Caroline O'Donoghue

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

District of Columbia

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three • “O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." —People "If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.

The Rachel Incident

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Jessamine Chan

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance. Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough. Until Frida has a very bad day. The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good. A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

The School for Good Mothers

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Marie NDiaye

Jordan Stump

From the best-selling author of Three Strong Women comes a thrilling novel about a triple homicide that dredges up unsettling memories from a lawyer’s childhood. The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can’t quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial? While this mystery preoccupies Maître Susane, at home she is increasingly concerned about Sharon, her faithful but peculiar housekeeper. Sharon arrived from Mauritius with her husband and children, and she lacks legal residency in France. But while Maître Susane has generously offered Sharon her professional services, the housekeeper always finds ways to evade her, claiming the marriage certificate Maître Susane requires is being held hostage. Is Sharon being honest with Maître Susane, or is something more sinister going on? Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmith’s work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.

Vengeance Is Mine

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Maria Adelmann

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Lorrie Moore meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this darkly playful and subversive debut story collection exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness. What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness? Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition. Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.

Girls of a Certain Age

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Caroline Waight

Ingvild Rishøi

"Beautifully told with humor and tenderness, a Norwegian Christmas tale of sisterhood, financial hardship, and far-off dreams, acclaimed by reviewers and beloved by readers across Europe, where it has been a bestseller. Christmas is just around the corner, and Ronja and Melissa's dreamer of a father is out of work again. When ten-year-old Ronja hears about a job selling Christmas trees near where the family lives in central Oslo, she thinks it might be the stroke of luck they all need. Soon, the fridge fills with food, and their father returns home with money in his pocket and a smile on his face. But the local pub has an irresistible pull on Ronja and Melissa's father, and before long he disappears into the night under the pretense of buying Christmas gifts. Melissa decides to take his place at the Christmas tree stand, working before and after school, and brings along her sister Ronja, who charms the middle-class customers with her simple sweetness. On rare breaks in the dark of Norwegian December they dream of a brighter place of kindness and plenty, but both girls understand that their family structure is a precarious one. Skillfully told, evoking the delight, misunderstandings, and innocence of a child's voice, Brightly Shining is small in stature but with an outsize impact on the reader, and has all the markings of a magical modern classic"--

Brightly Shining

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Cristina García

From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban, a follow-up novel that tracks four generations of the del Pino family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, the U.S., Germany, and Russia in the new millennium "A beautiful novel: hilarious one moment, haunting the next.” —Chris Bohjalian, author of The Flight Attendant and The Lioness Celia del Pino, the matriarch of a far-flung Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic yet troubled Ivanito performs on stage as his drag queen persona, while being haunted by the ghost of his mother. Pilar Puente, adrift in Los Angeles, is a struggling sculptor and the single mother of a young son. In Moscow, Ivanito’s cousin Irina has become the wealthy owner of a lingerie company, but she remains deeply lonely in the wake of her parents’ deaths and her estrangement from her Cuban heritage. Meanwhile, in Havana, Celia prepares to reunite with her lost lover, Gustavo, and wonders whether age and the decades spent apart have altered their bond. Cut off from their Cuban roots, yet still feeling the island’s ineluctable pull, Ivanito and his extended family try to reimagine where—and with whom—they belong. Over the course of a momentous year, each will grapple with their histories as they are pulled to Berlin for a final, explosive reunion. Set twenty years after the events in Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina García’s new novel is an epic tale of family, devotion, and the timeless search for home.

Vanishing Maps

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Morgan Talty

"Fire Exit, Morgan Talty's debut novel, is utterly consuming. The novel absolutely smolders."--Tommy Orange

Fire Exit

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William Alexander

A History

New York Times bestselling author William Alexander provides "an entertaining, broad-ranging history of the tomato" (Mark Pendergrast) in this fascinating and erudite microhistory.



The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Lost in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato has become the avatar for our disaffection with industrial foods -- while becoming the most popular vegetable in America (and, in fact, the world). Each summer, tomato festivals crop up across the country; the Heinz ketchup bottle, instantly recognizable, has earned a spot in the Smithsonian; and now the tomato is redefining the very nature of farming, moving from fields into climate-controlled mega-greenhouses the size of New England villages. 



