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The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the worldOn the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood?Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is'a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language,'The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.

The highly acclaimed author of Landslide delivers “[an] intricate, delicate-as-rice-paper novel'(O, The Oprah Magazine) about an ex-pat in China who embarks on a journey that takes her into the darkest corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood. When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we're done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling in love with Lukas. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as artist, mother, and wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking, and descending into boredom and unhappiness. So she agrees to go. There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself and her marriage. Written in a voice at once wry, sensual, blunt, and hypnotic, Elsey Come Home is a modern odyssey and a quietly dynamic portrait of contemporary womanhood.

A literary tour de force from the acclaimed author of The Blessings-a riveting novel about one of the most urgent crises of our time. One August afternoon, as single mother Maggie Daley prepares to send her only child off to college, their world is shattered by news of a mass shooting at the local mall in rural Maine. As reports and updates about the tragedy begin to roll in, Maggie, an English professor, is further stunned to learn that the gunman had been a student of hers: Nathan Dugan was an awkward, complicated young man whose quiet presence in her classroom had faded from her memory-but not, it seems, the memories of his classmates. When a viral blog post hints at the existence of a dark, violence-tinged essay Nathan had written during Maggie's freshman comp seminar, Maggie soon finds herself at the center of a heated national controversy. Could the overlooked essay have offered critical red flags that might have warned of, or even prevented, the murders to come? As the media storm grows around her, Maggie makes a series of desperate choices that threaten to destroy not just the personal and professional lives she's worked so hard to build, but-more important-the happiness and safety of her sensitive daughter, Anna. Engrossing and provocative, combining sharp plot twists with Juska's award-winning, trademark literary sophistication, If We Had Known is at once an unforgettable mother-daughter journey, an exquisite portrait of a community in turmoil, and a harrowing examination of ethical and moral responsibility in a dangerously interconnected digital world.

The Strangers, a breathtaking companion to Vermette's bestselling debut The Break, is a fierce exploration of of bonds that refuse to be broken even in the most traumatic of circumstances. Cedar, Phoenix, and Elsie—these are the strangers, each haunted in her own way. Cedar grapples with the pain of being separated from her mother, Elsie, and her sister, Phoenix. From a youth detention center, Phoenix gives birth to a baby she'll never get to raise. And Elsie, struggling with addiction and determined to turn her life around, is buoyed by the idea of being reunited with her daughters and striving to be someone they can depend on, unlike her own distant mother. Between flickering moments of warmth and support, the women diverge and reconnect, fighting to survive in a fractured system that pretends to offer success but expects them to fail. Facing the distinct blade of racism from those they trusted most, they urge one another to move through the darkness, all the while wondering if they'll ever emerge safely on the other side.

An electric contemporary reimagining of the myth of Persephone and Demeter set over the course of one summer on a lush private island, about addiction and sex, family and independence, and who holds the power in a modern underworld.Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she's in charge. Her mother, Emer, head of a teetering agricultural NGO, senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears. Alternating between the two women's perspectives, Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America's own late capitalist mythos. Lyon's reinvention of Persephone and Demeter's story makes for a haunting and ecstatic novel that vibrates with lush abandon. Readers will not soon forget it.

A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 yearsAn ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family's origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family's mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present.Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

“A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)​ “The collection will reshape what you think about the region and the people that inhabit it.” —Debutiful “Surprising and revelatory.... I love this book.” —Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us “This book has staying power.” —Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts Original stories of Black family life in Louisville, Kentucky, for readers of Dantiel Moniz (Milk Blood Heat) and Kai Harris (What the Fireflies Knew). The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers'drug addictions. JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother's illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria's new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her. Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry's stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

“Stradal serves up another saga of food and family, hurt and healing, pitched between cliff-hanger moments... that make the pages fly.” —PeopleFrom the New York Times bestselling author J. Ryan Stradal, a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she's been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel's grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed. Ned is also an heir—to a chain of home-style diners—and while he doesn't have a head for business, he knows his family's chain could provide a better future than his wife's fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation? In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, J. Ryan Stradal has once again given us a story full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage; what we hold onto and what we leave behind; and what our legacy will be when we are gone.

