote Scottish island. Twenty years later, one is found--but she's still the same age as when she disappeared. The secrets of witches have reached across the centuries in this chilling Gothic thriller from the author of the acclaimed The Nesting.

When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it's an opportunity to start over with her three daughters--Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she's frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she's initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers--except she's still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she'll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn't realize just how much the truth will change her.

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Where They Wait

Scott Carson

Where They Wait is so readable you’ll be a couple of hundred pages in before you realize you’re terrified…and then you can’t put it down. Mesmerizing.” —Stephen King

“Tense and twisty.” —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Vampire Mysteries

“A taut, creepy techno-chiller that will leave you hearing ghosts.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song

A new supernatural novel about a sinister mindfulness app with fatal consequences from the New York Times bestselling author of the “grips from the first page” (Stephen King) thriller The Chill.

Recently laid-off from his newspaper and desperate for work, war correspondent Nick Bishop takes a humbling job: writing a profile of a new mindfulness app called Clarity. It’s easy money, and a chance to return to his hometown for his first visit in years. The app itself seems like a retread of old ideas—relaxing white noise and guided meditations. But then there are the “Sleep Songs.” A woman’s hauntingly beautiful voice sings a ballad that is anything but soothing—it’s disturbing, really, more of a warning than a relaxation—but it works. Deep, refreshing sleep follows.

So do nightmares. Vivid and chilling, they feature a dead woman who calls Nick by name and whispers guidance—or are they threats? And soon her voice follows him long after the song is done. As the effects of the nightmares begin to permeate his waking life, Nick makes a terrifying discovery: no one involved with Clarity has any interest in his article. Their interest is in him.

An atmospheric and haunting thriller perfect for our times, Where They Wait proves that “horror has a new name and it’s Scott Carson” (Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author).

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Comfort Me With Apples

Catherynne M. Valente

Comfort Me With Apples is a terrifying new thriller from bestseller Catherynne M. Valente, for fans of Gone Girl and Spinning Silver

Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect.

It's just that he's away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect.

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze....

But everything is perfect. Isn't it?

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The Restoration

J.H. Moncrieff

Inspired by the author’s overnight stay in a historical haunted house, The Restoration is a thrilling tale of intrigue, murder, and family secrets that refuse to stay buried.

It was the perfect opportunity…or so she thought. When Terri Foxworth is hired to spend a year restoring a crumbling manor house, she believes she’s hit the jackpot. She moves in with her young daughter and high hopes for the project’s success. As the restoration begins to go terribly wrong, she realizes dark forces won’t let her leave the house until its horrible secrets are revealed.

This job could very well be the death of her.

FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing Independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress.

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The Drowning Kind

Jennifer McMahon

Be careful what you wish for. When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it's just another one of her sister's episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother's estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister's things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

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My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Stephen Graham Jones

In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

“Some girls just don’t know how to die…”

Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

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For Your Own Good

Samantha Downing

USA Today bestselling author Samantha Downing is back with her latest sneaky thriller set at a prestigious private school--complete with interfering parents, overeager students, and one teacher who just wants to teach them all a lesson...

Teddy Crutcher has won Teacher of the Year at the prestigious Belmont Academy, home to the best and brightest.

He says his wife couldn't be more proud--though no one has seen her in a while.

Teddy really can't be bothered with a few mysterious deaths on campus that're looking more and more like murder or the student digging a little too deep into Teddy's personal life. His main focus is pushing these kids to their full academic potential.

All he wants is for his colleagues--and the endlessly meddlesome parents--to stay out of his way. If not, well, they'll get what they deserve.

It's really too bad that sometimes excellence can come at such a high cost.

 

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A Dark and Secret Place

Jen Williams

For fans of Kathleen Barber and Julia Heaberlin comes a chilling psychological suspense from award-winning author Jen Williams about a woman who discovers her late mother had a decades-long secret correspondence with a serial killer, begging the question: how well do we know our own family and even ourselves?

