Georgie Blalock

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

A Novel of the Crown, a Conspiracy, and the Duchess of Windsor

The Windsor Conspiracy

9d156210-5d25-4e6f-817d-ad24d6307a63-0

Jesmyn Ward

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a “tour de force” (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic. Jesmyn Ward’s historic second National Book Award–winner is “perfectly poised for the moment” (The New York Times), an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. “Ward’s writing throbs with life, grief, and love… this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it” (Buzzfeed). Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager. His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances. When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and “an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and present” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

Sing, Unburied, Sing

b6556e5d-d0fb-44ab-9acd-1f97969f2b23-1

Quinn Connor

For fans of The Midnight Library and Swamplandia! comes a breathtaking story of magical realism about two sisters, deeply tied to their small Southern town, fighting to break free of the darkness swallowing the land--and its endless cycle of pecan harvests--whole. In the struggling town of Clearwater, Arkansas, the annual pecan harvest is a time of both celebration and heartbreak. But even as families are forced to sell their orchards and move away, Lil Clearwater refuses to let go of the land her family has been rooted to for generations. She feels a connection to the earth that goes deeper than memory--which is why she reluctantly accepts her sister Sasha's return to the fold after so long away. It should be a time of joyful reconnection, yet it isn't long before things take a dark turn. There is rot hiding beneath the surface, and hungry eyes that watch from the dark. As phantom fires begin to light up the night and troubling local folklore is revealed to be all too true, the sisters--confronted with the ghosts of their pasts--come to the stark realization that in the kudzu-choked South, nothing is ever as it seems.

The Pecan Children

a1d6873e-f6ae-47fe-83c5-6c7e29ef5d6c-0

Cat Shook

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

For fans of Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, Cat Shook's Humor Me is a love letter to the New York City stand-up scene, as told by a jaded, yet lovable, assistant at a late night show.Presley Fry is not amused. She's been an assistant at the Late Night Show for way too long, she's adopted a "business casual" approach to dating to save herself from the embarrassment of seeking genuine connection, and everyone else around her seems to have figured out the whole "adulting" thing already. And yet, Presley is absolutely enamored with her job and the world of stand-up comedy. The joy she finds in discovering up-and-coming comedians, and the beauty and connection in their shared humor - it's enough for now.Enter Susan Clark, the childhood best friend of Presley's mom, who recently passed after years of struggle with alcoholism. Susan happens to be married to the head of the network where Presley works, and she is determined to take Presley under her wing and ease her way through life in the big city. She's also determined to connect Presley with her son, the bright and affable Lawrence, who happens to be Presley's polar opposite.As Presley grapples with her mother's loss after a tumultuous relationship, and finds her people among those who seek out comedy to make the world a bit brighter, Humor Me reminds us that friendship can emerge from where you least expect it, and that shared laughter can ease some of the deepest pain.

Humor Me

c2a3501a-190c-4174-9754-1138e7338ee7-0

Millie Bobby Brown

Millie Bobby Brown's dazzling debut novel is a moving tale of love, longing, and loss, inspired by the true events of her family's experience during World War II. Love blooms in the darkest days... It's 1942, and London remains under constant threat of enemy attack as the second world war rages on. In the Bethnal Green neighborhood, Nellie Morris counts every day lucky that she emerges from the underground shelters unharmed, her loving family still surrounding her. Three years into the war, she's grateful to hold onto remnants of normalcy--her job as assisting the mayor and nights spent at the local pub with her best friend. But after a chance encounter with Ray, an American airman stationed nearby, Nellie becomes enchanted with the idea of a broader world. Just when Nellie begins to embrace an exciting new life with Ray, a terrible incident occurs during an air raid one evening, and the consequences are catastrophic. As the truth about that night is revealed, Nellie's world is torn apart. When it seems all hope is lost, Nellie finds that, against all odds, love and happiness can triumph. Nineteen Steps is a deeply affecting, mesmerizing page-turner inspired by the author's family history. An epic story of longing, loss, and secrets, Millie Bobby Brown's propulsive debut introduces an unforgettable, brave young woman and boldly portrays the strength in the power of love.