A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner “An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction​ • A sweeping and beautifully rendered exploration of home and yearning, following the fracturing of a family upon the demise of its patriarch'Each character here is richly and deeply drawn...This is a novel that encourages us to stand in life's burning doorways, and to think long before we walk away or walk through.”—New York TimesIn the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, consuming Grenfell Tower and many of the lives within it. Across town, an earlier spark has caught fire. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt—estranged husband, complicated dad, and Pitt family patriarch—takes his final breaths alone.These twin tragedies open Diana Evans's A House for Alice, an aching portrait of a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure. At the novel's center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria. Her three daughters are torn on the issue of whether she stays or goes, and while youngest sibling Melissa also grapples with the embers of her own failed relationship, the Pitt family's foundational pillars—of trust, love, and cultural identity—begin to crack.Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

Toby Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of her family, has opened a summer residence program in the Nebraska Sandhills for the wounded and broken, misfits and dreamers. Besides her guests—a minister on sabbatical and a woman recovering from cancer treatment—Toby is joined by Anita and Luís, her hired help; Anita's brother Gabe; and someone Toby least expected, her nearly estranged daughter, Nola Jean. Mother-daughter tensions, age-old prejudices, and generational divides challenge the members of this disparate community as they bump up against each other. Parallel conflicts occur against the backdrop of a changing rural landscape where history clashes with evolving mores. In this thoughtful and moving novel Pamela Carter Joern probes the complications of family relationships, identity, belonging, and the impact of long-held secrets.

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • Instant New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, The New Yorker, and more. “Nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving.” —Vogue • “A novel of triumph.” —The Washington Post • “Harrowing, immersive, and other-worldly.” —People From “one of America's finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub)—comes a haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War that's destined to become a classic.Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours” (NPR). Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this “[s]earing and lyrical…raw, transcendent, and ultimately hopeful” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's most magnificent novel yet.

A powerful work of Afro-magic realism that interrogates the legacy of slavery and roots of poverty, witnesses the beauty and power in survival, and asks whether belief, magic, and intention can forge new realities Blue's daughter, Tsitra, is dying a horrific death. Thousands of miles away, Blue feels time slowing and hears voices, followed by an 18-month stillness. More than a century before, Blue's grandparents, Amanda and Palmer, attend a salon party in New Orleans. It's a veritable array of who's-who within pre–Civil War social circles. Conversations get heated quickly as Ismay, the hostess who hails from French royalty, antagonizes Palmer, a landowner whose parents had been sold into American slavery and who's there to seek revenge, and Amanda, a shapeshifter and puzzlemaker who had been enslaved until this very gathering. At this party, Amanda learns of a plot that will doom a line of her—and Palmer's—family to poverty. She devises her own counter-plot to undo the damage. Meanwhile, Blue comes out of her stillness, broke and devoid of inspiration. In profound grief and consumed by guilt, Blue travels to The Ranch where the voices grow louder and she has visions of two women from the distant past. As time collapses and Blue and Amanda meet in the space of possibility, Blue feels the spark of a power and creative energy she has only glimpsed. A novel of invention but grounded in the real, The Blue Is Where God Lives is a dual-timeline, time-bending novel of undeniable beauty, magic, and possibility.

A quirky, thrilling, darkly-funny page-turner that explores the fuzzy lines between sanity and insanity, magic and reality, love and duty. It's 1969. An eight-year-old girl, Elizabeth Squire, has a choice to make: to be disabled by the circumstances of her own botched birth or to become extraordinary. In Buffy Cram's captivating new novel, Elizabeth narrates the story of her childhood in the late sixties, describing how she came to be at a Vancouver halfway house at the age of nineteen. Once Upon an Effing Time chronicles the sometime-exploitative relationship between Elizabeth and Margaret, her mother, and the bizarre and criminal misadventures they have after running away from Ontario's cheese belt and their “Big Sad Story.” Attempting to bond with her neglectful mother, Elizabeth learns to adopt personas and live multiple lives, transforms into a fortune teller named MeMe who speaks primarily in Bob Dylan lyrics, and joins an American hippie doomsday cult. Elizabeth's life is fragmented between ordinary childhood pleasures and indulging her mother's conspiracy theories about the upcoming moon landing by hiding pamphlets in New York City public library books. Throughout, Buffy Cram weaves humour and heartbreak together to form an engaging narrative about cults—the cult of family, the cult of counterculture, the cult of Rock n'Roll—and the role of story within those cults.

