
Monthly Featured Topic
-
Prep
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of—and, ultimately, a participant in—their rituals and mores. As a scholarship student, she constantly feels like an outsider and is both drawn to and repelled by other loners. By the time she’s a senior, Lee has created a hard-won place for herself at Ault. But when her behavior takes a self-destructive and highly public turn, her carefully crafted identity within the community is shattered.
Ultimately, Lee’s experiences—complicated relationships with teachers; intense friendships with other girls; an all-consuming preoccupation with a classmate who is less than a boyfriend and more than a crush; conflicts with her parents, from whom Lee feels increasingly distant—coalesce into a singular portrait of the painful and thrilling adolescence universal to us all.
-
The Secret Place
A year ago a boy was found murdered at a girlsʼ boarding school, and the case was never solved. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.” Stephen joins with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case—beneath the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. With the clues leading back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, to their rival clique, and to the tangle of relationships that bound them all to the murdered boy, the private underworld of teenage girls turns out to be more mysterious and more dangerous than the detectives imagined.
-
The Secret History
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
-
The Idiot
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
-
Again, but Better
Shane has been doing college all wrong. Pre-med, stellar grades, and happy parents...sounds ideal -- but Shane's made zero friends, goes home every weekend, and romance...what’s that?
Her life has been dorm, dining hall, class, repeat. Time's a ticking, and she needs a change -- there's nothing like moving to a new country to really mix things up. Shane signs up for a semester abroad in London. She's going to right all her college mistakes: make friends, pursue boys, and find adventure!
Easier said than done. She is soon faced with the complicated realities of living outside her bubble, and when self-doubt sneaks in, her new life starts to fall apart.
Shane comes to find that, with the right amount of courage and determination one can conquer anything. Throw in some fate and a touch of magic - the possibilities are endless.
-
The Ingredients of Happiness
Thirty-two-year-old 'happiness guru' Dr Cooper Hunziker has it all - a dream job as assistant psychology professor at Yale University, a soon-to-be published self-help book, The Happiness Connection, and the perfect man. But there's a problem. Cooper isn't happy.
Of course, it doesn't help that she's facing cut-throat competition for her tenure at Yale, an accusation of plagiarism that could cost her everything, or that her new book has irritated the department chairman, who assigns her to co-lead a happiness group at the New Haven Library.
As her friendship with the other women in the group flourishes, Cooper finds herself questioning her choices. Forced to face a life-changing betrayal and her own traumatic past, can she navigate a path to happiness with the help of a gargoyle's wisdom?
-
The Summer Girl
College student Cassie Soul hasn’t spent an entire summer in Avalon Bay in years, not since her parents divorced and her mother spitefully whisked her away to Boston. Now that her grandmother is selling the boardwalk hotel that’s been in their family for five decades, Cassie returns to the quaint beach town to spend time with family, ring in her twenty-first birthday...and maybe find herself a summer fling.
On her first night in town, she finds the perfect candidate: Tate Bartlett, Avalon Bay’s fun-loving golden boy.
Tate, sailing instructor and lovable player, is no stranger to flings. In fact, he’s always down for a good time. But the moment he meets Cassie, he knows she’s not the girl you play games with. Cassie is gorgeous, hilarious, and, frankly, the coolest person he’s ever met. The last thing he wants to do is risk breaking her heart, and so he reluctantly puts her in the friend-zone...only to realize he made a huge mistake. Soon, his attraction to Cassie becomes impossible to ignore. He wants that fling now. Big-time.
And maybe even something more.
As Cassie and Tate walk the line between friends and lovers, they’re about to discover that their situation is the least complicated part of this equation. Because Avalon Bay is full of secrets—and their relationship might not survive when those secrets come to light.
-
Counting Lost Stars
New York Times bestselling author of Orphan #8, Kim van Alkemade returns with a gripping and poignant historical saga in which an unmarried college student who's given up her baby for adoption helps a Dutch Holocaust survivor search for his lost mother.
