Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Beautiful brand new book in pristine condition and from a smoke free home.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Michigan

The author of The Girls Are All So Nice Here returns with a thriller set in the vineyards of Napa Valley that asks: what happens when the husband you thought died years ago shows up alive? Ten years ago, June’s beloved husband drowned on their honeymoon, his body never found. Now, a decade later, June is finally ready to move on. She owns a natural wine bar in Brooklyn and is engaged to a patient, supportive man named Kyle. She’s excited to finally begin a new chapter in her life and start a family. But out of the blue, she sees him—Josh, her first husband. Is this just a hallucination from the guilt June carries about finally moving on, or is it possible that her husband never died in the first place? June tries to forget about this vision, chalking it up to grief and nerves, but soon enough, she stumbles across a website for a winery in Napa, and the owner in the photo is identical to her dead husband. With her upcoming wedding looming and a fiancé who’s already worried she hasn’t quite left her past behind, June secretly flies to Napa for answers. But she’s not prepared for all the secrets she’s about to unlock because everything she thought she knew about her first love is a lie.

Till Death Do Us Part

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Celia Bell

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Novel

This radiant and thrilling debut follows a passionate love affair between two noblewomen who wish to free themselves from their repressive society, whatever the cost. In 17th century Paris, everyone has something to hide. The noblemen and women and writers consort with fortune tellers in the confines of their homes, servants practice witchcraft and black magic, and the titled poison family members to obtain inheritance. But for the Baroness Marie Catherine, the only thing she wishes to hide is how unhappy she is in her marriage, and the pleasures she seeks outside of it. When her husband is present, the Baroness spends her days tending to her children and telling them elaborate fairy tales, but when he’s gone, Marie Catherine indulges in a more liberated existence, one of forward-thinking discussions with female scholars in the salons of grand houses, and at the center of her freedom: Victoire Rose de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Conti, the androgynous, self-assured countess who steals Marie Catherine’s heart and becomes her lover. Victoire possesses everything Marie Catherine does not—confidence in her love, and a brazen fearlessness in all that she’s willing to do for it. But when a shocking and unexpected murder occurs, Marie Catherine must escape. And what she discovers is the dark underbelly of a city full of people who have secrets they would kill to keep. The Disenchantment is a stunning debut that conjures an unexpected world of passion, crime, intrigue, and black magic.

The Disenchantment

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J.D. Robb

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

An Eve Dallas Novel

Homicide Detective Eve Dallas hunts a killer who turns a wedding party into a murder scene in the next novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author, J.D. Robb, Passions in Death. On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, speed through the streets of Manhattan to the Down and Dirty club, where a joyful, boisterous pre-wedding girls’ night out has turned into a murder scene. One of the brides lies in a pool of blood, garroted in a private room where she was preparing a surprise for her fiancée—two scrimped and saved-for tickets to Hawaii. Despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses are hard to come by. It all brings back some bad memories for Eve who once suffered an assault in the very same room—but she’d been able to fight back and survive. She’d gotten justice. And now she needs to provide some for poor young Erin. Eve knows that the level of violence and the apparent premeditation involved suggest a volatile mix of hidden, heated passion and ice-cold calculation. This is a crime that can be countered only by hard detective work and relentless dedication—and Eve will not stop until she finds the killer who destroyed this couple’s dreams before the honeymoon even began...

Passions in Death

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Karin Slaughter

A Will Trent Thriller

"For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it s the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night. Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying&.Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves. It soon becomes clear that normal rules don t apply at McAlpine Lodge, and Will and Sara are going to have to watch their step at every turn. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock."--Provided by publisher.