Nineteen Steps

49edbf5d-2844-4f48-b3ce-e31622a36435-1

Shirlene Obuobi

Talia Hibbert meets Carley Fortune in this swoon-worthy story of love and friendship in the age of social media--where what you see might not be all you get. To her countless Instagram followers Josephine Boateng is the dazzling Dr. Jojo--and her opinions on health, growth, and self-love matter. Her message: be smart (she has a medical degree after all), be significant, and do not put up with foolish men. But behind the camera, Jo's story is more complicated--she finds her influencer career underwhelming; her potential career in medicine overwhelming, and she's hung up on her best friend, nepo-baby and romcom heartthrob Ezra Adelman. When Ezra shows up to his thirtieth birthday party with her childhood bully on his arm, however, Josephine realizes that it's time to take her own advice and prioritize herself for once. No one is more shocked than Malcolm Waters when his debut novel turns him into a critic's darling. When he's invited to a swanky penthouse party to discuss turning his book into a film, he knows rubbing elbows with the elites of entertainment will be great for his career. The only problem: he's not good with people, and even worse at networking. Just when he's about to throw in the towel, he's rescued by none other than Dr. Jojo. He's been following her on social media for years, and she's even more impressive in real life. And to his bewilderment, the feeling is mutual. But in a world where the lines between private and public are as blurred as those between friendship and love, can they risk it all for something real?

Between Friends and Lovers

5c1b269a-8dc0-4977-914a-48581d06d78b-0

Mary Beth Keane

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, BookPage, LitHub and more “I adored this compelling, touching, exquisitely crafted story about a marriage in crisis.” —Liane Moriarty, New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies From the bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, a masterful novel about a couple in a small town who must navigate the complexities of marriage, family, and longing. Malcolm Gephardt, handsome and gregarious longtime bartender at the Half Moon, has always dreamed of owning a bar. When his boss finally retires, Malcolm stretches to buy the place. He sees unquantifiable magic and potential in the Half Moon and hopes to transform it into a bigger success, but struggles to stay afloat. His smart and confident wife, Jess, has devoted herself to her law career. After years of trying for a baby, she is facing the idea that motherhood may not be in the cards for her. Like Malcolm, she feels her youth beginning to slip away and wonders how to reshape her future. Award-winning author Mary Beth Keane’s new novel takes place over the course of one week when Malcolm learns shocking news about Jess, a patron of the bar goes missing, and a blizzard hits the town of Gillam, trapping everyone in place. With a deft eye and generous spirit, Keane explores the disappointments and unexpected consolations of midlife, the many forms forgiveness can take, the complicated intimacy of small-town living, and what it means to be a family.

The Half Moon

2feec284-765a-4770-8f89-24b40750c793-0

Thao Thai

A Read with Jenna Pick

A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick "A riveting mother-daughter tale." -- Elle "Radiant. ... An intimate account of one family's planting of roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way." -- Washington Post A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family's inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories. When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she's last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life--a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste--but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng. Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann's childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who's always held them together. Running parallel to this is Minh's story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House's attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life--and beyond. Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.

Banyan Moon

b1dfd080-6f6d-467f-bc2b-e628bc32296a-0

Serena Kaylor

A calculus nerd enlists her surly classmate’s help to win back her ex-boyfriend, but when sparks start to fly, she realizes there’s no algorithm for falling in love. Marlowe Meadows understands a lot of things. She understands that calculus isn’t overwhelmingly beautiful to everyone, and that it typically kills the mood when you try to talk Python coding over beer pong. She understands that people were surprised when golden boy Josh asked her out and she went from weird, math-obsessed Marlowe to half of their school’s couple goals. Unfortunately, Marlowe was the one surprised when Josh dumped her because he’d prefer a girlfriend who's more romantic. One with emotional depth. But Marlowe has never failed anything in her life, and she isn’t about to start now. When she’s paired with Ashton Hayes for an English project, his black clothing and moody eyeliner cause a bit of a systems overload, and the dissonant sounds of his rock band make her brain itch. But when she discovers Ash's hidden stash of love songs, Marlowe makes a desperate deal to unleash her inner romantic heroine: if Ash will agree to help her write some love letters to win back Josh, she’ll calculate the perfect data analytics formula to make Ash's band go viral. As the semester heats up with yearning love notes, a syllabus of romance novels, and late nights spent with a boy who escapes any box her brain tries to put him in, Marlowe starts to question if there’s really a set solution to love. Could a girl who's never met a problem she can't solve have gotten the math so massively wrong?