Supported by meticulous research and told in a lively, accessible voice, Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World seamlessly weaves travel, history, humor, and a little adventure (and misadventure) to follow the tomato's trail through history. A fascinating story complete with heroes, con artists, conquistadors, and--no surprise--the Mafia, this book is a mouth-watering, informative, and entertaining guide to the food that has captured our hearts for generations.

Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World

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Romesh Gunesekera

The internationally celebrated (and Booker Prize-shortlisted) author returns with a dazzling coming-of-age story set in post-independence Sri Lanka

"A master storyteller."
--The New York Times

Ceylon is on the brink of change. But young Kairo is at loose ends. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat, and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo's hardworking mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyist father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret bets on horse races in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick through secondhand westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.

Then he meets the magnetic teenage Jay, and his whole world is turned inside out.

A budding naturalist and a born rebel, Jay keeps fish and traps birds for an aviary he is building in the garden of his grand home. As Jay guides Kairo from the realm of make-believe into one of hunting guns and fast cars and introduces him to a girl-- Niromi--Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequence.

Taut and luminous, graceful and wild, Suncatcher is a poignant coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings set among the tumult of 1960s Sri Lanka, that confirms Gunesekera's status as one of today's most lyrical writers.

Suncatcher

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Andrea Marcolongo

Will Schutt

Learning to Run Like a Greek

The inspiring story of how one of Europe's most original and compelling classicist learned to run--and live--like a Greek Much has changed since the day in 490 BCE when the indefatigable Athenian herald Philippides made his legendary run and delivered to the people of Athens news of their city's victory over the Persians. One thing, however, hasn't changed: it is still twenty-five punishing miles over rough terrain from Marathon to the Acropolis. Each year, all over the world, thousands of professional athletes and millions of amateur enthusiasts replicate Philippides's enterprise, many running with such gusto that one could be forgiven for thinking the fate of Athens once more hung in the balance. Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, sweat, of testing one's limits? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions and to wonder why we choose to measure ourselves in this way against others; they were the first to formulate the adage, mens sana in corpore sano; they were first to interrupt war, work, politics, the daily routine to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. The Greeks invented sport! Sport as something separate from labor or war; activity as an end unto itself and a form of entertainment for others. They were also the first to understand how regular physical activity, victory, and loss connected to our emotional and mental well-being. As the pandemic entered its second year, despondent, isolated, and apprehensive about the future, the internationally renowned classics scholar and best-selling author Andrea Marcolongo discovered running. After years spent with her head and heart in the books, trying to think like a Greek, she set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she not only deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying, but also discovered a great deal about herself. In this spirited, generous, and erudite book, Andrea Marcolongo shares not only her erudition but her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is indeed, and in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.

The Art of Running

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Anthony Marra

In December 2004 in a rural village in Chechnya, failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized eight-year-old daughter of a man abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

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Abby Fried

Abby Fried

@abby47568

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Caroline O'Donoghue

The Rachel Incident

Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers

Marie NDiaye; Jordan Stump

Vengeance Is Mine

Maria Adelmann

Girls of a Certain Age

Caroline Waight; Ingvild Rishøi

Brightly Shining

Cristina García

Vanishing Maps

Morgan Talty

Fire Exit

William Alexander

Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World

Romesh Gunesekera

Suncatcher

Andrea Marcolongo; Will Schutt

The Art of Running

Anthony Marra

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

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Caroline O'Donoghue

The Rachel Incident

Jessamine Chan

The School for Good Mothers

Marie NDiaye; Jordan Stump

Vengeance Is Mine

Maria Adelmann

Girls of a Certain Age

Caroline Waight; Ingvild Rishøi

Brightly Shining

Cristina García

Vanishing Maps

Morgan Talty

Fire Exit

William Alexander

Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World

Romesh Gunesekera

Suncatcher

Andrea Marcolongo; Will Schutt

The Art of Running

Anthony Marra

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

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