This Is Why We Lied

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Kat Tang

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

In Kat Tang’s exciting and resonant debut, a “Rental Stranger”—a companion hired under various guises—walks the line between personal and professional in surprising new ways. Would you hire someone to be the best man at your wedding? Your stand-in brother? Your husband? In an age where online ratings are all-powerful, Five-Star Stranger follows the adventures of a top-rated man on the Rental Stranger app—a place where users can hire a pretend fiancé, a wingman, or an extra mourner for a funeral. Referred to only as Stranger, the narrator navigates New York City under the guise of characters he plays, always maintaining a professional distance from his clients. But, when a nosy patron threatens to upend his long-term role as father to a young girl, Stranger begins to reckon with his attachment to his pretend daughter, her mother, and his own fraught past. Now, he must confront the boundaries he has drawn and explore the legacy of abandonment that shaped his life. Five-Star Stranger is a strikingly vivid novel about the commodification of relationships in a gig economy, isolation in a hyperconnected world, and the risk of asking for what we want from those who cannot give. This is the story of a man who finds out who he is by being anyone but himself.

Five-Star Stranger

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Frank Figliuzzi

Hunting the Highway Serial Killers

"A true-crime masterpiece." --Don Winslow, #1 bestselling author of The Force, The Cartel, and City on Fire From the FBI's former assistant director, a shocking journey to the dark side of America's highways, revealing the FBI Highway Serial Killings Initiative's hunt for the long-haul truckers behind an astonishing 850 murders-and rising. In 2004, the FBI was tipped off to a gruesome pattern of unsolved murders along American roadways. Today at least 850 homicides have been linked to a solitary breed of predators: long-haul truck drivers. They have been given names like the "Truck Stop Killer," who rigged a traveling torture chamber in the rear of his truck and is suspected to have killed fifty women, and "The Interstate Strangler," who once answered a phone call from his mother while killing one of his dozen victims. The crisis was such that the FBI opened a special unit, the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. In many cases, the victims--often at-risk women--are picked up at truck stops in one jurisdiction, sexually assaulted and murdered in another, and dumped along a highway in a third place. The transient nature of the offenders and multiple jurisdictions involved make these cases incredibly difficult to solve. Based on his own on-the-ground research and drawing on his twenty-five-year career as an FBI special agent, Frank Figliuzzi investigates the most terrifying cases. He also rides in a big-rig with a long-haul trucker for thousands of miles, gaining an intimate understanding of the life and habits of drivers and their roadside culture. And he interviews the courageous trafficked victims of these crimes, and their inspiring efforts to now help others avoid similar fates. Long Haul is a gripping exploration of a violent, disordered world hiding in plain sight, and the heroes racing to end the horror. It will forever unsettle how you travel on the road.

Long Haul

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Ethan Joella

 Beautiful brand new book in pristine condition and from a smoke free home.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

From the author of the Read with Jenna Bonus Pick A Little Hope, an uplifting and emotionally resonant novel set in a Delaware beach town about a local restaurant owner at a turning point. Three generations of Schmidts have run their family’s beachfront restaurant and Jack has been at the helm since the death of his father. Jack puts the demands of the restaurant above all else, with a string of failed relationships, no hobbies, and no days off as proof of his commitment to the place. He can’t remember the last time he sat on the beach, or even enjoyed a moment to himself. Meanwhile, the DelDine group has been gradually snapping up beloved eateries along this stretch of coast and are pursuing Jack with a very generous offer to take Schmidt’s off his hands. Jack craves companionship and maybe even a family. He wonders if closing the door on the restaurant might open a new window for him. But who would he be without Schmidt’s, and can he trust DelDine’s claims that they will continue to employ his staff and honor his family’s legacy? When he receives startling news from the past, Jack begins to reshape his life and forge unexpected new friendships. But will he really let go of the very things that have defined him?

The Same Bright Stars

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Beautiful and brand new book in pristine condition and from a smoke free home.