The Calculation of You and Me

c4154ccb-47c1-489e-98fc-7487eed95724-0

Megan Campisi

The author of the “magnificent…complex, vivid” (New York Journal of Books) Sin Eater returns with a rousing and propulsive novel based on the astonishing true story of the first female Pinkerton detective whose next assignment could end the Civil War. Kate Warner is many things: the country’s first female detective, a Pinkerton agent, and a union spy. It’s August 1861, and her latest assignment could finally end the bloody war and bring the fractured United States together again. All she has to do is win the trust of her captive: Confederate spy and socialite Rose Greenhow. But with Rose well aware of Kate’s working-class background and belief in abolitionism, it seems an impossible task. Worst, Kate has secrets that make her vulnerable, such as her forbidden love affair with a colleague. With time running out, Kate faces not only the moral and political divides between herself and Rose but also the ones she made in her own heart and life. Can she make the difficult decision over which divides are worth crossing? Or will she fail the most important assignment of her career in this spellbinding and moving new novel from Megan Campisi?

The Widow Spy

f2c9482e-b4d9-4ddd-922d-2c35b43443ec-0

Debbie Urbanski

A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth. Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem. Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect. As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

After World

60c5ef69-6a07-480c-9db6-2590aa8559d1-0

Maggie Smith

A Memoir

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • Time Best Book of the Year • Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year “A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” ­—Time “A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving. “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.” In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

8a4edced-a0ee-45e5-90b9-5f8541b7a2c1-0

Molly Morris

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Every ten years in the strange little town of Lennon, California, one person is chosen to return from the dead... Wilson Moss entered the town’s top-secret contest in the hopes of resurrecting her ex-best friend Annie LeBlanc, but that doesn’t mean she thought she’d actually win. Now Annie’s back and Wil’s ecstatic—does it even really matter that Annie ghosted her a year before she died...? But like any contest, there are rules, and the town’s resurrected dead can only return for thirty days. When Wil discovers a loophole that means Annie might be able to stay for good, she’s desperate to keep her alive. The potential key? Their third best friend, Ryan. Forget the fact that Ryan openly hates them both, or that she and Wilson have barely spoken since that awkward time they kissed. Wil can put it aside for one month; she just needs to stop thinking about it first. Because Wil has one summer to permanently put an end to her loneliness—it’s that, or lose her only friends...again. But along the way, she might have to face some difficult truths about Annie’s past and their friendship that, so far, she’s left buried.

Annie Leblanc Is Not Dead Yet

b43e7360-8dcd-4c5c-998d-8f9bae1f41f1-0

Karen Kingsbury

1941, Bloomington, Indiana. Irvel Ellis is too focused on her secret to take much notice in the war raging overseas. She's dating Sam but in love with his brother, Hank. When Pearl Harbor is attacked, their lives are turned upside down overnight, Sam is drafted; Hank wants to enlist, but Sam insists he stay home and take up the battle on the home front. While Sam fights in Europe, an undeniable chemistry builds between Irvel and Hank but neither would dare cross that line. When a devastating telegram comes, Hank enlists the next day and has just two weeks until he ships out. Years later, Hank and Irvel make a series of VHS tapes for her to play as she sinks into Alzheimer's, determined to keep some of her memories alive. - adapted from publisher info and perusal of book

Just Once

26e588f2-77a8-46aa-a005-a85ff46023d5-0

Elizabeth B. White

Joanna Sliwa

The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust

The astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg—a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir. World War II and the Holocaust have given rise to many stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the remarkable, unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Poland’s Nazi occupiers. Mehlberg operated in Lublin, Poland, headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat, she worked as a welfare official while also serving in the Polish resistance. With guile, cajolery, and steely persistence, the “Countess” persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp. She won permission to deliver food and medicine—even decorated Christmas trees—for thousands more of the camp’s prisoners. At the same time, she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned at Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. Incredibly, she eluded detection, and ultimately survived the war and emigrated to the US. Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story of this remarkable woman. They interweave Mehlberg’s sometimes harrowing personal testimony with broader historical narrative. Like The Light of Days, Schindler’s List, and Irena’s Children, The Counterfeit Countess is an unforgettable account of inspiring courage in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

