Recommended Reads

In ancient times, Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him and remained lost. After many ages, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

When Colonel Protheroe, the exceedingly disagreeable local magistrate, is found shot to death in the vicar's study, the police are confounded. But the vicar's observant neighbor, Miss Marple, notices far more than most. An adept and shrewd student of human nature, she is the only one clever enough to untangle the clues and solve the mystery.

With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers.

Stella Lane is professionally successful but has made way less progress in the dating department. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice at romance and intimacy with a professional. She hires escort Michael Phan to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan. Before long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but also to crave all of the other things he's making her feel. 

Charles Wang, a brash, lovable businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, has just lost everything in the financial crisis. So he rounds up two of his children from schools that he can no longer afford and packs them into the only car that wasn't repossessed. Together with their wealth-addicted stepmother, Barbra, they head on a cross-country journey from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the Upstate New York retreat of the eldest Wang daughter, Saina. 



 

Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew, and while they reluctantly rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission. 

 

The Lowland is an engrossing family saga steeped in history: the story of two very different brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn apart by revolution, and a love that endures long past death. Moving from the 1960s to the present, and from India to America and across generations, this dazzling novel is Jhumpa Lahiri at the height of her considerable powers.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and  Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. Moved by Sharanda’s plight, Brittany set to work to gain her freedom. 

After being dragged into the Salpêtrière asylum screaming, covered in blood, and suffering from amnesia, Josephine is diagnosed with what the nineteenth-century Parisian press has dubbed “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria. Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpêtrière’s acclaimed director, devotes popular lectures to it, using hypnosis to elicit fits and fantastical symptoms in front of rapt audiences. Laure, a lonely ward attendant, finds in Josephine friendship and something more. But who, really, is the girl she's grown to love?

Sophie Kohl is living a nightmare. Minutes after she confesses to her husband, a mid-level American diplomat in Hungary, that she had an affair while they were in Cairo, he is shot and killed. Stan Bertolli, a Cairo-based CIA agent, hears the voice of the only woman he ever truly loved ask why her husband has been assassinated. Omar Halawi has worked in Egyptian intelligence for years, and he must follow the fallout wherever it leads.

Samantha Heather Mackey is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself plunging deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world.

When Klaus Shawano abducts Sweetheart Calico, the seductive Indian woman who has stolen his heart, and takes her far from her native Montana plains to his own Minneapolis home, he cannot begin to imagine the eventual ramifications his brazen act will entail. Shawano’s mysterious Antelope Woman has utterly mesmerized him—and soon proves to be a bewitching agent of chaos whose effect on others is disturbing and irresistible, as she alters the shape of things around her and the shape of things to come.

Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. And while highly unusual, his family is not the only one to wonder whether their heartbreak is the result of unbelievable bad luck, or if there might be another explanation.

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.

The delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe is drawn to private investigation to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart is a missing eleven-year-old boy who may have been snatched by witch doctors.

In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Jemma Barker accepts an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, thinking it is her chance to start over. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Then the shocking truth comes out. Jemma learns the Duchons are cursed, and they believe that only she can free them.
 

On the eve of turning fifty, Mark decided to spend a year visiting the national parks. He planned to take his mother to a park she'd not yet visited and to re-create his childhood trips with his wife and their iPad-generation daughter. But when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and given just months to live, Mark's journey became about family, the parks, and the legacies we leave behind.

When Dr. Gul Delani receives a call in the middle of the night from Karachi's Sindh police, she is summoned to a narcotics investigation in a remote desert region, many hours away. There, in a cave, they find a mummy—intact, seemingly authentic, its sarcophagus decorated with symbols from the ancient city of Persepolis. If it’s a genuine archaeological discovery, it will rewrite history.

From their faithful camper van to boats, kayaks, bicycles, and motorbikes, stars of Outlander Sam Heughan and Graham Robb embark on a road trip with a difference, as the two Scotsmen explore their land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history, and warfare.

