Mateo Askaripour

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Michigan

A Novel

"This Great Hemisphere is an inventive and immersive epic that follows its brave invisible protagonist as she navigates a futuristic new world that often mirrors our own. A thrilling page-turner." —Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half From the award-winning and bestselling author of Black Buck: A speculative novel about a young woman—invisible by birth and relegated to second-class citizenship—who sets off on a mission to find her older brother, whom she had presumed dead but who is now the primary suspect in a high-profile political murder. Despite the odds, Sweetmint, a young invisible woman, has done everything right her entire life—school, university, and now a highly sought-after apprenticeship with the Northwestern Hemisphere’s premier inventor, a non-invisible man belonging to the Dominant Population who is as eccentric as he is enigmatic. But the world she has fought so hard to build after the disappearance of her older brother comes crashing down when authorities claim that not only is he well and alive, he’s also the main suspect in the murder of the Chief Executive of the Northwestern Hemisphere. A manhunt ensues, and Sweetmint, armed with courage, intellect, and unwavering love for her brother, sets off on a mission to find him before it’s too late. With five days until the hemisphere’s big election, Sweetmint must dodge a relentless law officer who’s determined to maintain order and an ambitious politician with sights set on becoming the next Chief Executive by any means necessary. With the captivating worldbuilding of N. K. Jemisin’s novels and blazing defiance of Naomi Alderman’s work, This Great Hemisphere is a novel that brilliantly illustrates the degree to which reality can be shaped by non-truths and vicious manipulations, while shining a light on our ability to surprise ourselves when we stop giving in to the narratives others have written for us.

This Great Hemisphere

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Eleanor Catton

"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work--what a treat." --Stephen King

"One of the finest writers of our time." --Jonathan Ruppin, The Independent

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.

Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting oﬀ the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.

But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam's founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He's intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they're poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both inﬂuences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unﬂinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Birnam Wood

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Wendell Berry

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The author's celebration of life in a Kentucky town continues with his latest installment--the stories of Port William matriarch Hannah Coulter, an eighty-year-old woman who has been widowed twice and has watched the town's sense of community gradually deteriorate. Reprint.

Hannah Coulter

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Susan Abulhawa

A heart-wrenching, powerfully written novel that does for Palestine what The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan.

Mornings in Jenin is a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to return to a lost home.

The novel's voice is that of Amal, the granddaughter of the old village patriarch, a bright, sensitive girl who makes it out of the camps, only to return years later, to marry and bear a child. Through her eyes, with her evolving vision, we get the story of her brothers, one who is kidnapped to be raised Jewish, one who will end with bombs strapped to his middle. But of the many interwoven stories, stretching backward and forward in time, none is more important than Amal's own. Her story is one of love and loss, of childhood and marriage and parenthood, and finally the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has.

Set against one of the twentieth century's most intractable political conflicts, Mornings in Jenin is a deeply human novel - a novel of history, identity, friendship, love, terrorism, surrender, courage, and hope. Its power forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining conflicts of our lifetimes.

Mornings in Jenin

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Christopher Priest

Older edition and used when I bought it. cover is a little dinged up, but otherwise good condition. See photos

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in a darkened salon during the course of a fraudulent seance, and from this moment they try to expose and outwit each other at every turn

The Prestige

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Nathanael West

Jonathan Lethem

Older edition showing its age but in good condition. See photos

Two classic novels are included in a single volume, first, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a newspaper reporter seeking to avoid writing an agony column, with only his cynical editor Shrike in the way, the second, The Day of the Locust, about Tod Hackett, who pines for a role in the film industry, only to discover the emptiness of Hollywood's inhabitants. Original.

Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust

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Boris Pasternak

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Read once. Corners and edges of cover and spine are a little dinged up. See photos

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, lives and loves during the first three decades of 20th-century Russia.

Doctor Zhivago

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Vikram Seth

Read once. A little dinged up along the edges of the cover and spine. Spine is unbroken. 

Now a television series on Acorn TV, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair

"Surrender to this strange, beguiling world and be swept away on the wings of story. . . . It is difficult to imagine that many contemporary writers could give us a novel that provides so much deep satisfaction." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy tells the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love, ambition, humor, sadness, prejudice, reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette, and the most appalling violence.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata's--and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra's--attempts to find a suitable boy for Lata, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in the early 1950s in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, this compelling story takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. 

A Suitable Boy

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Julia Phillips

"One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two sisters, eight and eleven, go missing. In the ensuing months the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. Social and ethnic tensions have long simmered in the region, and outsiders are often the first to be accused..."--Provided by publisher.