The Counterfeit Countess

30a49a8a-545a-4cdd-8bc5-f1ba922f1dea-0

Scarlett Thomas

From “one of the UK’s most interesting authors” (Kirkus Reviews), Patricia Highsmith meets White Lotus in this surprising and suspenseful modern gothic story following a couple running from both secretive pasts and very present dangers while honeymooning on a Greek island. Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on a tiny Greek island for their honeymoon. It’s the end of the season and a storm is imminent. Determined to make the best of it, they check into the sun-soaked doors of the Villa Rosa. Already feeling insecure after seeing the “beautiful people,” the seemingly endless number of young models and musicians lounging along the Mediterranean, Evelyn is wary of the hotel’s owner, Isabella, who seems to only have eyes for Richard. Isabella ostensibly disapproves of every request Evelyn makes, seemingly annoyed at the fact that they are there at all. Isabella is also preoccupied with her chance to enthrall the only other guests—an American producer named Marcus and his partner Debbie—with the story of “the sleepwalkers,” a couple who had stayed at the hotel recently and drowned. Everyone seems to want to talk about the sleepwalkers, save for Hamza, a young Turkish man Evelyn had seen with some “beautiful people,” as well as the “dapper little man”—the strange yet fashionable owner of the island’s lone antiques and gift shop she sees everywhere. But what at first seemed eccentric, decorative, or simply ridiculous, becomes a living nightmare. Evelyn and Richard are separated the night of the storm and forced to face dark truths, but it’s their confessions around the origins of their relationship and the years leading up to their marriage that might save them. Exhilarating, suspenseful, and also very funny, The Sleepwalkers asks urgent questions about relationships, sexuality, and the darkest elements of contemporary society—where our most terrible secrets are hidden in plain sight.

The Sleepwalkers

73c5ff7a-da79-4213-939b-78155621e53f-0

Jennifer E. Smith

Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything? Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan's life. Having missed her flight, she's stuck at JFK airport and late to her father's second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother Hadley's never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport's cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he's British, and he's sitting in her row. A long night on the plane passes in the blink of an eye, and Hadley and Oliver lose track of each other in the airport chaos upon arrival. Can fate intervene to bring them together once more? Quirks of timing play out in this romantic and cinematic novel about family connections, second chances, and first loves. Set over a twenty-four-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver's story will make you believe that true love finds you when you're least expecting it.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

63aa0082-dc4c-4536-a298-9ce99ca75229

Bruce Holsinger

"A gripping, full-throttle page turner."- Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe

To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna--the world's first category 6 hurricane--upends everything they have taken for granted.
 
When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will "normal" ever return?
 
A suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, The Displacements thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

The Displacements

4c82e87a-a461-47a3-a3aa-d30381ae266e-1

Michelle Min Sterling

In a near-future northern settlement, a handful of climate change survivors find their fates intertwined in this mesmerizing and transportive novel in the vein of Station Eleven and The Power.

In the far north of Canada sits Camp Zero, an American building project hiding many secrets.

Desperate to help her climate-displaced Korean immigrant mother, Rose agrees to travel to Camp Zero and spy on its architect in exchange for housing. She arrives at the same time as another newcomer, a college professor named Grant who is determined to flee his wealthy family's dark legacy. Gradually, they realize that there is more to the architect than previously thought, and a disturbing mystery lurks beneath the surface of the camp. At the same time, rumors abound of an elite group of women soldiers living and working at a nearby Cold War-era climate research station. What are they doing there? And who is leading them?

An electrifying page-turner where nothing is as it seems, Camp Zero cleverly explores how the intersection of gender, class, and migration will impact who and what will survive in a warming world.