The Pairing

Elyse John

The stunning, gender-flipped novel about love, creativity and the power of speaking out, which has the biggest names in Australian literature swooning with praise - perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and Pat Barker. ''Poetic and evocative ... this story will thrill readers'' PIP WILLIAMS ''Vivid, consuming, potent, and poetic ... A moving, magical ode to the power of using our voices'' HOLLY RINGLAND Their love transcends every boundary. Can it cheat death? Orphia dreams of something more than the warrior crafts she''s been forced to learn. Hidden away on a far-flung island, her blood sings with poetry and her words can move flowers to bloom and forests to grow ... but her father, the sun god Apollo, has forbidden her this art. A chance meeting with a young shield-maker, Eurydicius, gives her the courage to use her voice. After wielding all her gifts to defeat one final champion, Orphia draws the scrutiny of the gods. Performing her poetry, she wins the protection of the goddesses of the arts: the powerful Muses, who welcome her to their sanctuary on Mount Parnassus. Orphia learns to hone her talents, crafting words of magic infused with history, love and tragedy. When Eurydicius joins her, Orphia struggles with her desire for fame and her budding love. As her bond with the gentle shield-maker grows, she joins the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Facing dragons, sirens and ruthless warriors on the voyage, Orphia earns unparalleled fame, but she longs to return to Eurydicius. Yet she has a darker journey to make - one which will see her fight for her love with all the power of her poetry. Praise for Orphia and Eurydicius ''A swoonworthy, breathtakingly exquisite, poignant masterpiece'' BETTER READING ''Like all enchanted books, the story of Elyse Johns'' Orphia and Eurydicius is vivid, consuming, potent, and poetic. This gender-flipping, feminist retelling is not just a love story for the ages, but a moving, magical ode to the power of using our voices, and of being who we are in the world.'' HOLLY RINGLAND, author of The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding ''As I read, I imagined the muses beside Elyse John, focusing her mind and guiding her hand. The writing is poetic and evocative, and the story will thrill readers who have long suspected something is missing from the classics of Greek myth.'' PIP WILLIAMS, author of The Bookbinder of Jericho ''This book hooked me from its opening lines ... Music and poetry, art and magic are woven together in this dazzling fable which ultimately asks: how far are we willing to go for the ones we love? Elyse John has taken one of the most beautiful and tragic love stories ever told and infused it with a modern sensibility. Readers will swoon.'' LAUREN CHATER, author of The Winter Dress ''A timeless story told in rich, poetic language ... a book for lovers of myth, passion and transporting historical fiction. John brilliantly reimagines the past while crafting a moving tale of love that challenges outdated gender roles, and of grief drawn from the depths of experience. The mesmerising landscapes, the journeys of sea and fire, encircle this very human story in the evocative realm of legend.'' KATHERINE BRABON, author of The Shut Ins ''Highly polished and luminous ... A wonderfully ambitious, richly imagined tale of star-crossed lovers. Brimming with passion, wit and poetry Orphia and Eurydicius is a story of, and for, the ages. One that not only stands as a paeon to love, courage and acceptance but to every woman''s desire, and right, to be heard. A triumph.'' LYN HUGHES, author of Mr Carver''s Whale ''A gorgeous, sweeping tale that both evokes the feeling of classic mythology and intelligent and modern insight, this is a story of the boundaries we put on love and grief - I dare you to be unmoved by it.'' SAM HAWKE, author of City of Lies ''A beautiful, poetic ode to Greek myth, love, and the sheer power of women''s art and women''s voices.'' TASHA SURI, author of the Burning Kingdoms series ''Spins a bewitching tale of courage, love, and defiance, giving voice and agency to the women in Greek tales who are so often defined by the men they are associated with. Orphia''s poetry may bring the gods to tears; John''s words have the same effect on us mere mortals. Tragic and triumphant, a must-read!'' ANDREA STEWART, author of The Bone Shard Daughter ''A delectable concoction at once ancient and modern, comfortingly familiar and yet very much her own ... A thrilling tale of epic love and epic ambition spun with a Homeric sense of adventure and storytelling flair. It''s also a hymn to the pleasures of sensuality, nature and creativity, and to the courage of being yourself rather than the person others want you to be.'' LEE KOFMAN, author of The Writer Laid Bare ''A powerful ode to female creativity and ambition, a poignant exploration of grief, and a testament to the power of art and love to transcend death. Lyrical, luminous, and brimming with passion.'' H.G. PARRY, author of The Magician''s Daughter ''Elyse John has written that rare novel, one that has heart and wisdom, adventure and poetry, and all the while it pulses with a great political purpose. It''s a marvel.'' NIGEL FEATHERSTONE, author of My Heart is a Little Wild Thing ''A fresh and enchanting retelling of the Orpheus myth, in which Ancient Greece''s greatest poet becomes a bold, powerful woman, and her muse an artistic, gentle man. John astutely explores and tests the gendered stereotypes of classical myth and elevates women''s voices and stories to craft a beautiful, beguiling modern myth about the value of creativity, the strength of non-conformity and the power of love.'' NIKKI MARMERY, author of Lilith ''An intoxicating story about a woman fighting to live a life of creativity and love, on her own terms. This is a powerful epic about the collective power of women set in the mythical past that feels incredibly relevant today. John''s gilded romance about breaking boundaries to live and love is transportative.'' STEPH VIZARD, winner of the 2022 HarperCollins Banjo Prize for The Love Contract

