Recommended Reads
-
The Hidden Book
From bestselling author Kirsty Manning comes a stunning novel based on a true story of clandestine courage in World War II as prisoners of war risk their lives to secure evidence of Nazi atrocities--and how one man concealed it for decades before passing it on to his family who struggle to understand their inherited legacy of trauma.
Austria, 1940s: Yugoslavian Nico Antonov is just one of more than 200,000 people imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp near the Danube River. Malnourished and forced into hard labor in a quarry, he still defies his captors any way he can. When fate brings him into contact with Lena Lang, a young woman living with her family in fear of their Nazi occupiers, he finds an ally.
SS officers have charged Spanish POW and photographer Mateo Baca with recording the events and prisoners of Mauthausen and to make five copies of the collected photo book for the Third Reich's leaders. But Mateo also creates a sixth book to be smuggled out of the camp--where Nico entrusts Lena to hide it and protect their secret.
Australia, 1980s to present day: When teenager Hannah Campbell discovers her grandfather Nico's mysterious photo album, filled with horrific visions of suffering and cruelty, the barbarities of World War II no longer feel like ancient history. Haunted by the images for years, as a university student and a married young mother, she pursues the truth behind her grandfather's incarceration. As Hannah experiences love and loss in her own life, she comes to understand how the photos not only capture history but reflect a shared humanity that must never be forgotten.
-
Silken Gazelles
“In Alharthi’s world, it’s not only the future that holds promise; the past has possibility and opportunities for revision, too." —The New York Times Book Review
From Man Booker International Prize-winning author of Celestial Bodies and Bitter Orange Tree, a new novel about two Omani women whose unbreakable connection is forged as nursing sisters—a bond considered akin to that of a birth sibling
Raised as sisters, Ghazaala is devastated when her friend Asiya is forced to leave their small mountainside village following a tragic circumstance. It’s a separation that haunts her into adulthood, and she never gives up on finding a love that might replace the bond they shared.
Years later, Ghazaala’s family moves to Muscat, where she falls in love with a professional violinist who lives in their building. She completely surrenders herself to his charm and, despite her parents’ opposition, runs away from home to marry him. While balancing the duties of a new wife—caring for her husband, their home, and, before long, their twin boys—Ghazaala resumes her education and enrolls in university.
Ghazaala's sharp wit catches the attention of another student, Harir, during their freshman year. In the pages of her diary, Harir recounts the story of her deepening, transformative friendship with Ghazaala over the course of ten years. The elusive, ghostly existence of Asiya exerts a force over both their lives, yet neither Ghazaala nor Harir is aware of the connection. From the brilliant mind of Jokha Alharthi comes a tale of childhood friendship, and how its significance—and loss—can be recalibrated at different stages of life. -
Scandalous Women
Mad Men meets the world of publishing in international bestselling author Gill Paul's new novel about Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann, two dynamic, groundbreaking writers renowned for their scandalous and controversial novels, and the beleaguered young editorial assistant who introduces them.
1966, NYC: Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls hits the bookstores and she is desperate for a bestseller. It's steamy, it's a page-turner, but will it make the big money she needs? In London, Jackie Collins's racy The World Is Full of Married Men launches her career. But neither author is prepared for the price they will pay for being women who dare to write about sex.
Jacqueline and Jackie are lambasted by the literary establishment, deluged with hate mail, and even condemned by feminists. In public, both women shoulder the outcry with dignity; in private, they are crumbling--particularly since they have secrets they don't want splashed across the front pages.
1965, NYC: College graduate Nancy White is excited to take up her dream job at a Manhattan publishing house, but she could never be prepared for the rampant sexism she will encounter. While working on Valley of the Dolls, she becomes friends with Jacqueline Susann, and, after reaching out to Jackie Collins about a US deal, she is responsible for the two authors meeting.
Will the two Jackies clash as they race to top the charts? Will Nancy achieve her ambition of becoming an editor, despite all the men determined to hold her back? Three women struggle to succeed in a man's world, while desperately trying to protect those they love the most.