Disappearing Earth

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Angie Cruz

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize “Through a novel with so much depth, beauty, and grace, we, like Ana, are forever changed.” —Jacqueline Woodson, Vanity Fair “Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story.” —Sandra Cisneros Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, O Magazine, Time, Seattle Times, The Baltimore Sun, Real Simple, Nylon, Instyle, BuzzFeed, Lit Hub, The Millions, Bustle, and more Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family’s assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family. In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.

Dominicana

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Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Bottom front of dust jacket has some creasing. See photo

Stories

A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond--and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.

Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley's Black American and Afro-Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life--even if we haven't always been willing to listen.

When Trying to Return Home

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Claire Jimenez

Small tear in jacket along front edge. See photo. NOT an Aardvark edition

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A powerful debut novel that's "hilarious, heartbreaking, and ass-kicking" (Jamie Ford), of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long‑missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and they set out to bring her home.



A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle *  USA Today * Today.com * Ms. Magazine * Good Housekeeping * Bustle * The Week *  Goodreads * Bookriot * Pop Culturely * SheReads * Litreactor * Electric Lit * The Mary Sue * People Español * Zibby Mag 



The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen‑year‑old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?



The years since Ruthy's disappearance haven't been easy on the Ramirez family. It's 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.



After seeing maybe‑Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long‑lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future--with or without Ruthy in it.



What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

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Sonora Jha

"Sonora Jha expertly inhabits the perspective of a man so terrified of the old world slipping away, he can't see the ground shifting beneath his feet. A deliciously sharp, mercilessly perceptive exploration of power, The Laughter explores how 'otherness' is both fetishized and demonized, and what it means to love something--a person, a country--that does not love you back."--Celeste Ng, New York Times-bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts

A white male college professor develops a dangerous obsession with his new Pakistani colleague in this modern, iconoclastic novel.

Dr. Oliver Harding, a tenured professor of English, is long settled into the routines of a divorced, aging academic. But his quiet, staid life is upended by his new colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a dynamic Pakistani Muslim law professor.

Ruhaba unexpectedly ignites Oliver's long-dormant passions, a secret desire that quickly tips towards obsession after her teenaged nephew, Adil Alam, arrives from France to stay with her. Drawn to them, Oliver tries to reconcile his discomfort with the worlds from which they come, and to quiet his sense of dismay at the encroaching change they represent--both in background and in Ruhaba's spirited engagement with the student movements on campus.

After protests break out demanding diversity across the university, Oliver finds himself and his beliefs under fire, even as his past reveals a picture more complicated than it seems. As Ruhaba seems attainable yet not, and as the women of his past taunt his memory, Oliver reacts in ways shocking and devastating.

An explosive, tense, and illuminating work of fiction, The Laughter is a fascinating portrait of privilege, radicalization, class, and modern academia that forces us to confront the assumptions we make, as both readers and as citizens.

The Laughter

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Stephen Buoro

Crackling with energy and intelligence, this debut is the "smart, subversive, funny, heartbreaking" (Kamila Shamsie) story of an exceptional teenager coming of age in the shadow of colonialism and communal violence in Nigeria.

Andrew Aziza is an unusually smart fifteen-year-old in Kontagora, Nigeria. He lives with his fiercely protective mother, Gloria, and fantasizes obsessively about white girls-especially blondes. When he's not in church, at school, or hanging about town with his droogs wishing to become one of "Africa's first superheroes," he's contemplating the larger questions with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who has feelings for him. Together they discuss mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed the Curse of Africa.

Sure enough, the reluctantly nicknamed Andy Africa soon falls hopelessly and inappropriately in love with the first white girl he lays eyes on: Eileen. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. An unfamiliar man there claims, despite his mother's denials, to be Andy's father, and an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy is forced to reckon with his identity and desires and determine how to live on the so-called Cursed Continent.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa announces a dazzlingly unique literary voice. Crackling with energy, this tragicomic novel provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of growing up in a turbulent world.

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

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Aaliyah Bilal

A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America. In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. In “Due North,” an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she’s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In “Who’s Down?” a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In “Candy for Hanif” a mother’s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In “Woman in Niqab,” a daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In “New Mexico,” a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.

Temple Folk

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Manuel Munoz

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Shimmering stories set in California's Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.

"Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters--straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old--are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently--perhaps literally--haunted.

In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It's a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

The Consequences

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Jamil Jan Kochai

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2022

"An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent." --Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins.

A luminous new collection of stories from a young writer who "has brought his culture's rich history, mythology, and lyricism to American letters." --Sandra Cisneros

Pen/Hemingway finalist Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In these arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy, often starring young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness, Kochai once again captures "a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers."*

In "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain," a young man's video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father's memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, "Return to Sender" follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in "Hungry Ricky Daddy" starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak," we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family's life.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement--and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today.

*The New York Times Book Review

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

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Anne Boyd Rioux

The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

On its 150th anniversary, discover the story of the beloved classic that has captured the imaginations of generations.

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