1960, New York City: College student Rita Klein is a pioneering woman in the new field of computer programming--until she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. At the Hudson Home for Unwed Mothers, social workers pressure her into surrendering her baby for adoption. Rita is struggling to get on with her life when she meets Jacob Nassy, a charming yet troubled man from the Netherlands who is traumatized by his childhood experience of being separated from his mother during the Holocaust. When Rita learns that Hitler's Final Solution was organized using Hollerith punch-card computers, she sets out to find the answers that will help Jacob heal.
1941, The Hague: Cornelia Vogel is working as a punch-card operator at the Ministry of Information when a census of Holland's population is ordered by the Germans. After the Ministry acquires a Hollerith computer made in America, Cornelia is tasked with translating its instructions from English into Dutch. She seeks help from her fascinating Jewish neighbor, Leah Blom, an unconventional young woman whose mother was born in New York. When Cornelia learns the census is being used to persecute Holland's Jews, she risks everything to help Leah escape.
After Rita uncovers a connection between Cornelia Vogel and Jacob's mother, long-buried secrets come to light. Will shocking revelations tear them apart, or will learning the truth about the past enable Rita and Jacob to face the future together
-
Ex-Purgatory
When he’s awake, George Bailey is just an ordinary man. Five days a week he coaxes his old Hyundai to life, curses the Los Angeles traffic, and clocks in at his job as a handyman at the local college.
But when he sleeps, George dreams of something more.
George dreams of flying. He dreams of fighting monsters. He dreams of a man made of pure lightning, an armored robot, a giant in an army uniform, a beautiful woman who moves like a ninja.
Then one day as he’s walking from one fix-it job to the next, a pale girl in a wheelchair tells George of another world, one in which civilization fell to a plague that animates the dead…and in which George is no longer a glorified janitor, but one of humanity’s last heroes.
Her tale sounds like madness, of course. But as George’s dreams and his waking life begin bleeding together, he starts to wonder—which is the real world, and which is just fantasy?
-
Normal People
Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.
New Non-Fiction
-
The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
Named a Most Anticipated Title by: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post!
A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author's identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author's name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.
In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond "Crafts." She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity--as Hannah Crafts--to make sense of a life fractured by slavery.
Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman's Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts's friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.
At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America's slide into Civil War.
-
Call It Home
Through gorgeous photography and heartfelt essays, the interior designer and author of Made for Living reveals her detail-oriented approach to renovating, decorating, and building a beautiful home.
The details can make a room. The bullnose edge of a marble countertop. The wood grain and color of the flooring. The particular pleat of the drape. Amber Lewis, the esteemed designer known for her signature California-inspired style, obsesses over the tiniest of features to create her eclectic, laid-back look. In Call It Home, she shares her secrets to choosing and applying fabric, paint, finishes, tile, flooring, and more for a beautifully designed home, shortcutting the often-overwhelming decision-making process.
Amber walks you through eight new homes she designed—including her own—and the thought processes behind every major choice. Whether you're decorating one room, renovating your entire house, or planning new construction, she shares how to approach a project from start to finish, guiding you on how to find the right team so you can get the perfect results. Then she takes you through mountain retreats and surfside homes, dreamy escapes she’s created by pulling inspiration from the surrounding property for a look that’s unique to each home. Through personal essays, you’ll learn how she set about the project, what challenges her team faced, and the materials she used to achieve the finished result.
With more than 200 gorgeous images of livings rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, entryways, bedrooms, and baths, you'll have photographs of Amber's details on hand when you're ready to create your own collection of stunning spaces—and call it home. -
The Hidden Language of Cats
Descended from shy, solitary North African wild cats, domestic cats set up homes with devoted owners all over the world by learning how to talk to us. This book translates—in case you missed anything.