One cold and snowy night, everything Irene Steele thought she knew falls to pieces with a shocking phone call: her beloved husband, away on business, has been killed in a helicopter crash on the distant Caribbean island of St. John. After Irene and her sons arrive at the island, they discover that her husband had been living a secret life. 

New York City, 1962: Vera Kelly is working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. They send her to Argentina, to wiretap a congressman and infiltrate a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera is forced to take extreme measures to save herself.
 

English travel writer Tahir Shah shares a highly entertaining account of making an exotic dream come true. By turns hilarious and harrowing, here is the story of his family’s move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge. From elaborate exorcism rituals involving sacrificial goats to dealing with gangster neighbors intent on stealing their property, the Shahs must cope with a new culture and all that comes with it. 

Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic law and tradition. But Katya, one of the few women in the medical examiner's office, is determined to make her work mean something. Only Katya is convinced that the victim can be identified and her killer found. She calls upon her friend Nayir for help. Their growing search takes them from the city's car-clogged streets to the deadly vastness of the desert beyond.

At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior–Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”―an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty–five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her.

A tenacious Māori detective, Hana Westerman juggles single motherhood, endemic prejudice, and the pressures of her career in Auckland CIB. A mysterious video leads her to discover a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room with a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Hana realizes that the murder is utu--the Māori tradition of rebalancing for the crime of killing a Maori chief eight generations ago. Descendants of two of the soldiers who killed the chief have been killed in turn, and four more potential murders remain. 

Haven Ambrose, a trailblazing nautical archaeologist, has come to the sun-soaked village of Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast and the sunken treasure her father spotted on his final drive. Upon Haven's arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister at work?

 

Nanao, nicknamed Ladybug, the self-proclaimed "unluckiest assassin in the world," is put on the bullet train by his boss, a mysterious young woman called Maria, to steal a suitcase full of money and get off at the first stop. When Ladybug misses his chance to get off the train, he soon discovers that he's not the only dangerous passenger on board. Worse yet, now everyone's after the suitcase.
 

On the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter-to-be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef, using cooking to express herself and sharing recipes with readers along the way.

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do Dublin couple, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from.
 

In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.

Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a bucket list of life experiences. When she enlists Redford ‘Red’ Morgan in her mission to live more fully, she learns that this handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and sex appeal has a bucket list of his own. And Chloe may find herself on it.

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. 

Harvard students and colleagues Zoe and Jack find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel antiaging drug. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. Then Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership.

* Instant NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestseller *
* GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD WINNER for BEST DEBUT and BEST ROMANCE of 2019 *
* BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR* for VOGUE, NPR, VANITY FAIR, and more! *

What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?

When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. But Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond, leading to a well-publicized altercation. What at first begins as a staged truce and friendship becomes something deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. 
 

On Halloween night, Jet Mason is violently attacked by an unseen intruder, suffering a catastrophic head injury. Doctors are certain the injury will trigger a fatal aneurysm in a week or less. Jet looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend. As her condition deteriorates, she reconnects with her childhood friend Billy, the only one willing to help her solve her own murder.

This luminous poetry collection by presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. 

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are com­peting for the ultimate prize: their freedom. The penalty for loss? Death.
 

Margot and Mama have lived by the forest ever since Margot can remember. They spend quiet days waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Mama feeds these 'strays,' keeps them warm, then satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies. When a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her bid for freedom.

In this sensational, page-turning debut novel, a high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post.

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts—geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and Indigenous leaders—to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. 

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets, the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source. 

 

Kuang makes her exciting debut with this epic historical military fantasy, inspired by the bloody history of China’s twentieth century and filled with treachery and magic.

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. 

Birdgirl follows Mya-Rose and her family as they travel the world in search of rare birds and astonishing landscapes. But a shadow moves with them, too—her mother's deepening mental health crisis. In the face of this struggle, the Craigs turn to nature again and again for comfort and meaning. 