-
How to Leave the House
“A wild and funny ride through modern life.” —The Financial Times
It's Natwest's last day before he leaves for university, and there's only one thing on his mind: the deeply embarrassing package he ordered to his house - which still hasn't arrived. He won't leave town without it. Any alternative is too distressing to consider ...
This is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of Natwest, and his small-town odyssey in pursuit of the missing package. And yet it's also the story of a middle-aged dentist who dreams of being a respected artist - but the only thing he can seem to paint is the human mouth. And it's the story of a tortured imam involved in a quasi-romantic entanglement with the local vicar; and an octogenerian mourning the death of her secretive husband; and a troubled teenager whose nudes have leaked on the internet. It's the story of Natwest's obnoxious ex-boyfriend, and his class-traitor mother and her childhood boyfriend, and the life-changing secrets he knows about Natwest's past.
Alternating between Natwest's idiosyncratic inner world and the perspectives of the other characters - and dazzling in its energy, imagination and originality - this is an outrageously funny and tenderly moving story about being connected to everyone and everything at all times; about love, friendship, and the lies we tell ourselves; about unhappy endings, happy endings - and whether anything really is as simple as one or the other. -
The Housekeeper's Secret
"This BEAUTIFULLY-WRITTEN HISTORICAL is a SUMPTUOUS, PAGE-TURNING DELIGHT
filled with an enticing mix of FORBIDDEN ROMANCE and buried secrets.”
—Ellen Marie Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Willowbrook
Duty, desire, and deception reside under one roof.
Standing in the remote windswept moors of Northern England, Coldwell Hall is the perfect place to hide. For the past five years, Kate Furniss has maintained her professional mask so carefully that she almost believes she is the character she has created: Coldwell’s respectable housekeeper.
It is the summer of 1911 that brings new faces above and below the stairs of Coldwell Hall—including the handsome and mysterious new footman, Jem Arden. Just as the house’s shuttered rooms open, so does Kate’s guarded heart to a love affair that is as intense as it is forbidden. But Kate can feel her control slipping as Jem harbors secrets of his own.
Told in alternating timelines from the last sun-drenched summer of the Edwardian Age to the mud-filled trenches of WWI, The Housekeeper's Secret opens its door to a world of romance, the truths we hold onto, and the past we must let go.
"RICH IN ATMOSPHERE AND BRIMMING WITH INTRIGUE, THE HOUSEKEEPER'S SECRET IS NOT TO BE MISSED!"
–Amanda Skenandore, award-winning author of The Nurse's Secret
"BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED...I rooted for Kate, fell completely in love with Jem, and will hold their unforgettable story close for a very long time to come."
–Jenny Ashcroft, author of Island in the East and The Officer and the Spy -
Our Narrow Hiding Places
"For fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale: an elderly woman recounts her Dutch family's survival during the final years of Nazi occupation, shedding new light on old secrets that rippled through subsequent generations. Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn's life is one of quiet routine. Widowed for many years, she enjoys the view from her home on the New Jersey shore, visits with friends, and tai chi at the local retirement community. But when her beloved grandson, Will, and his wife, Teru, show up for a visit, things are soon upended. Their marriage is threatening to unravel, and Will has questions for his grandmother-questions about family secrets that have been lost for decades and are now finally rising to the surface. But telling Will the truth involves returning to the past, and to Mieke's childhood in coastal Holland. There, in the last years of World War II, she survived the Hunger Winter, a brutal season when food and heat were cut off and thousands of Dutch citizens starved. Her memories weave together childhood magic and the madness of history, and carry readers from the windy beaches of The Hague to the dark cells of a concentration camp, through the bends of eel-filled rivers, and, finally, to the story of Will's father, absent since Will's childhood. Our Narrow Hiding Places is a sweeping story of survival and of the terrible cost of war-and a reminder that sometimes the traumas we inherit come along with a resilience we never imagined."--
-
Glass Houses
A group of employees and their CEO, celebrating the sale of their remarkable emotion-mapping-AI-algorithm, crash onto a not-quite-deserted tropical island.