A renowned cat behavior scientist of over thirty years, Dr. Sarah Brown has been at the forefront of research in the field, discovering how cats use tail signals to interact with each other and their owners. Now, she reveals the previously unexplored secrets of cat communication in a book that is both scientifically grounded and utterly delightful.
Each chapter dives into a different form of communication, including vocalizations, tail signals, scents, rubbing, and ear movements. The iconic meow, for example, is rarely used between adult cats—cleverly mimicking the cries of a human infant, the meow is a feline invention for conversing with people. Through observing the behavior of two cat colonies in rural England, readers will also have the opportunity to glimpse into the lives of some of the cats behind Dr. Brown's science.
Can we understand what cats’ meows and other signals mean? How do cats actually perceive us? And how can we use this information to inform how we talk back to our feline friends? Referencing historical records, exploring modern scientific studies of cat-human communication, and including simple, elegant line drawings, The Hidden Language of Cats is perfect for any cat lover who wants to learn more about their companion. -
How to Know a Person
A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain
As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?
Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.
The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood. -
The Pioneer Woman Cooks--Dinner's Ready!
The #1 New York Times bestselling author and Food Network favorite The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond returns with an exciting new cookbook filled with no-fuss family recipes for dinners, desserts, and more.
Cook smarter, not harder!
After seventeen years of sharing recipes in my cookbooks, on my website, and on my cooking show, I still absolutely love cooking! That said, while I enjoy making a slow-cooked meat sauce or long-braised pork roast, life is just too busy these days to devote that much time to getting dinner on the table day after day. Heck, even if I have the time to whip up a complicated recipe, for some reason I just don't seem to have the patience. If you find yourself in the same dinner boat, here's a collection of flavorful and fast recipes to breathe speedy new scrumptiousness into your cooking.
In The Pioneer Woman Cooks--Dinner's Ready! you'll find lots of new dishes to fit your schedule, whether you're in a hurry to get supper made or simply want to get out of the kitchen quicker to spend time doing other things you enjoy (even if that's curling up in front of the TV for the night)! Every occasion is covered, from hosting company, with my mom's Seafood Casserole from the '70s and Pork Marsala with Mushrooms, to pizza night, with my classic Cast-Iron Hamburger Pizza and gorgeous Rainbow Pizza, to teenager-friendly fun food like Pretzel Dogs and Pickle Chicken Bites. You'll also enjoy tasty new pasta dishes, chicken dinners, and fuss-free sides like Crispy Parmesan Potatoes and Pimento Cheese Grits, as well as delicious desserts like Blackberry Lime Whip and Chuckwagon Brownies. As a delicious bonus, there's a whole chapter of easy-to-make Fridge Grabs--from Refrigerator Pickles to Garlic Confit--that are great to have on hand for adding even more flavor and zip to the recipes!
These low-stress, fuss-free, big-on-flavor recipes are sure to be new family faves. You'll be able to holler "Dinner's ready!" faster than ever.
-
If You Would Have Told Me
“...I love him, and I respect him, and I need him. We all do.”
—from the foreword by Jamie Lee Curtis
If you would have told a young John Stamos flipping burgers at his dad’s fast-food joint that one day he’d be a household name and that, at the height of his success, he’d be living alone, divorced, with no kids, high on a cocktail of forgetting, he might’ve asked, “You want fries with that?”
John burst onto the scene in General Hospital, propelling him into the teen idol stratosphere, a place that’s often a point of no return. But Stamos beat the odds and over the past four decades has proved himself to be one of his generation’s most successful and beloved actors. Whether showing off his comedic chops on Full House or his dramatic skills on ER, pushing the boundaries on Broadway or living out his youthful dreams as an honorary Beach Boy, John has surprised everyone, most of all himself.
A universal story about friendship, love, loss, and the courage to embrace love once more, John Stamos’s memoir is filled with some of the most memorable names in Hollywood, both old and new. Funny, deeply poignant, and brutally honest, If You Would Have Told Me is a portrait of a boy who went from believing in Disney magic to a man who learns that we have to create our own magical moments in life. -
Hidden Potential
“This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.”
—Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights.
We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.
Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.
Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there. -
The Woman in Me
The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.
Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last. -
Endangered Eating
Apples, a common New England crop, have been called the United States' "most endangered food." The iconic Texas Longhorn cattle is categorized at "critical" risk for extinction. Unique date palms, found nowhere else on the planet, grow in California's Coachella Valley--but the family farms that caretake them are shutting down. Apples, cattle, dates--these are foods that carry significant cultural weight. But they're disappearing.
In Endangered Eating, culinary historian Sarah Lohman draws inspiration from the Ark of Taste, a list compiled by Slow Food International that catalogues important regional foods. Lohman travels the country learning about the distinct ingredients at risk of being lost. Readers follow Lohman to Hawaii, as she walks alongside farmers to learn the stories behind heirloom sugarcane. In the Navajo Nation, she assists in the traditional butchering of a Navajo Churro ram. Lohman heads to the Upper Midwest, to harvest wild rice; to the Pacific Northwest, to spend a day wild salmon reefnet fishing; to the Gulf Coast, to devour gumbo made thick and green with filé powder; and to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, to taste America's oldest peanut--long thought to be extinct. Lohman learns from those who love these rare ingredients: shepherds, fishers, and farmers; scientists, historians, and activists. And she tries her hand at raising these crops and preparing these dishes. Each chapter includes two recipes, so readers can be a part of saving these ingredients by purchasing and preparing them.
Animated by stories yet grounded in historical research, Endangered Eating gives readers the tools to support community food organizations and producers that work to preserve local culinary traditions and rare, cherished foods--before it's too late.
-
George Harrison
From the premiere Beatles biographer—author of the New York Times bestseller John Lennon: The Life and the million-copy selling Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation—a rare and revealing portrait of George Harrison, the most misunderstood and mysterious Beatle, based on decades-long research and unparalleled access to inside sources.
Despite being hailed as one of the best guitarists of his era, George Harrison, particularly in his early decades, battled feelings of inferiority. He was often the butt of jokes from his bandmates owing to his lower-class background and, typically, was allowed to contribute only one or two songs per Beatles album out of the dozens he wrote.
Now, acclaimed Beatles biographer Philip Norman examines Harrison through the lens of his numerous self-contradictions. Compared to songwriting luminaries John Lennon and Paul McCartney he was considered a minor talent, yet he composed such masterpieces as “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Here Comes the Sun,” and his solo debut album “All Things Must Pass” achieved enormous success, appearing on many lists of the 100 best rock albums ever. Modern music critics place him in the pantheon of sixties guitar gods alongside Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Jimmy Page.
Harrison railed against the material world yet wrote the first pop song complaining about income tax. He spent years lovingly restoring his Friar Park estate as a spiritual journey, but quickly mortgaged the property to help rescue a film project that would be widely banned as sacrilegious, Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Harrison could be fiercely jealous, but not only did he stay friends with Eric Clapton when Clapton fell in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, the two men grew even closer after Clapton walked away with her.
Unprecedented in scope and filled with numerous color photos, this rich biography captures George Harrison at his most multi-faceted: devoted friend, loyal son, master guitar player, brilliant songwriter, cocaine addict, serial philanderer, global philanthropist, student of Indian mysticism, self-deprecating comedian, and, ultimately, iconic artist and man beloved by millions.
New Fiction & Mysteries
-
The Roaring Days of Zora Lily
"Beautifully written and vividly drawn . . . [a] dazzling and sexy, dangerous and inspiring journey through the speakeasies of the jazz age to the glamour and darkness of Hollywood." --Jillian Cantor, USA Today bestselling author of Beautiful Little Fools
The discovery of a hidden label on a famous gown unearths the story of a talented young seamstress in this glittering novel of family, love, ambition, and self discovery by the USA Today bestselling author of The Flight Girls.