A National Bestseller A USA TODAY Bestseller A New York Times Editors'Choice A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Electric Literature, Tor, and Literary Hub From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a “Grimm Brothers fairy tale for the modern age” (Good Housekeeping) and “darkly funny horror novel” (NYLON) about a lonely young woman who's drawn to a cult-like spa in the wake of her mother's mysterious death. “Surreal, scary and deeply moving—like all the best fairy tales” (People). A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Time, Vogue, The Guardian, Goodreads, Bustle, The Millions, LitHub, Tor, Good Housekeeping, and more!For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother's considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother's demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother's) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass. Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER“Whip-smart and compulsively readable... both a wildly entertaining adventure story and a meditation on what it means to love your children—fiercely and imperfectly.”—Oprah Daily “Springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and the heart.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post“A full-hearted portrait of sisterhood, family and the ways we process grief. Charming, wry, and original.” —People TWO SISTERS, ONE MOM, AND ONE WOOLLY SECRET.Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother's scientific expedition. But there's a lot about their lives lately that hasn't been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it's like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.

“A poetic debut which masterfully intertwines themes of familial love, friendship, class, prejudice and trauma with psychological acuity and wit.” ─ The 2023 Booker Prize JudgesI lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards. Sunday Forrester does things more carefully than most people. On certain days, she must eat only white food; she drinks only carbonated beverages; she avoids clocks. It's 1988, before autism was widely diagnosed. Sunday has an old etiquette handbook that guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly, her clever, headstrong teenage daughter, now on the cusp of leaving their home in the Lake District of England. When the glamourous Vita and Rollo move in next door, the couple disarm Sunday with their charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday's book. Soon they are spending loads of time together, and Sunday feels acknowledged like never before. But underneath Vita and Rollo's allure lies something else, something darker. For Sunday has precisely what Vita has always wanted for herself: a daughter of her own. A page-turning psychological drama, All the Little Bird-Hearts is an extraordinary, often witty glimpse into the mind of an autistic woman─and a remarkable debut by an author who is herself autistic. It is also an astute portrait of a woman coming to terms with the meaning of love, of motherhood, and of authenticity, and a poignant reminder about why accepting ourselves can be so freeing.

•LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE•'Pearl, an exceptional debut novel, is both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation, evoking the profundities of the haunting medieval poem. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort – at once quiet and hugely ambitious – is very high. It's a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.'—Booker Prize judges A haunting debut novel inspired by the medieval poem of the same nameMarianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing.Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother's love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother's disappearance and the secrets she's sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

The redemptive power of stories and family is revealed in New York Times bestselling author John Connolly's atmospheric tale set in the same magical universe as the “enchanting, engrossing, and enlightening” (Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale) The Book of Lost Things.“Twice upon a time—for that is how some stories should continue…” Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident—a body without a spirit. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud the fairy stories Phoebe loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world. But an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, to journey to a land colored by the memories of childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father—a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; a land where old enemies are watching and waiting… The Land of Lost Things.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds'A tour de force.'—Tayari Jones, author of An American MarriageIn 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital's entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee's father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother's maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a warmhearted and empowering new novel about love, family, friendship, secrets, and a life-changing journey.Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she's lived since college still looks like she's just moved in. But she's got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She's at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she's on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend. Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she's always wanted. Yet Abby can't escape the feeling that something isn't right...or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. When Abby gets a last-minute invitation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she's happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind. But things get complicated fast. First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she'd never see again. Sebastian is a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away. In spite of their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance. Then there's a surprise last-minute addition to the trip: her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she's still trying to undo. Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways...and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.