Orphia and Eurydicius

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Juliet Grames

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy. Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either. Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival. Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia

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Claire Douglas

"So cleverly plotted and brimming with tension."--Gillian McAllister "First-rate suspense . . . hard to put down."--Shari Lapena A bestselling detective novelist and her family are in danger when chilling events from her novels begin happening around her in this gripping thriller from the British sensation--the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Girls Who Disappeared and The Couple at Number 9. Emilia has a dream life. But someone knows the truth . . . Emilia Ward lives in suburban London with her husband, their young son, and a teenager from her first marriage. Emilia is an ordinary mom--and she's also the bestselling author of the Miranda Moody detective novels. But when writing her tenth--and most difficult--book, life takes a disturbing turn: an incident mimicking the plot of one of her novels occurs in real life. Just an unsettling coincidence, right? Until it happens again. And again. Then someone she knows dies in the same way as a victim in the book she's currently writing. Why is someone doing this? What do they want? How could they possibly know what she's thinking--and writing? Is Emilia and her family next?

The Woman Who Lied

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Julie Schumacher

Beautiful brand new book in pristine and from a smoke free home.

The English Experience

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Mary Beth Albright

How Food Supports Emotional Well-Being

Food has power to nourish your mind, supporting emotional wellness through both nutrients and pleasure. In this groundbreaking book, journalist Mary Beth Albright draws on cutting-edge research to explain the food/mood connection. She redefines "emotional eating" based on the science, revealing how eating triggers biological responses that affect humans' emotional states both immediately and long-term. Albright's accessible voice and ability to interpret complex studies from the new field of nutritional psychology, combined with straightforward suggestions for what to eat and how to eat it, make this an indispensable guide. Readers will come away knowing how certain foods help reduce the inflammation that can harm mental health, the critical relationship between the microbiome and the brain, which vitamins help restore the body during intensely emotional times, and how to develop a healthful eating pattern for life--with 30-day kickoff plan included. Eat and Flourish is the entertaining, inspiring book for today's world.

Eat and Flourish

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Tembe Denton-Hurst

A Best in Fiction Book for 2023 "[A] sharp, charming and passionate debut." --New York Times Book Review A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle, USA Today, Bustle, Ebony, Harper's Bazaar, PopSugar, New York Post, The Skimm, and The Millions. A Best Book of 2023 by Marie Claire, Esquire, Vogue, them, Autostraddle, Betches, Gay Times, and Cosmopolitan. An insightful, propulsive, and deeply sexy debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and pens a searing manifesto about racism in the industry. Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey's well on her way, and it's far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Everything finally seems to be falling into place--until she finds out she's being replaced. Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism she's endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, even from her usually-encouraging girlfriend, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is, she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run: her hometown. Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her hometown--and the flirtation of a former flame--but she soon learns that you can't outrun your past. In the newfound quiet, she is forced to reflect on the sacrifices she'd made for an industry that never loved her back and pick up the pieces of the life she thought she'd left behind for good. After all, when the walls of success you've carefully built around yourself come crumbling down, what--and who--are you left with? A meditation on identity, self-worth and the toll of corporate racism, Homebodies is a portrait of modern Black womanhood with a protagonist you won't soon forget.

Homebodies

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Juan Villoro

Alfred MacAdam

A City Called Mexico

At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. 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. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.