Camp Zero

fdda7c06-4db4-4977-996f-6f5fd26c6769-1

Bethany C. Morrow

Named A Most Aniticipated Book of 2022 by *Medium* CrimeReads* Tor Nightfire* Bookshop* Book Talk* BiblioLifestyle* and more! From bestselling author Bethany C. Morrow comes a new adult social horror novel in the vein of Get Out meets My Sister, the Serial Killer, about Farrah, a young, calculating Black girl who manipulates her way into the lives of her Black best friend’s white, wealthy, adoptive family but soon suspects she may not be the only one with ulterior motives. . . . Seventeen-year-old Farrah Turner is one of two Black girls in her country club community, and the only one with Black parents. Her best friend, Cherish Whitman, adopted by a white, wealthy family, is something Farrah likes to call WGS—White Girl Spoiled. With Brianne and Jerry Whitman as parents, Cherish is given the kind of adoration and coddling that even upper-class Black parents can’t seem to afford—and it creates a dissonance in her best friend that Farrah can exploit. When her own family is unexpectedly confronted with foreclosure, the calculating Farrah is determined to reassert the control she’s convinced she’s always had over her life by staying with Cherish, the only person she loves—even when she hates her. As troubled Farrah manipulates her way further into the Whitman family, the longer she stays, the more her own parents suggest that something is wrong in the Whitman house. She might trust them—if they didn’t think something was wrong with Farrah, too. When strange things start happening at the Whitman household—debilitating illnesses, upsetting fever dreams, an inexplicable tension with Cherish’s hotheaded boyfriend, and a mysterious journal that seems to keep track of what is happening to Farrah—it’s nothing she can’t handle. But soon everything begins to unravel when the Whitmans invite Farrah closer, and it’s anyone’s guess who is really in control. Told in Farrah’s chilling, unforgettable voice and weaving in searing commentary on race and class, this slow-burn social horror will keep you on the edge of your seat until the last page.

Cherish Farrah

68ff894b-db7c-423d-84bd-1eb42be5c5b4-1

Emily M. Danforth

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls--a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit. "A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . deliciously ghoulish." --Ron Charles, Washington Post Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever--but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way. Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the "haunted and cursed" Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled--or perhaps just grimly exploited--and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins. A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.

Plain Bad Heroines

ddf4f74c-b90e-457f-be84-e2b29cd34ab8-1

Nikki May

"An incisive and exhilarating debut novel following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group-the most unforgettable girls since Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha"--

Wahala

6cf06d1f-4c87-47eb-b197-f489175cb66f-1

Nancy Jooyoun Kim

The New York Times bestselling author of the “timely, important” (PopSugar) The Last Story of Mina Lee returns with a propulsive and suspenseful new novel about a family that unravels when a stranger—who may hold the key to their missing mother—is found dead in their backyard. 1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on with their lives after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children, Anastasia and Ronald, than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John discovers the body of a dead stranger in the backyard. The tragedy seems random until it’s revealed that the dead man was carrying a letter to Sunny, sparking a desperate investigation into the stranger’s history and possible connections to Sunny—only to discover that someone has been watching them. 1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her work-obsessed husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation is broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother at risk, but their very lives as well. Both a riveting page-turner and moving family story, What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores the consequences of secrets between parents and children, husbands and wives, the search for home when all seems lost, and what it means to dream in America.

Browse by categories

Georgie Blalock

The Windsor Conspiracy

Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Quinn Connor

The Pecan Children

Cat Shook

Humor Me

Millie Bobby Brown

Nineteen Steps

Shirlene Obuobi

Between Friends and Lovers

Mary Beth Keane

The Half Moon

Thao Thai

Banyan Moon

Serena Kaylor

The Calculation of You and Me

Megan Campisi

The Widow Spy

Debbie Urbanski

After World

Maggie Smith

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Molly Morris

Annie Leblanc Is Not Dead Yet

Thao Thai

Banyan Moon

Karen Kingsbury

Just Once

Elizabeth B. White; Joanna Sliwa

The Counterfeit Countess

Scarlett Thomas

The Sleepwalkers

Jennifer E. Smith

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Bruce Holsinger

The Displacements

Michelle Min Sterling

Camp Zero

Bethany C. Morrow

Cherish Farrah

Emily M. Danforth

Plain Bad Heroines

Nikki May

Wahala

Nancy Jooyoun Kim

What We Kept to Ourselves

Get The App