2023, The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History: A costume conservator is preparing an exhibition featuring movie costumes from the 1920s to present day. As she gingerly places a gown once worn by Greta Garbo on a mannequin, she discovers another name hidden beneath the designer's label, leaving her to wonder--who is Zora Lily?
1924, Seattle: Poverty-stricken Zora Hough spends her days looking after her younger siblings while sewing up holes and fixing hems for clients to bring in extra money, working her fingers to the bone just to survive. But at night, as she lies in the bed she shares with one of her three sisters, she secretly dreams of becoming a designer like Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin.
When her best friend gets a job dancing in a club downtown, Zora is lured in by her stories of music, glittering dresses and boys. She follows her friend to the underground speakeasies that are at once exciting and frightening--with smoke hanging in the air, alcohol flowing despite Prohibition, couples dancing in a way that makes Zora blush and a handsome businessman named Harley. It's a world she has only ever imagined, and one with connections that could lead her to the life she's always dreamed of. But as Zora's ambition is challenged by tragedy and duty to her family, she'll learn that dreams come with a cost.
-
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores the weight of the devil’s bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom.
Hugo Contreras’s world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo’s debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.
One day, Hugo’s nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo’s debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there’s one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn’t believe in spirits.
Hugo plans to do what he’s done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo’s old tricks don’t work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi’s demons in an explosive climax.
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe—to ourselves, our families, and our histories. -
Knock Knock, Open Wide
Knock Knock, Open Wide weaves horror and Celtic myth into a terrifying, heartbreaking supernatural tale of fractured family bonds, the secrets we carry, and the veiled forces that guide Irish life.
Driving home late one night, Etain Larkin finds a corpse on a pitch-black country road deep in the Irish countryside. She takes the corpse to a remote farmhouse. So begins a night of unspeakable horror that will take her to the very brink of sanity.
She will never speak of it again.
Two decades later, Betty Fitzpatrick, newly arrived at college in Dublin, has already fallen in love with the drama society, and the beautiful but troubled Ashling Mallen. As their relationship blossoms, Ashling goes to great lengths to keep Betty away from her family, especially her alcoholic mother, Etain.
As their relationship blossoms, Betty learns her lover's terrifying family history, and Ashling's secret obsession. Ashling has become convinced that the horrors inflicted on her family are connected to a seemingly innocent children's TV show. Everyone in Ireland watched this show in their youth, but Ash soon discovers that no one remembers it quite the same way. And only Ashling seems to remember its star: a small black goat puppet who lives in a box and only comes out if you don’t behave. They say he’s never come out.
Almost never.
When the door between the known and unknown opens, it can never close again. -
The Death of Us
From the award-winning author of Death at Greenway and The Lucky One comes a chilling suspense novel in which the discovery of a submerged car in a murky pond reveals betrayals and family secrets that will tear a small town apart.
One rainy night fifteen years ago, a knock at the door changed Liss Kehoe's life forever.
On that night, Ashley Hay stood on Liss's front porch and handed over her brand-new baby Callan.
She was never seen or heard from again.
Since then, Liss has raised Callan as her own, and loves him as fiercely as any mother would. But in the back of her mind, she's always wondered whether Ashley is still out there somewhere--and feared what might happen if she comes back.
When Ashley does reappear, it's not in the way Liss expected. After all these years, Ashley's car has been found... in the quarry pond on Kehoe property. But the discovery of the car dredges up more questions than answers. What really happened on the night of Ashley's disappearance? Was it a tragic accident, or something far more sinister? Someone in town knows the truth, and they'll go to great lengths to keep it quiet.
As tensions rise in the small community, Liss must fight to protect her family and keep her own secrets hidden--or risk losing everything she loves.
-
The Intern
A young Harvard law student falls under the spell of a charismatic judge in this timely and thrilling novel about class, ambition, family and murder.