Horizontal Vertigo

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Brooke Lea Foster

“If you’re looking to dive into historical fiction this summer, look no further than” (Town & Country) the acclaimed author of Summer Darlings and On Gin Lane and her latest page-turning novel about two estranged friends whose unexpected reconnection in the Hamptons forces them to finally confront the terrible event that drove them apart. When wealthy, impulsive summer girl Margot meets hardworking and steady local girl Thea in the summer of 1967, the unlikely pair become fast friends, working alongside one another in a record store and spending every spare moment together. But after an unspeakable incident on one devastating August night, they don’t see one another for ten years…until Margot suddenly reappears in Thea’s life, begging for help and harboring more than one dangerous secret. Thea can’t bring herself to refuse her beloved friend—but she also knows she can’t fully trust her either. Unfulfilled as a housewife, Thea enjoys the dazzling sense of adventure Margot brings to her life, but will the truth of what happened to them that fateful summer ruin everything? Testing the boundaries of how far she’ll go for a friend, Thea is forced to reckon with her uncertain future while trying to decide if some friends are meant to remain in the past. Set in the dual timelines of 1967 and 1977, All the Summers In Between is at once a mesmerizing portrait of a complex friendship, a delicious glimpse into a bygone Hamptons, and a powerful coming-of-age for two young women during a transformative era.

All the Summers in Between

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Rachel Howzell Hall

Beautiful brand new book in pristine condition and from a smoke free home. Book is stunning under dust jacket!

A Thriller

What Fire Brings

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Alana Saab

Beautiful brand new book in pristine condition and from a smoke free home

An "engrossing, affecting, and singular" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world. While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn’t having it. It’s just Oblivion. Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world’s poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she’s ever believed about life, writing, and love. And then there’s Norma’s girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion’s antagonist, the manuscript’s savior? Or is she just a human? Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today’s world, challenging all we’ve been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

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Elysha Chang

In A Quitter's Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother's death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own. Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she's hiding things from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn't understand the person you've lost? Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path that will force her to confront her present. After a series of incidents--and some questionable choices--it becomes clear that no matter how hard Eleanor tries, she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she's hurtling toward? At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter's Paradise interweaves Eleanor's story with her parents' in an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of family bonds and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.

A Quitter's Paradise

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Jenny Ashcroft

Jenny Ashcroft's Under the Golden Sun is a captivating World War II historical love story set against the raw beauty of Australia. Rose Hamilton is in desperate need of a life change when she reads the want ad in the newspaper for a companion needed to escort a young orphaned child to Australia. There are so many reasons she should ignore the advertisement—the war, those treacherous winter seas, her family, her fiance... but she can't help herself. Within weeks she is boarding an enormous convoy, already too attached to five-year-old Walter. Unfortunately, the cattle station home of Walter's family isn't anything like either of them were told to expect. Rose can't leave this little boy who she's grown to love until he is happy and settled, and she knows the key to this is Walter's wounded fighter pilot uncle. But how will she ever part with Walter? And what if he isn't the only reason she wants to stay?

Under the Golden Sun

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Brittany Means

A Memoir

Starred review from Kirkus "Brittany Means has pieced together the shards of a devastating childhood in this powerful memoir. It's gut-wrenching but at the same time triumphant, harrowing yet exquisitely told. Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways is a story of survival that left me choked up and cheering." -Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle "The book's lasting impact might be what it demands of the memoir genre. Brittany Means has, at once, created the most readable and the most psychologically rigorous book I've read in decades. I needed the reminder that art can do this." -Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy "I can't write a story about myself as the sad, quiet child of two drug addicts. That's not how it was, even when it was. To me, sleeping in the car was normal. Better, it was comfy and fun. I loved my bed made of clothes inside a trash bag that I sank into slowly like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family movie. . . . I loved the motels and their swimming pools and trashy daytime TV channels. . . . Nobody could tell us what to do." Brittany Means's childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn't care where they were going--to a roadside midwestern motel, a shelter, or The Barn in Indiana, the cluttered mansion her Pentecostal grandparents called home--as long as they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her--and leave. As Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn't only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, Brittany makes sense of this cycle and finds a way to leave it. While untangling the web of her most painful memories, Brittany crafts a tale of self-preservation, resilience, and hope with a unique narrative style--a sparkling example of the human ability to withstand the most horrific experiences and still thrive.

Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways

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Amanda Churchill

"A heartbreakingly resonant debut, The Turtle House is a tender, big-hearted story about women, family, and the complicated history of Texas. These characters, and their tentative, flawed stumblings toward grace, will stay with me."--Elizabeth Wetmore, author of Valentine "Sweeping yet intimate, Amanda Churchill's Turtle House spans cultures and continents. Minnie and her granddaughter Lia are unforgettable protagonists, whose grit and grace will inspire you. Together, they find a way through in this gripping debut."--Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City Moving between late 1990s small-town Texas to pre-World War II Japan and occupied Tokyo, an emotionally engaging literary debut about a grandmother and granddaughter who connect over a beloved lost place and the secrets they both carry. It's spring 1999, and 25-year-old Lia Cope and her prickly 73-year-old grandmother, Mineko, are sharing a bedroom in Curtain, Texas, the ranching town where Lia grew up and Mineko began her life as a Japanese war bride. Both women are at a turning point: Mineko, long widowed, moved in with her son and daughter-in-law after a suspicious fire destroyed the Cope family ranch house, while Lia, an architect with a promising career in Austin, has unexpectedly returned under circumstances she refuses to explain. Though Lia never felt especially close to her grandmother, the two grow close sharing late-night conversations. Mineko tells stories of her early life in Japan, of the war that changed everything, and of her two great loves: a man named Akio Sato and an abandoned Japanese country estate they called the Turtle House, where their relationship took root. As Mineko reveals more of her early life--tales of innocent swimming lessons that blossom into something more, a friendship nurtured across oceans, totems saved and hidden, the heartbreak of love lost too soon--Lia comes to understand the depth of her grandmother's pain and sacrifice and sees her Texas family in a new light. She also recognizes that it's she who needs to come clean--about the budding career she abandoned and the mysterious man who keeps calling. When Mineko's adult children decide, against her wishes, to move her into an assisted living community, she and Lia devise a plan to bring a beloved lost place to life, one that they hope will offer the safety and sense of belonging they both need, no matter the cost. A story of intergenerational friendship, family, coming of age, identity, and love, The Turtle House illuminates the hidden lives we lead, the secrets we hold close, and what it truly means to find home again when it feels lost forever.

The Turtle House

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Max Ludington

"Now in his late-sixties, Daniel lives in quiet anonymity in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. A legendary artist, he's known for one seminal work-Thorn Tree-a hulking, welded, scrap metal sculpture that he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work emerged from tragedy, but building it kept Daniel alive and catapulted him to brief, reluctant fame in the art world. Daniel is neighbors with Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress. She too experienced youthful fame, hers in a popular television series, but saw her life nearly collapse after a series of bad decisions. Now, a new movie with a notorious director might reignite her career. A single mother, Celia leaves her young son Dean for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she's on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel's cottage--but something about Jack seems off. Discomfiting, strangely intimate, with flashes of anger balanced by an almost philosophical bent, Jack is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be."--

Thorn Tree

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Lindsay Starck

A poignant and evocative novel that explores the bounds of familial love, the high stakes of parenthood, and the tenuous divide between fiction and reality. Thirteen years ago, Sylvia Gray's young daughter, Faye, attacked her babysitter in order to impress the Kingman, a monster she and her best friend had encountered on the Internet. When the now twenty-three-year-old Faye goes missing, leaving her toddler behind, Sylvia launches a search that propels her back into the past and back into the Kingman's orbit. With the help of her estranged husband and a sister she hasn't spoken to in years, Sylvia draws dangerously closer not only to Faye, but also to the truth about the monster that once inspired her. Will Sylvia be able to reach her daughter before history repeats itself? Or will it be Sylvia, this time, who loses her grip on reality and succumbs to the dark powers of this monstrous fiction? Both literary and suspenseful, Monsters We Have Made confronts the terrors of parenthood and examines the boundaries of love. Most importantly, it reminds us of the power of stories to shape our lives.

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