Two years after being framed for fraud by the Society of the Charmed, an exclusive club of New York's wealthiest--and most magical--citizens, Emmy Vallillo wastes away in prison, utterly alone. Until her cell door bursts open, revealing Jack Fontaine, one of the Society's favorite sons, now imprisoned for a crime he swears he didn't commit. They make a deal: he'll help Emmy escape, if she helps destroy those who've wronged them. 

When the first letter appears in Kay Anderson's locker, it carries one instruction: dye your hand blue. Kay doesn't have time for secret societies. Still, Kay's intrigued, so she stains her palms with ink to join the mysterious Blue Hand Girls. Kay soon finds out that the group is set on exposing the shady business that Davison's founders would rather keep hidden.

Run away with me is a profoundly romantic YA novel about two teenage boys finding each other and falling in love over one summer in Rome.

Sixteen-year-old Winnie Bray is a liar. As the resident psychic at an oddities shop, Winnie truly can see the future. But her customers only want reassurance, and Winnie only wants their money. Favorable fortunes are a fast track to funding her way out of Buffalo, NewYork, for good, after all. But all of that changes when a vision sends her stalking in the remains of her family home that burned down in a fire 10 years ago.

Seventeen-year-old Willow Stokes gets by selling fraudulent charms and magical items at her father's shoppe, but when outlander Brianna unintentionally turns her fake wares real, the girls' paths intertwine as they search for a missing grimoire and try to break Brianna's curse.

Everyone else loves Orion Lake. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep his flashy combat magic to himself. I don’t need help surviving the Scholomance. Give me a chance and I’ll level mountains and kill untold millions, make myself the dark queen of the world. The school certainly wants me to turn into the evil witch I could become. But the Scholomance isn’t getting what it wants from me and neither is Orion Lake. 

Lennon Carter gets a mysterious phone call inviting her to take the entrance exam for Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah. She begins to learn how to master her devastating and unsettling power of persuasion on others and matter itself. As Lennon continues in her studies, her control grows, and she starts to uncover more about the secret world she has entered into, including the disquieting history of Drayton College.

For Robin Swift, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide whether he can change Babel - or must overthrow it.

The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa Li and her surviving classmates must work together or this school will eat them alive.

When Alexandra Witt joins the faculty at Stonebridge Academy, she’s hoping to put a painful past behind her. Then one of her creative writing assignments generates some disturbing responses from students. Before long, Alex is immersed in an investigation of the students atop the school’s social hierarchy—and their connection to something called the Darkroom. She soon inspires the girls who’ve started to question the school’s “boys will be boys” attitude and incites a resistance.

In the early 1900's, Brookhants School for Girls students Flo and Clara fell madly in love, brought together by their obsession for a scandalous memoir. A few months later they were found dead in the woods, after a horrific wasp attack, the book lying next to their intertwined bodies. Now, the school's doors are open once more to film the tragic 'Curse of Brookhants.' But as the crew of glamorous young actresses assemble to start filming, past and present begin to blur.
 

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case. She begins to wonder if back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, he feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate's effortless charm. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him. As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together. 

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. She is utterly repelled by a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," she finds herself inexplicably drawn to their sinister yet saccharine world. 

Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented and chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions. But when a new threat arises in the form of the ancient demon who has long waited patiently just beyond the school’s wards, even Walden and the aggressively competent Chief Marshal, Laura Kenning, may not be able to contain it.

On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, Detective Colborne wants to know the truth of the crime that put him there. A decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras. But in their final year, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make-believe. 

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. For the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and to understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov, who can compel her to perform seemingly-impossible tasks. At summer's end, he directs her to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. As Sasha quickly discovers, the institute's "special technologies" are unlike anything she has ever encountered. Despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that are like nothing she has ever dreamed yet all she could ever want.

Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of an abandoned cabin, kidnapped by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?

Eddie Huang was raised by a wild family of FOB (“fresh off the boat”) immigrants. Young Eddie tried his hand at everything mainstream America threw his way, from white Jesus to macaroni and cheese. He finally found his home as leader of a rainbow coalition of lost boys up to no good. This is the story of a Chinese-American kid blazing his way through America’s deviant subcultures, trying to find himself, ten thousand miles from his legacy and anchored only by his conflicted love for his family and his passion for food. 