From the Orange Prize­–winning author of A Crime in the Neighborhood comes a “sharply witty” and “impeccably written” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) novel featuring a therapist attempting to unlock the most difficult cases of her life—those of her son and of her mother. Anyone who's ever had trouble persuading a teenager or an elderly parent to “open up” will recognize Lorna's dilemma during the three days she finds herself alone in a remote lakeside cottage with her mutely miserable son and her impenetrable mother. Despite her training as a clinical social worker, and her arsenal of therapeutic techniques, she's resisted at every turn as she tries to understand what's made the two people most important to her go silent. Though silence has always marked Lorna's family. Her father was deaf. Her mother, Marika, abandoned Lorna and her brother when they were children. No explanation was ever offered. Nor why Marika resurfaced eighteen years ago to invite Lorna and her infant son, Adam, to Vermont for a strained reunion. A relationship, of sorts, has followed—an annual Thanksgiving visit, during which Marika sits taciturnly among the guests at Lorna's table, agreeing only to “be seen to exist.” But now it's Adam who won't talk. Home from college and suffering over something he won't disclose, he's so depressed that he refers to himself as “A” for “Anti-Matter.” So, when she's summoned to Vermont because Marika has had a fall, Lorna sees an opportunity to get Adam out of the house and maybe also a chance to finally connect with her mother. What she never anticipated was that grandson and grandmother would form a bond, and leave her out of it. How do you care for people you can't understand, and who don't want to be understood? Suspenseful, poignantly funny, and beautifully incisive, The Blue Window explores the ways people misperceive each other, and how secrets and silence, wielded and guarded, exert their power over families—and what luminous, frightening, and tender possibilities might come forth, once those secrets are challenged. “Suzanne Berne is an elegant, psychologically astute novelist” (Tom Perrotta), whose new book reveals what happens to people who hide from themselves, and the act of imagination it takes to find them.

'Beautifully written, tender and terrifying.'UNA MANNION Annie surrendered her fantasy of travelling the world, settled instead for marrying her beloved Peter and becoming a mother. When her two youngest daughters – her Crow Face and her Doll Face – perform a seemingly impossible act of levitation at a family picnic, Annie realises that they are truly extraordinary. Magical. And it's her role to protect them. With growing paranoia and a bitter fatalism, she spirits her daughters away from their home and the wreck of her marriage. But she commits a terrible, unthinkable, unmotherly act on the way. Crow Face, Doll Face is an uncanny, brooding tale of domestic disturbances, dysfunctional families, flawed mothers, and unfulfilled dreams.'I can't think of anyone who's currently writing more assuredly, or more enjoyably, in the fantastical tradition of Angela Carter, Emma Tennant and Elizabeth Bowen.'STEVE DUFFY'Deliciously unsettling… delicately peels away the layers of ordinary family life to reveal dark truths underneath.'CATRIN KEAN'Unflinching in its authentic and raw portrayal of the complexities of motherhood.'PHILIPPA HOLLOWAY

“Obsessed!” —Chloë Sevigny “I am literally obsessed.” —Busy Philipps Hailed as “richly intimate” and “wickedly delightful” (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one woman's affair with her daughter's best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition.It's opening night, but Alice's performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter's Tale is far from glamorous. She doesn't have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn't exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another's only friends—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend's support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine. A professor of women's and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine's landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she's struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice's play, she relents, if only to escape writer's block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice's performance and realizes that her daughter's once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman. Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie's early friendship days and Celine's decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary Hollywood—Alice and Celine's affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.

NAMED ONE OF'51 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023'(WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS) LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD In beautifully rendered prose, a mother and a daughter struggle as outsiders in Baghdad and London in this intergenerational drama set against a background of political tension and intrigue “Who would be charmed by tales of life in the beautiful old house on the banks of the Tigris—looted now no doubt, its shutters torn and the courtyard strewn with mattresses?”One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq? Their stories begin in 1937, when Mona's mother Diane, a lively Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an ambitious Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane of colluding with Duncan and the British.Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon's richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.

Celebrated by the Boston Globe as “a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs,” the deliciously weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the secret lives of the polished Connecticut haven that got us all hooked on NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, and jolts us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide“Acampora's prose has a seductive, pearlescent allure.”—TIME Magazine Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back in her affluent hometown of Nearwater, Connecticut, where she's married to a successful older architect, raising a preteen daughter, and trying to vitalize the provincial local art center. As the years pass, she's grown restless in her safe and comfortable routine, haunted by the flash of the life she used to live. When intense and intriguing young artist-environmentalist Gabriel arrives in town with his aristocratic family, his impact on the Raders has hothouse effects. As Gabriel pushes to realize his artistic vision for the world, he pulls both Louisa and her daughter Sylvie under his spell, with consequences that disrupt the Raders'world forever.A strange, sexy, and sinister novel of art and obsession, in The Hundred Waters Acampora gives us an incisive, page-turning story of ambition, despair, desire, and the pursuit of fulfillment and freedom at all costs.

