Gabriella Burnham

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A Novel

A young woman reunites with her teenage sister in their childhood home on Nantucket Island after their mother disappears in this alluring coming-of-age novel from the acclaimed author of It Is Wood, It Is Stone. “A novel to remember.”—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children’s toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise’s worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind. Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

Wait

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Jean Kyoung Frazier

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

"Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways. Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world"--

Pizza Girl

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Magda Szabo

Len Rix

From the author of The Door, a beloved coming-of-age tale set in WWII-era Hungary.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school's grounds has come to be called. If you're in trouble, it's said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

There is something of Jane Austen in this story of the deceptiveness of appearances; fans of J.K. Rowling are sure to enjoy Szabó's picture of irreverent students, eccentric teachers, and boarding-school life. Above all, however, Abigail is a thrilling tale of suspense.

Abigail

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Kiana Davenport

"Compares with Toni Morrison."--Glamour
 
Beginning with the fateful meeting of a nineteenth-century Yankee sailor and the runaway daughter of a Tahitian chief, and sweeping over a century and a half of passionate, turbulent Hawaiian history, Shark Dialogues takes its place as the first novel to do justice to the rich heritage and cruel conflicts of the beautiful and beleaguered islands and their people. Surreal, provocative, erotic, magical, meaningful, and supremely wise, it is a tale of islanders and invaders, of victors and victims, of queens and whores, of lepers and healers. And at its center are Pono, the magnificent pure-blooded matriarch and seer, and her four mixed-blood granddaughters seeking to come to terms with the contradictions of their ancestries and the hungers of their hearts. Their loves, their hates, the bonds joining them, and the furies possessing them are interwoven with ancient legends and lore of the islands whose past offers their salvation and whose future is their fate. Kiana Davenport has written a major contribution to the literature of the Pacific Rim--a great reading experience both brilliantly contemporary in its form and timeless in its illumination.
 
"A giant, image-fevered, luxuriant saga of a Hawaiian family... powerful, memorable, intoxicating."--Kirkus Reviews
 
"Complex, resonant... handles the sweep of history and the nuance of the personal equally well... Sensuous."--San Francisco Chronicle

Shark Dialogues

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Clara Drummond

Daniel Hahn

Role Play is a fresh satire narrated by a wealthy young woman in Rio on the verge of a class-consciousness awakening. Vivian’s gallery gig in Rio de Janeiro is more than a job. She’s a curator, not just at work but in every aspect of her life. Her apartment has designer armchairs. Her wallet is Comme des Garçons. Everything is selected and arranged, even her friends, culled from Brazil’s richest families, who play the supporting cast in Vivian’s ongoing performance of self. In Vivian’s world, everything comes in excess, including her own caustic self-awareness. As she informs us, “I’m a misandrist and a misogynist,” but she is fond of gay men, “the one type of human you can get along with as equals.” The gravity of real life breaks through Vivian’s ongoing act when she's confronted with an unexpected and awful proximity to police violence. Can she pause long enough to recast herself in a new role, one that fits her highly staged world and can account for the random and unpredictable? Role Play examines the superabundances of Brazilian elites, their art and ethics, and their monied ambivalence in the face of social inequality, machismo, and violence. As sharp and sparkling as broken champagne flutes, Clara Drummond’s prose is seductively frank and unflinching in its depiction of wealth's warping effects. Her third novel and her English-language debut, Role Play is a bold and hilarious book that places everything that affirms and informs the performance of self under a harsh spotlight.

Role Play

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Joshua Whitehead

A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reservation.

Jonny Appleseed

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Clare Sestanovich

From the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize finalist, whose short stories received instant acclaim (“Sparingly told, evoked with lacerating intimacy . . . Extraordinary”—Esquire), a debut novel about a young woman’s coming of age, and the singular friendship that challenges her values, her beliefs, and the course of her life At sixteen, Eva meets Jamie by chance. She lives in middle-class south Brooklyn; he comes from the super rich of upper Manhattan. She’s observant, cautious, often insecure; he’s curious, bold, full of mysteries. These two questers are drawn together in a strange and profound friendship, tested by forces larger than themselves. As Eva follows a path of conventional achievement—a prestigious degree, a classic romance, the start of an ambitious career—Jamie seeks out more radical experiments in finding himself: renouncing his family, joining a political movement, and eventually even talking to God. Carried forcefully along by Clare Sestanovich’s exquisite prose, these two characters are pulled into separate spheres but circle the same questions: how to define their values and find their purpose, how to create a sense of self while discovering what they owe to society and to the cause of justice. These reckonings propel a surprising story of intimacy across time, exploring the alchemy of identity, the mystery of destiny, and the difficult journey of finding faith—in yourself, and in the world.

Ask Me Again

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Jinwoo Chong

"Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn't predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride." -- Ling Ma, author of Severance

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel--and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes . . .
 
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
 
So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
 
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

Flux

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Leila Mottley

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Poems

A poignant and rousing debut book of poetry from the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, CA—the acclaimed, best-selling author of the novel Nightcrawling Leila Mottley follows her trailblazing first novel with a perfectly pitched first collection of poems that demonstrate her spark and scope. woke up no light reckons with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. Moving in sections from “girlhood” to “neighborhood” to “falsehood” to, finally, “womanhood,” these poems are the breathing life of a Black girl as she grows into adulthood, simultaneously youthful and profound. Each poem is a searing vignette, capturing the dissonance of Black girlhood through visceral language. The collection is sharp and raw, wise and rhythmic, a combination that lights up each page. From unearthing histories to searching for ways to dream of a future in a world constantly on the brink of disaster, Mottley sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail. woke up no light confirms Leila Mottley’s arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice—brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.

Woke up No Light

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Banana Yoshimoto

Asa Yoneda

The internationally beloved author of Kitchen and Dead-End Memories returns with a beautiful and heartfelt story of a young woman haunted by her childhood and the inescapable bitterness that inevitably comes from knowing the truth Yayoi, a nineteen-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, has lately been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day and, as if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino. No one understands her aunt’s unusual lifestyle. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home, quietly, almost as though asleep. When she is not working, Yukino spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She eats only when she feels like it, and she often falls asleep lying on her side in the hallway. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, sometimes serves flan in a huge mixing bowl for dinner, and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A study desk, old stuffed animals––things Yukino wants to forget––are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories. An instant bestseller in Japan when first published in 1988, The Premonition is finally available for the first time in English, translated by the celebrated Asa Yoneda.

The Premonition

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Jamaica Kincaid

Lucy, a nineteen-year-old girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair and observes the unhealthy realities of the seemingly happy family that employs her, in a new edition of the acclaimed coming-of-age novel. Reprint.

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Gabriella Burnham

Wait

Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl

Magda Szabo; Len Rix

Abigail

Kiana Davenport

Shark Dialogues

Clara Drummond; Daniel Hahn

Role Play

Joshua Whitehead

Jonny Appleseed

Clare Sestanovich

Ask Me Again

Jinwoo Chong

Flux

Leila Mottley

Woke up No Light

Banana Yoshimoto; Asa Yoneda

The Premonition

Jamaica Kincaid

Lucy

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Gabriella Burnham

Wait

Jean Kyoung Frazier

Pizza Girl

Magda Szabo; Len Rix

Abigail

Kiana Davenport

Shark Dialogues

Clara Drummond; Daniel Hahn

Role Play

Joshua Whitehead

Jonny Appleseed

Clare Sestanovich

Ask Me Again

Jinwoo Chong

Flux

Leila Mottley

Woke up No Light

Banana Yoshimoto; Asa Yoneda

The Premonition

Jamaica Kincaid

Lucy

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