Madison Rivera lands the internship of a lifetime working for Judge Kathryn Conroy. But Madison has a secret that could destroy her career. Her troubled younger brother Danny has been arrested, and Conroy is the judge on his case.
When Danny goes missing after accusing the judge of corruption, Madison’s quest for answers brings her deep into the judge’s glamorous world. Is Kathryn Conroy a mentor, a victim, or a criminal? Is she trying to help Madison or use her as a pawn? And why is somebody trying to kill her?
As the two women circle each other in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, will they save each other, or will betrayal leave one of them dead? -
A Haunting on the Hill
From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House--a "scary and beautifully written" (Neil Gaiman) new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time.
Open the door . . . .
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It's enormous, old, and ever-so eerie--the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly's girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house's peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . . .
"The lines of paranoia, art, and reality are terrifyingly blurred . . . only the brilliant Elizabeth Hand could so expertly honor Jackson's rage, wit, and vision with a twenty-first century twist." --Paul Tremblay
"Hill House is back and haunting as ever in this vividly imagined return to Shirley Jackson's iconic setting . . . This book gave me the best kind of nightmares." --Ana Reyes -
Blood Sisters
A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister.
There are secrets in the land.
As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.
While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.
When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women.
But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd.
The truth will be unearthed. -
Midnight Is the Darkest Hour
From the critically acclaimed author of In My Dreams I Hold A Knife and The Last Housewife comes Midnight is the Darkest Hour, a gothic Southern thriller about a killer haunting a small Louisiana town, where two outcasts--the preacher's daughter and the boy from the wrong side of the tracks--hold the key to uncovering the truth.
For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all...even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar--and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town's secret underbelly in search of true evil.
A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we've come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world.
"Where The Crawdads Sing meets Twilight meets Thelma and Louise in this brilliantly realized, totally original thriller. Absolutely sensational--I couldn't put it down." --Clare Mackintosh, New York Times bestselling author
-
The Oceans and the Stars
Mark Helprin, the #1 New York Times, bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, presents a fast-paced, beautifully written novel about the majesty of the sea; a life dedicated to duty, honor, and country; and the gift of falling in love.
A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what's right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line's only prototype--Athena, Patrol Coastal 15--with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral.
Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride, and while supervising Athena's fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in last-chance love. Soon thereafter, he is deployed on a mission that subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy.
As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps him alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial. In classic literary form, an enthralling new novel that extolls the virtues of living by the laws of conscience, decency, and sacrifice, The Oceans and the Stars is nothing short of a masterpiece.
-
The Last Exchange
"Here's the catch--even if I make it out of here alive, I need a reason to breathe again."
When MacThomas Pockets finished his last tour as part of the Scottish Special Forces, he was hired to consult for a film director to finesse some scenes that weren't working. In a twist he never saw coming, he ended up moving to L.A. to work as the bodyguard for movie star Maybe Joe Sue.
It didn't take long for Pockets to realize there were two Joe Sues: The Joe Sue the public saw with her perfect life and her Hollywood husband. And the private Joe Sue: the one with the traumatic youth that no amount of pills could cover up, who desperately wanted a child of her own.
Even after their paths diverged, he continued to track Joe Sue's life. Only a few would notice when the bottom fell out. But he did. And that's when he stepped in.
One man seeks to answer the question: How far would you go--really-- to save someone you love? And in the masterful hands of New York Times bestselling author Charles Martin, finding the answer will take readers on an intense and heart-wrenching journey to the very end.
- Suspenseful, emotion-filled contemporary fiction
- Stand-alone novel
- Includes discussion questions for book clubs
- Also by Charles Martin: The Water Keeper, The Mountains Between Us, and Chasing Fireflies

Book Groups
Love to read and talk about books? Join a Book Group!

Reading Challenges
Take part in one of our Reading Challenges!