The searing and haunting debut novel from PEN finalist and New York Times bestelling author Andrea J. BuchananSpanning five generations of women, Five-Part Invention wrestles with the question—if trauma echoes through generations, can love echo, too? Is the love we transmit enough to undo the trauma of the past that we unwittingly carry with us and often re-enact in the present? When Lise, a pianist, suffers a nervous breakdown early in her marriage, her husband, in a warped act of protection and jealousy, has her piano taken away. With prose that is precise and emotionally affecting, Buchanan vividly renders how Lise's separation from her one source of expression and fulfilment cascades into her relationship with her daughter, leaving a legacy of trauma that echoes through the generations to come. Characters emerge broken and passionate, jagged, and yet hopeful and emotionally resonant, written in a way that only Buchanan, herself a conservatory-trained pianist, could achieve. Five-Part Invention is by turns frightening and exquisitely observed, and establishes Buchanan as a literary force.

A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The story of three once-inseparable college friends in Nigeria who reunite in Lagos for the first time in thirty years—a sparkling novel about the extraordinary resilience of female friendship. “A story rendered with so much heart.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, best-selling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six Funmi, Enitan, and Zainab first meet at university in Nigeria and become friends for life despite their differences. Funmi is beautiful, brash, and determined; Enitan is homely and eager, seeking escape from her single mother's smothering and needy love; Zainab is elegant and reserved, raised by her father's first two wives after her mother's death in childbirth. Their friendship is complicated but enduring, and over the course of the novel, the reader learns about their loves and losses. How Funmi stole Zainab's boyfriend and became pregnant, only to have an abortion and lose the boyfriend to police violence. How Enitan was seduced by an American Peace Corps volunteer, the only one who ever really saw her, but is culturally so different from him—a Connecticut WASP—that raising their daughter together put them at odds. How Zainab fell in love with her teacher, a friend of her father's, and ruptured her relationship with her father to have him.Now, some thirty years later, the three women are reunited for the first time, in Lagos. The occasion: Funmi's daughter, Destiny, is getting married. Enitan brings her American daughter, Remi. Zainab travels by bus, nervously leaving her ailing husband in the care of their son. Funmi, hosting the weekend with her wealthy husband, wants everything to go perfectly. But as the big day approaches, it becomes clear that something is not right. As the novel builds powerfully, the complexities of the mothers'friendship—and the private wisdom each has earned—come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment of decision. Dele Weds Destiny is a sensational debut from a dazzling new voice in contemporary fiction.

'Suspenseful, dazzling and moving'Rumaan Alam'Arresting and powerful'Lily King'Breathtakingly propulsive and insightful'Leslie Jamison It's 22 December and Henry, Kate and Martin are gathering with their partners and children at Henry and Alice's house in upstate New York. It's the first Christmas since their mother passed and without her ever-present advice and gentle nudges to connect with each other when they need it most, the siblings have grown distant. Their differences are all too apparent, from the lives they have forged for themselves to what they each want to do with their sole inheritance: their mother's house. As they try and fail and try again to create new picture-perfect memories, tensions and old resentments rise, but they are forced to unite when a local family calls for help. Compassionate and wise, Flight explores the meaning of family and home, and the gift of being together.Praise for Lynn Steger Strong ‘Furious, aching and razor sharp'Emma Cline ‘A deeply intelligent and sneakily moving novel about having the ground fall away beneath your feet. Strong ingeniously undercuts conventional wisdom about what it means to be a success in this world'Jenny Offill ‘A defining novel of our age of left-behind families... as if Anne Helen Peterson's viral burnout article and John Steinbeck's oeuvre had a baby'Vulture ‘Elizabeth's anxious, raw voice ties these threads together, coalescing into a story about the price women pay for craving what's just out of reach'Time magazine ‘Through Elizabeth's experiences and in her propulsive voice, the novel explores race, class, privilege, coincidence, family, friendship and love'Guardian ‘A smart, sharp novel'Elle ‘Strong strips away at the imbalance of advantages that ultimately injure us all and the collisions that never cease. Yet, in this stunning novel, she never loses sight of the irrepressible desire to love, connect and forgive one another'Observer

Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, Alcott wrote the book over several months, at the request of her publisher. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel. Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, with readers eager for more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (titled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, though the name originated with the publisher and not Alcott). It was also met with success. The two volumes were issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels to her popular work, both also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). The novel has been said to address three major themes:'domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity.'According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new genre. Elbert argues that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the'All-American girl'and that her various aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.