When prodigal daughter Heather Evans returns to her family home after her mother's baffling suicide, she makes an alarming discovery--stacks and stacks of carefully preserved letters from notorious serial killer Michael Reave. The Red Wolf, as he was dubbed by the press, has been in prison for over twenty years, serving a life sentence for the gruesome and ritualistic murders of several women across the country, although he has always protested his innocence. The police have had no reason to listen, yet Heather isn't the only one to have cause to re-examine the murders. The body of a young woman has just been found, dismembered and placed inside a tree, the corpse planted with flowers. Just as the Red Wolf once did.

What did Heather's mother know? Why did she kill herself? And with the monstrous Red Wolf safely locked inside a maximum security prison, who is stalking young women now? Teaming up with DI Ben Parker, Heather hopes to get some answers for herself and for the newest victims of this depraved murderer. Yet to do that, she must speak to Michael Reave herself, and expose herself to truths she may not be ready to face. Something dark is walking in the woods, and it knows her all too well.

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Survive the Night

Riley Sager

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

One of New York Times Book Review's "summer reads guaranteed to make your heart thump and your skin crawl"; An Amazon Best of the Month Pick; Named a must-read summer book by The Washington Post, USA Today, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, New York Post, Good Housekeeping, E!, PopSugar, CrimeReads, Thrillist, and BookRiot.

It's November 1991. Nirvana's in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.


Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it's guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it's to help care for his sick father--or so he says.

The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there's something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn't want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she's sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie's jittery mistrust merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?

One thing is certain--Charlie has nowhere to run and no way to call for help. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to win is to survive the night.

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The Final Girl Support Group

Grady Hendrix

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"The horror master...puts his unique spin on slasher movie tropes."-USA Today

A can't-miss summer read, selected by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, LitHub, BookRiot, Bustle, Popsugar and the New York Public Library

In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives...but what happens after?

Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix's latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films--movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

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The Book of Accidents

Chuck Wendig

A family returns to their hometown--and to the dark past that haunts them still--in this masterpiece of literary horror by the New York Times bestselling author of Wanderers

"The dread, the scope, the pacing, the turns--I haven't felt all this so intensely since The Shining."--Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians

Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father--and has never told his family what happened there.

Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn't have--and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures.

Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania.

Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver.

And now what happened long ago is happening again . . . and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.

This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family--and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this battle: their love for one another.

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An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed

Helene Tursten

Don't let her age fool you. Maud may be nearly ninety, but if you cross her, this elderly lady is more sinister than sweet.

Just when things have finally cooled down for 88-year-old Maud after the disturbing discovery of a dead body in her apartment in Gothenburg, a couple of detectives return to her doorstep, ruining a perfectly good afternoon. Though Maud deftly dodges their questions with the skill of an Olympic gymnast a fifth of her age, she wonders if suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is. The truth is, ever since Maud was a girl, death has seemed to follow her.

In these six interlocking stories, memories of unfortunate incidents from Maud's past keep bubbling to the surface, each triggered by something around her: an image, a word--even a taste. Meanwhile, certain Problems in the present require immediate attention. Luckily, Maud is no stranger to taking matters into her own hands . . . even if it means she has to get a little blood on them in the process.

*Includes cookie recipes*

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The Last Graduate

Naomi Novik

The specter of graduation looms large as Naomi Novik's groundbreaking, New York Times bestselling trilogy continues in the stunning sequel to A Deadly Education.

In Wisdom, Shelter. That's the official motto of the Scholomance. I suppose you could even argue that it's true--only the wisdom is hard to come by, so the shelter's rather scant.

Our beloved school does its best to devour all its students--but now that I've reached my senior year and have actually won myself a handful of allies, it's suddenly developed a very particular craving for me. And even if I somehow make it through the endless waves of maleficaria that it keeps throwing at me in between grueling homework assignments, I haven't any idea how my allies and I are going to make it through the graduation hall alive.

Unless, of course, I finally accept my foretold destiny of dark sorcery and destruction. That would certainly let me sail straight out of here. The course of wisdom, surely.