Luckily, those who survived have found a beautiful, fully-stocked private palace, with all the latest technological updates (though one without connection to the outside world). The house, however, has more secrets than anyone might have guessed, and a much darker reason for having been built and left behind.
Kristen, the hyper-competent "chief emotional manager" (a position created by her eccentric, boyish billionaire boss, Sumter) is trying to keep her colleagues stable throughout this new challenge, but staying sane seems to be as much of a challenge as staying alive.
Being a woman in tech has always meant having to be smarter than anyone expects--and Kristen's knack for out-of-the-box problem-solving and quick thinking has gotten her to the top of her field. But will a killer instinct be enough to survive the island?
A gleefully decadent near future whodunit from Madeline Ashby, the acclaimed futurist and author of Company Town--perfect for fans of Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror. -
Mina's Matchbox
From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.
“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent." —New York Times Book Review
“Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.
In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse. -
The Murders in Great Diddling
The best stories are the ones we didn't know needed to be told
The small, rundown village of Great Diddling is full of stories--author Berit Gardner can feel it. The way the villagers avoid outsiders, the furtive stares and whispers in the presence of newcomers... Berit can sense the edge of a story waiting to be unraveled, and she's just the person to do it. In fact, with a book deadline looming over her and no manuscript (not even the idea for a manuscript, truth be told), Berit doesn't just want this story. She needs it.
Then, while attending a village tea party, Berit becomes part of the action herself. An explosion in the library of the village's grand manor kills a local man, and the resulting investigation and influx of outsiders sends the quiet, rundown community into chaos. The residents of Great Diddling, each one more eccentric and interesting than any character Berit could have invented, rewrite their own narrative and transform the death of one of their own from a tragedy into a new beginning. Taking advantage of Great Diddling's new notoriety, the villagers band together to start a book and murder festival designed to bring desperately-needed tourists to their town. What they couldn't have predicted is how the new story they've begun to tell will change all their lives forever.
Uplifting, charming, and laugh-out-loud funny, The Murders in Great Diddling by New York Times bestselling author Katarina Bivald is a celebration of the life-changing magic of books and the people who love them.
-
Lady Macbeth
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ava Reid comes a “masterful reimagining” (Publishers Weekly) of Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most famous villainess, giving her a voice, a past, and a power that transforms the story men have written for her.
“Lady Macbeth doesn’t retell Shakespeare so much as slice cleanly through it, revealing what was hidden beneath. I couldn't look away.”—Alix E. Harrow, New York Times bestselling author of Starling House
The Lady knows the stories: how her eyes induce madness in men.
The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed.
The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of strategy, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive.
But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armor. She does not know that her magic is greater and more dangerous, and that it will threaten the order of the world.
She does not know this yet. But she will. -
The Stranger at the Wedding
Before love at first sight, there were things no one saw.
Annie never much believed in love. That is, until meeting Mark. After crossing paths on morning commutes, they connect at a group counseling session for trauma survivors. Each recognizes something in the other, though both hide their own troubled pasts.
It’s a whirlwind romance that propels Annie through their courtship, all the way to her wedding day—a day she couldn’t have predicted for herself once upon a time yet now feels surer about than anything in her life.
But as Annie stands at the altar, casting her eyes over the rows of well-wishers, she spots a stranger in the crowd, and she soon learns that her new life isn’t going to be the happily ever after that she had planned. Who is the stranger at the wedding? What really happened to Mark’s first wife? And was Annie and Mark’s meeting as random as it first appeared, or is something more sinister at work?
A sizzling thriller, A. E. Gauntlett's The Stranger at the Wedding will make you think twice before saying “I do.” -
Worst Case Scenario
"Worst Case Scenario is the best thriller I've read so far this year. It's a chilling idea with great characters and near-perfect execution." -James Patterson
When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications.