A heart-warming historical novel about surviving against the odds and finding a family, from top 10 bestseller Lindsey Hutchinson.In two rundown houses, at the side of a barren heath, live six children with no family but each other. Abandoned or orphaned, every day is a fight to find food and keep warm. But they are determined to stay free of the clutches of the workhouse and the horrors that would face them if they were ever torn apart.Dora Parsons lives with her mother Mary and her evil grandmother Edith. Edith's house may be comfortable and warm, and food is plentiful, but every day Dora suffers at the hands of her spiteful gran. Desperate to protect her child, Mary longs to run away but she has no money to keep them alive and nowhere else to call home.When fate intervenes and Mary and Dora meet the children, events are set in train that will change all their lives forever. But will the friends find peace and comfort at last, or does the chill of the winter signal the most desperate ending of all… The top 10 best-seller is back with a heart-breaking, page-turning story of survival, friendship and what it means to be a family. Perfect for fans of Catherine Cookson, Val Wood and Lyn Andrews.Praise for Lindsey Hutchinson:'A great story with a great mix of characters, well written and keeps you hooked with each page turn!'Sarah Davies, NetGalley'A wonderful read... The author writes so well, it's a really hard novel to put down!'Grace Smith, NetGalley.'Make sure to read this book where you won't be disturbed because once it gets going, you won't want to put it down'Andrea Ruiz, NetGalley'A very poignant, feel-good-factor novel'Shelia Easson, NetGalley'Excellent story!'Stephanie Collins, NetGalley'The story will linger in your mind long after you finish it'The Avid Reader

“The writing is sharp, beautiful, very evocative. The characters pop off the page and are instantly recognizable. Noomi is so achingly human and alive. I love the subtlety of Patel's hand in the way she depicts Noomi and her world in Mirror Made of Rain. Everything feels so lush and gorgeous as the story at the heart of the novel emerges and eventually coheres to devastating effect.” ―Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy AnimalsDespite an embarrassing, alcoholic mother, Noomi Wadia is loathe to change her own hard-partying ways simply because it's what's expected in Kamalpur high society. As her peers begin to marry and her social obligations become more fraught, she finds herself under constant scrutiny at summer parties of the city's upper crust.With her options in her hometown growing increasingly limited, Noomi leaves for Mumbai and quickly becomes a successful journalist. There she falls in love with Veer, who appreciates her for exactly who she is. When Noomi and Veer decide to marry, Noomi must observe a host of patriarchal wedding rituals at the behest of her new in-laws, whose cultural customs deviate from her own. Soon, Noomi realizes that her worst fears have come to pass--she is trapped in the same cycle of self-destructiveness as her mother, and she must battle her impulses or risk losing it all.A riveting exploration of class and tradition in contemporary India, Noomi is as quick-witted as she is quick-tempered. At times funny and tragic, taking place over many years of Noomi's life, Naheed Phiroze Patel's exhilarating debut novel shows how society encourages us to see ourselves through the eyes of others.

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Bookish Named a Best Book of the Month by Buzzfeed'The novel is masterfully plotted.”—New York Times Book Review “Atomic Anna is a dazzling work of ingenuity and imagination.”―Téa Obreht,National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of InlandFrom the author of A Bend in the Stars, an epic adventure as three generations of women work together and travel through time to prevent the Chernobyl disaster and right the wrongs of their past. Three brilliant women. Two life-changing mistakes. One chance to reset the future. In 1986, nuclear scientist Anna Berkova is asleep in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl's reactor melts down. The energy surge accidentally sends her through time. When she wakes up, she's in 1992 and discovers Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Should Anna travel in time to save her daughter or stop Chernobyl? Anna goes to'60s Philadelphia, where Molly is coming of age as an adopted refusenik in a family full of secrets. Molly finds solace in comic books, drawing her own series, Atomic Anna. But when she meets volatile Viktor, their romance sets her life on a dangerous course. Anna then seeks out Molly's daughter, Raisa, in the'80s. Raisa is a lonely teen and math prodigy, who finds new issues of Atomic Anna in unexpected places. Each comic challenges her to solve equations leading to two impossible conclusions: Time travel is real and so is the strange old woman claiming to be her grandmother. These three remarkable women must work together across time to prevent the greatest nuclear disaster of the twentieth century, but simply because you can change the past, does it mean you should?