But I'm not giving in--not to the mals, not to fate, and especially not to the Scholomance. I'm going to get myself and my friends out of this hideous place for good--even if it's the last thing I do.

With keen insight and mordant humor, Novik reminds us that sometimes it is not enough to rewrite the rules--sometimes, you need to toss out the entire rulebook.

The magic of the Scholomance trilogy will continue in 2022

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A Line to Kill

Anthony Horowitz

The New York Times bestselling author of the brilliantly inventive The Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death returns with his third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz.

When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don't expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation--or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past.

Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival's other guests--an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children's author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian--along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.

When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

Both a brilliant satire on the world of books and writers and an immensely enjoyable locked-room mystery, A Line to Kill is a triumph--a riddle of a story full of brilliant misdirection, beautifully set-out clues, and diabolically clever denouements.

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Cackle

Rachel Harrison

A darkly funny, frightening novel about a young woman learning how to take what she wants from a witch who may be too good to be true, from the author of The Return.

All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. She's stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.

Then Annie meets Sophie. Beautiful, charming, magnetic Sophie, who takes a special interest in Annie, who wants to be her friend. More importantly, she wants Annie to stop apologizing and start living for herself. That's how Sophie lives. Annie can't help but gravitate toward the self-possessed Sophie, wanting to spend more and more time with her, despite the fact that the rest of the townsfolk seem...a little afraid of her. And like, okay. There are some things. Sophie's appearance is uncanny and ageless, her mansion in the middle of the woods feels a little unearthly, and she does seem to wield a certain power...but she couldn't be...could she?

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Payback's a Witch

Lana Harper

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets The L Word in this fresh, sizzling rom-com by Lana Harper.

Emmy Harlow is a witch but not a very powerful one--in part because she hasn't been home to the magical town of Thistle Grove in years. Her self-imposed exile has a lot to do with a complicated family history and a desire to forge her own way in the world, and only the very tiniest bit to do with Gareth Blackmoore, heir to the most powerful magical family in town and casual breaker of hearts and destroyer of dreams.

But when a spellcasting tournament that her family serves as arbiters for approaches, it turns out the pull of tradition (or the truly impressive parental guilt trip that comes with it) is strong enough to bring Emmy back. She's determined to do her familial duty; spend some quality time with her best friend, Linden Thorn; and get back to her real life in Chicago.

On her first night home, Emmy runs into Talia Avramov--an all-around badass adept in the darker magical arts--who is fresh off a bad breakup . . . with Gareth Blackmoore. Talia had let herself be charmed, only to discover that Gareth was also seeing Linden--unbeknownst to either of them. And now she and Linden want revenge. Only one question stands: Is Emmy in?

But most concerning of all: Why can't she stop thinking about the terrifyingly competent, devastatingly gorgeous, wickedly charming Talia Avramov?

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Reprieve

James Han Mattson

"An eventual American classic that is unrelenting in its beauty and incisive cultural critique." - KIESE LAYMON

A chilling and blisteringly relevant literary novel of social horror centered around a brutal killing that takes place in a full-contact haunted escape room--a provocative exploration of capitalism, hate politics, racial fetishism, and our obsession with fear as entertainment.
 

On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, "reprieve," they'll win a substantial cash prize--a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house's long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.

Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view: Kendra Brown, a teenager who's been uprooted from her childhood home after the sudden loss of her father; Leonard Grandton, a desperate and impressionable hotel manager caught in a series of toxic entanglements; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay international student who came to the United States in a besotted search for his former English teacher. As each character's journey unfurls and overlaps, deceit and misunderstandings fueled by obsession and prejudice are revealed, forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe.

An astonishingly soulful exploration of complicity and masquerade, Reprieve combines the psychological tension of classic horror with searing social criticism to present an unsettling portrait of this tangled American life.

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A Spindle Splintered

Alix E. Harrow

USA Today bestselling author Alix E. Harrow's A Spindle Splintered brings her patented charm to a new version of a classic story. Featuring Arthur Rackham's original illustrations for The Sleeping Beauty, fractured and reimagined.