#1 internationally bestselling author T.J. Newman is back with Worst Case Scenario, following her explosive debut thriller Falling and its harrowing follow-up Drowning.
"Worst Case Scenario is the best thriller I've read so far this year. A jetliner crashes in the worst possible location - and I mean the worst - the site of a nuclear plant. It's a chilling idea with great characters and near-perfect execution. T. J. Newman is the kind of gifted storyteller that comes along every 5 to 10 years. Don't miss Worst Case Scenario." -James Patterson
The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now.In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people--power plant employees, firefighters, teachers, families, neighbors, and friends-- are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives. It will take the combined courage, ingenuity, and determination of a brave few to save not only their community and loved ones, but the fate of humanity at large.
-
Burn
From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars and The Last Ranger, a novel about two men—friends since boyhood—who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence
Every year, Jess and Storey have made an annual pilgrimage to the most remote corners of the country, where they camp, hunt, and hike, leaving much from their long friendship unspoken. Although the state of Maine has convulsed all summer with secession mania—a mania that has simultaneously spread across other states—Jess and Storey figure it’s a fight reserved for legislators or, worst-case scenario, folks in the capital.
But after weeks hunting off the grid, the men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men—secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell—as they seek a path to safety. Then, a startling discovery drastically alters their path and the stakes of their escape.
Drenched in the beauty of the natural world and attuned to the specific cadences of male friendship, even here at the edge of doom, Burn is both a blistering warning about a divided country’s political strife and an ode to the salvation found in our chosen families. -
The Enemy
From the New York Times bestselling author of Practice Makes Perfect comes an expanded edition of The Enemy—a laugh-out-loud romance about rekindling old flames, with a never-before-seen chapter.
Enemies should never get a second chance. But this one might.
It’s been twelve years since June Broaden has seen her high school enemy (and secret crush), Ryan Henderson. That’s a long time to hold a grudge over some petty feud, but the sharp memory of him dangling a kiss at graduation, then pulling away at the last second, has fueled many angry fantasies since. Now it’s her chance to get even.
Ryan, along with most of her high school class, is back in town for her best friend’s wedding, and June is eager to show the former bully exactly what he’s missed out on. A lot has changed since their teenage days; June is now the Southern queen of gourmet donuts, not to mention one of the most desired bachelorettes in her small town.
What’s she’s not expecting, though, is for Ryan to show up looking like Adonis and touting his own career success as the youngest chef to ever win three Michelin stars. How dare he try to one-up her revenge plot? Luckily, June never backs down from a challenge. -
The Great Dating Fake Off
One over-the-top Italian wedding. Two fake couples. And a million hilariously disastrous possibilities...
Nora D’Amato would do almost anything for her best friend. Pretend she’s smitten with him to get his overly invested Italian family off his back? Absolutely. Attend a wedding for said overbearing family? Bring it. Spend the next six days at a posh resort watching the bride and groom’s families hate on each other? Pass the popcorn.
There’s only one tiny little hiccup. Nora’s crush—and the object of some very inappropriate thoughts—is here, too. And looking so delectable that she could spoon him faster than stracciatella gelato in a heat wave.
But Sebastian Rossi isn’t available...officially. He’s here with his fake wedding date. And he owes her big time for keeping an eye on his nonna while he’s away months at a time for work. A week in the Adirondacks is a piece of overly frosted cake. Besides, it’s not as though he can have a real relationship when he’s constantly on the move. Definitely not with the cute bookstore manager he can’t stop thinking about.
And a wedding war zone with two feuding families is not the time or place for flirting or sexy sneak-arounds. Everyone is watching—whether it’s during the pickleball tournament, the angry patriarch showdowns, or even the bull-riding bachelorette party. This wedding is one slipped fauxcade away from catastrophe, and if Nora and Sebastian can’t keep to their own sides of the aisle, they risk exposing the very secrets they’re sworn to protect.