A heartening and life-affirming novel about a single mother learning to make a bigger life, and the power of human connection to grow our worlds.Delphine Jones's world is about to get much bigger...if only she'd let it.Devoted single mother Delphine Jones is an expert at putting her head down and moving through life one day at a time. Since getting pregnant at sixteen, her circle has only ever included her now eleven-year-old daughter and best friend, Em, and her complicated father whom they live with. But when an opportunity for her to finish school presents itself, Delphine finally does something she hasn't done in years: she takes a chance on herself. Sometimes all it takes is one chance. As Delphine rediscovers her passions and her belief in herself, her circle expands to include an Oscar-winning actress turned teacher, an Eritrean couple running a local café-cum-jazz club, an elderly French widow looking to converse, and a handsome musician who awakens something in Delphine that she thought had been long buried. But as Delphine's eyes and heart start to open, she must also face questions she's stonewalled for more than a decade, questions about Em's father. Is she brave enough?

Posing the question: who packed the baggage we carry from birth?Don't Ask poses the question: who packed the suitcase we carry from birth? In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. Born in a German DP camp, she is the only child of Rokhl and the late Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but Rokhl is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her. Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she received from a laconic, distant mother, a foil to Hannah's voluble father who rescued Rokhl from Auschwitz. When Hannah announces that she must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah ‘go to that land of murderers,'it would be over her dead body. Three days later, Hannah locates her missing mother in the morgue. Secreted away in a confessional letter for Hannah to find one day is the story of Rokhl's life filled with loss, betrayal, and guilt. It is woven into the intrigue of the plot about contested land and a love affair weighted down by the baggage of history.

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jin's debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter's queer relationship.When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept. Green's involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green's mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one's own path.With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.

'A penetrating view into what it means to grieve, and then to heal... a captivating story'Karen HarradineTalented composer Alison Connaught has spent her career writing music for big names, but when her actress daughter, Ria, dies from an overdose, Alison is numb and can no longer compose.Haunted by the feeling that she has somehow let Ria down, Alison searches for answers, first during an intense stay with a Hopi shaman and then by travelling to Hollywood to try to piece together the many parts of Ria's life that have so far eluded her.As she meets her daughter's friends, colleagues and therapists, Alison finally begins to understand the realities of Ria's life, opening the door to self expression and a different kind of music, inspired by stirred/raw feelings and the spirit of Ria.Michelle Shine's skill as a storyteller brings Alison's thoughts and actions to life in this visceral and deeply moving tale of grief, regret and ultimately, hope.

'[an] imaginative debut...'- The New York Times'The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is a bittersweet and achingly tender coming of age novel. Like V. E. Schwab and Audrey Niffenegger, Rita Zoey Chin is an expert guide to that territory in which magic, loss, and possibility change not only the characters but the reader, too.” - Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble The luminous story of a fiercely lonely young woman's quest to uncover the truth behind her mother's disappearance... When 6-year-old empath Leah Fern—once “The Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World”—is abandoned by her beautiful magician mother, she is consumed with longing for her mother's return. Until something bizarre happens: On her 21st birthday Leah receives an inheritance from someone she doesn't even know, and finds herself launched on a journey of magical discovery. It's a voyage that will spiral across the United States, Canada, into the Arctic Circle and beyond—and help her make her own life whole by piecing together the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting novel about the transcendent power of the imagination, the magic at the threshold of past and present, and the will it takes to love.

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vogue and Vulture “Alternately whimsical, sweet, and dark,” this astonishing debut novel about a lonely girl waiting for her mother “brim[s] with uncompromisingly African magical realism” (The New York Times).Ayosa is a wandering spirit—joyous, exuberant, filled to the brim with longing. Her only companions in her grandmother's crumbling house are as lonely as Ayosa herself: the ghostly Fatumas, whose eyes are the size of bay windows, who teach her to dance and wail at the death news; the Jolly-Annas, cruel birds who cover their solitude with spiteful laughter; the milkman, who never greets Ayosa and whose milk tastes of mud; and Sindano, the kind owner of a café no one ever visits. Unexpectedly, miraculously, one day Ayosa finds a friend. Yet she is always fixed on her beautiful mama, Nabumbo Promise: a mysterious and aloof photographer, she comes and goes as she pleases, with no apology or warning. Set at the intersection of the spirit world and the human one, Things They Lost sets out a rich and magical vision of “girlhood as a time of complexity, laced with unparalleled creativity and expansion” (Vogue). Heartbreaking, elegant, and written in “giddily exuberant prose” (Financial Times), it's a story about connection, coming-of-age, and the dizzying dualities of love at its most intoxicating and all-encompassing.