"A vivid, subversive and feminist reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, where implacable destiny is no match for courage, sisterhood, stubbornness and a good working knowledge of fairy tales." —Katherine Arden

It's Zinnia Gray's twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it's the last birthday she'll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no-one has lived past twenty-one.

Her best friend Charm is intent on making Zinnia's last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, something strange and unexpected happens, and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.

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Under the Whispering Door

TJ Klune

A Man Called Ove meets The Good Place in Under the Whispering Door, a delightful queer love story from TJ Klune, author of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Welcome to Charon's Crossing.
The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead.

And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.

But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days.

Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.

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The Summoning

J. P. Smith

When it comes to contacting the dead, it's easy to go a step too far

Every year, as the anniversary of 9/11 inches closer on the calendar, Kit Capriol scans the memorials published in the New York Times. It's a simple thing to look up a name and phone number, to reach out to surviving family members who might still be yearning for connection with their lost loved one... to offer assistance. After her husband went down in the north tower, Kit scraped by as an actress, barely supporting herself and her daughter. But now Zoey is in the hospital, bills are due, and the acting work has dried up. Becoming a medium is almost too easy for someone used to pretending for a living--and desperate clients aren't hard to come by.

Now, though, something has changed. The seances Kit holds in her apartment are starting to feel unsettlingly real, and the intriguing man she met at a local bar could be more complicated than he seems. As the voices of the dead grow louder in her head and the walls of her apartment close in, Kit realizes that despite her daughter's absence, she hasn't been quite as alone as she thought...

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The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova

Ruth Hogan

From the wildly popular bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things--an uplifting, slightly magical story about how it's never too late to find out who you really are.

Madame Burova--beloved Tarot reader, palmist, and clairvoyant--is retiring and leaving her booth on the Brighton seafront.

After inheriting her mother's fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the Brighton pier practicing her trade. She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people's secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do--to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them.

In London, it is time for another woman to make a fresh start. Billie has lost her university job, her marriage, and her place in the world when a sudden and unlikely discovery leaves her very identity in question. Determined to find answers, she must follow a trail...which leads to Brighton, the pier, and directly to Madame Burova's door.

In a story spanning over fifty years, Ruth Hogan has conjured a magical world of 1970s holiday camps and seaside entertainers, eccentrics, heroes and villains, the lost and the found. Young people will make careless choices which echo down the years....but it's never too late to put things right.

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Dark Things I Adore

Katie Lattari

This vengeful tale that pits artistic genius against mental health and happiness will captivate fans of dark suspense.--Library Journal, STARRED review

A debut thriller for fans of Lucy Foley and Liz Moore, Dark Things I Adore is a stunning Gone Girl-esque tale of atonement that proves that in the grasp of manipulative men, women may momentarily fall. But in the hands of fierce women, men will be brought to their knees.

Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.

1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.

2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.

Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.

A searing psychological thriller of trauma, dark academia, complicity, and revenge, Dark Things I Adore unravels the realities behind campfire legends--the horrors that happen in the dark, the girls who become cautionary tales, and the guilty who go unpunished. Until now.

A smart, nuanced exploration of victims and villains, inspiration and theft, and the intersection of these things, in every artist. Pay attention to Katie Lattari. She's the real deal.--Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors

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The Witness for the Dead

Katherine Addison

"At once intimate and literally operatic, it's everything I love about Katherine Addison's writing, in ways I didn't know to expect. I loved it." —John Scalzi

Katherine Addison returns to the glittering world she created for her beloved novel, The Goblin Emperor, in this stand-alone sequel


When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had set the bombs that killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his father’s Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it. He lost his place as a retainer of his cousin the former Empress, and made far too many enemies among the many factions vying for power in the new Court. The favor of the Emperor is a dangerous coin.

Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honesty will not permit him to live quietly. As a Witness for the Dead, he can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. It is his duty use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered.

Celehar’s skills now lead him out of the quiet and into a morass of treachery, murder, and injustice. No matter his own background with the imperial house, Celehar will stand with the commoners, and possibly find a light in the darkness.