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world -- conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.

In her memoir, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and millions of other North Korean people have endured. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to freedom Seoul, South Korea. 

Situated hundreds of miles within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab refugee camp is a city like no other. Ben Rawlence became a first-hand witness to this strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary. In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born, a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam. This letter serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.

In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. 

Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but also make the difficult journey back to each other, a path once so familiar yet rendered foreign by the heartache of displacement.

In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. They call themselves the Joy Luck Club. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of the matriarchal ties that they believe have stymied their ability to face the uncertainties of the future. 

When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. 

America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. Editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of authors whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. The writers in this urgent collection share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.

In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, Roger C. Sullivan High School's immigrant population numbered close to three hundred--or nearly half the school--and many were refugees from thirty-five different countries, speaking more than thirty-eight different languages. Award-winning author Elly Fishman offers a riveting chronicle of the 2017-18 school year at Sullivan High. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique needs of refugee and immigrant children. 

In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth.

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, Nadia and Saeed embark on a furtive love affair. When unrest explodes in their city, they begin to hear whispers about doors that can whisk people far away. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. They emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. 

Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. 

Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the question of what it means to love.

Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though they are unlike in nearly every way. They never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their value. Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. When two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their differences and discover whether their friendship can survive.

Set in seventeenth century France, this novel tells the story of d'Artagnan's journey to Paris to join the legendary Musketeers of the Guard. The Three Musketeers is a masterful adventure romp packed with humor, satire, love, and daring-do.

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at all-female Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels boardinghouse. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, policeman's daughter Nora, , frustrated baseball star Beatrice, and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene. Grace's weekly attic-room dinner parties become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. 

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is his embrace of the mainstream. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hua prefers subculture, like making ’zines and haunting Bay Area record shops. Despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking not even three years after the day they first meet. Hua turned to writing to hold on to his memories of Ken, all he had left of their friendship. 

Celebrity cooking show host Marni McGuire has seen it all. She's been married--twice--and widowed and divorced. Now in her mid-fifties, she's happily single. She just needs to convince her pregnant daughter, Bella, of this fact. Similarly single, Marni's best friend and colleague is confident she's content without a man. Both older women find themselves leading by example as the young intern on their show appears caught in a toxic relationship, then Bella reveals her own marriage maybe isn't built to withstand the stresses of a new baby. The four women find themselves navigating together the challenges of dating, marriage, loneliness and love.

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined and what happens when one is left behind.

Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare but she is paying a price for the illusion of perfection. New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for a nanny. She comes with a mysterious past and a sadness beyond her years. These three women are at different crossroads, but they will all wind up in the same shocking place.
 

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in Wembley, in West London after losing his beloved wife. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library who discovers a crumpled-up list of novels in the back of a returned book. She decides to read every book on the list. When Mukesh arrives at the library, Aleisha passes along the reading list, hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too. Slowly, the shared books create a connection between two lonely souls.

In the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. She turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Two former Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, have been running a ramshackle stock operation near the Mexican border with a lot of work and not much success. When they hear rumors of freewheeling opportunities in the newly opened territory, they decide to break camp, pull up stakes, and head north. Their dusty trek is filled with troubles, violence, and unfilled yearning. 

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?

In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner—these are friends who are home co-owners, co-parents or each other’s caregivers. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—reveal how freeing and challenging it can be to embrace a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. 

Five years ago, Geeta lost her no-good husband when he walked out on her and she has no idea where he is. In her remote village in India, rumor has it that Geeta killed him. It turns out that being known as a “self-made” widow comes with some perks. Now other women are asking for her “expertise,” making her an unwitting consultant for husband disposal. With Geeta’s dangerous reputation becoming a double-edged sword, she has to find a way to protect the life she’s built—but even the best-laid plans of would-be widows tend to go awry.