Katherine Addison has created a fantastic world for these books – wide and deep and true.

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Sankofa

Chibundu Onuzo

Girl, Woman, Other meets An American Marriage in this gripping story of a mixed-race woman who goes in search of the African father she never knew, by a prize-winning writer who brilliantly captures the essence of a people and a place (Nicole Dennis-Benn).

Masterful in its examination of freedom, prejudice, and personal and public inheritance, Sankofa is a story for anyone who has ever gone looking for a clear identity or home, and found something more complex in its place.

Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother--the only parent who raised her--is dead.

Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president--some would say dictator--of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive...

When Anna decides to track her father down, a journey begins that is disarmingly moving, funny, and fascinating. Like the metaphorical bird that gives the novel its name, Sankofa expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past and bringing it into the present to address universal questions of race and belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for a family's hidden roots.

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The House of Rust

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

The first Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize winner, a story of a girl’s fantastical sea voyage to rescue her father

The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, The House of Rust is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.

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We Walk

Amy S. F. Lutz

In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience--the positive and the negative--as a mother of a now twenty-one-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each page and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity. We Walk is inspired by her own questions: What is the place of intellectually and developmentally disabled people in society? What responsibilities do we, as citizens and human beings, have to one another? Who should decide for those who cannot decide for themselves? What is the meaning of religion to someone with no abstract language? Exploring these questions, We Walk directly--and humanly--examines social issues such as inclusion, religion, therapeutics, and friendship through the lens of severe autism.

In a world where public perception of autism is largely shaped by the quirky geniuses featured on television shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor, We Walk demands that we center our debates about this disorder on those who are most affected by its impacts.

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We Are Not Like Them

Christine Pride

“Now these women, they can WRITE!” —Terry McMillan, New York Times bestselling author of It’s Not All Downhill from Here

We Are Not Like Them will stay with you long after you turn the last page.” —Laura Dave, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me

Told from alternating perspectives, an evocative and riveting novel about the lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, whose friendship is indelibly altered by a tragic event—a powerful and poignant exploration of race in America today and its devastating impact on ordinary lives.

Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. As adults, they remain as close as sisters, though their lives have taken different directions. Jen married young, and after years of trying, is finally pregnant. Riley pursued her childhood dream of becoming a television journalist and is poised to become one of the first Black female anchors of the top news channel in their hometown of Philadelphia.

But the deep bond they share is severely tested when Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager. Six months pregnant, Jen is in freefall as her future, her husband’s freedom, and her friendship with Riley are thrown into uncertainty. Covering this career-making story, Riley wrestles with the implications of this tragic incident for her Black community, her ambitions, and her relationship with her lifelong friend.

Like Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage and Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things, We Are Not Like Them explores complex questions of race and how they pervade and shape our most intimate spaces in a deeply divided world. But at its heart, it’s a story of enduring friendship—a love that defies the odds even as it faces its most difficult challenges.

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The Book of Hope

Jane Goodall

In a world that seems so troubled, how do we hold on to hope?

Looking at the headlines—the worsening climate crisis, a global pandemic, loss of biodiversity, political upheaval—it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.

In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world's most famous living naturalist, and Douglas Abrams, the internationally bestselling co-author of The Book of Joy, explore through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her "Four Reasons for Hope": The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.

Drawing on decades of work that has helped expand our understanding of what it means to be human and what we all need to do to help build a better world, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions, including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? What is the relationship between hope and action? Filled with moving and inspirational stories and photographs from Jane’s remarkable career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in the world today.

While discussing the experiences that shaped her discoveries and beliefs, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope, from living through World War II to her years in Gombe to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. And for the first time, she shares her profound revelations about her next, and perhaps final, adventure.

The second book in the Global Icons Series—which launched with the instant classic The Book of Joy with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu—The Book of Hope is a rare and intimate look not only at the nature of hope but also into the heart and mind of a woman who revolutionized how we view the world around us and has spent a lifetime fighting for our future.

There is still hope, and this book will help guide us to it.

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