Starling can trap a rabbit, cook a meal from a hedge and hear a bailiff coming from a mile off. All she has ever known is a nomadic existence, travelling in a camper van with Mar, her strong-willed mother.But Mar has cut them off from their community, and this winter they're stuck in deep mud in a wood, with no fuel, no money and no friends. One morning, without explanation, Mar leaves and doesn't come back.Utterly alone, Starling must learn to survive without her mother and build a life on her own terms. An offer to stay with an old friend draws her into a more conventional way of living - but can rootless Starling ever find a place where she truly belongs?

A 2023 MICHIGAN NOTABLE BOOKA beautiful and gripping psychological novel about a mother and daughter who, after a lifetime on the run from a dark and dangerous past, land in a small Michigan town that may hold the key to ending their fugitive lifestyle. For Blue Lake's entire life, she and her mother, Scarlet, have been on the run from HIM—the man who Scarlet, a talented and enigmatic painter, insists is chasing them. But now, at fifteen years old, Blue has begun to resent the nomadic life that once seemed like an adventure, increasingly unsure what to make of the phantom pursuer she's never seen. She only yearns to settle down in one place, to live a normal life. When Scarlet and Blue arrive in the beachfront town of South Haven, Michigan, it seems that Blue's wishes might finally come true. She makes a good friend, is falling in love for the first time, and has found a piano teacher who recognizes her budding talent. But even as Blue thrives, she cannot shake her worry about her mother, whose eccentricities and art are only becoming increasingly difficult to understand. Scarlet, meanwhile, has very different intentions for their stay in South Haven. It was no accident that she brought them there and, with the help of the psychoanalyst she's sought out, Henry, she is determined to find a way to finally escape the shadow of her traumatic past, no matter the cost. Told through the alternating voices of Blue, Scarlet, and Henry, Scarlet in Blue is a page-turning story about the ramifications of past trauma, the way art can hold our lives together, and, most of all, the enduring bond between mother and child.

'Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv.'-USA Today,'Best Books of the Year''Toews is a master of dialogue.'-New York Times Book Review, Editors'Choice'A revelation.'-Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year • Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • Writers'Trust Fiction Prize Finalist • Indie Next Pick • Amazon Editors'Pick • Apple Book of the MonthFrom the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women.“You're a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send.Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.

A Page of Love (1878) is a novel by French author Émile Zola. The eighth of twenty volumes of Zola's monumental Les Rougon-Macquart series is an epic story of family, politics, class, and history that traces the disparate paths of several French citizens raised by the same mother. Spanning the entirety of the French Second Empire, Zola provides a sweeping portrait of change that refuses to shy away from controversy and truth as it gets to the heart of heredity and human nature. Hélène Grandjean, a member of the Mouret family, finds herself desperate and alone when her husband Charles dies from a sudden illness. Left as the sole guardian of her young daughter Jeanne, she does her best to provide while overcoming the boundaries of life in a strange new town. Having moved from Marseilles to the suburbs of Paris only days before Charles'death, Hélène longs for friendship and community. When Jeanne suffers a violent seizure, she receives assistance from her neighbor, Dr. Deberle. Soon, Hélène befriends Deberle and his wife Juliette, who introduce her to their family and small circle of acquaintances. Although she remains wary of romance, Hélène soon finds herself falling in love with a kind and gentle man, a figure capable of caring for her and her young daughter—a man who is already married. A Page of Love is a story of family and fate, a thrilling and detailed novel that continues a series rich enough for its author to explore in twenty total volumes. This edition of Émile Zola's A Page of Love is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People.“In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, BabyIt's 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border.Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine.Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it's time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

'Propulsive.... Good books sometimes cut to the bone, and this one feels like a scythe.'—The New York Times Book Review'This wise, brilliant novel is so special, so overflowing with honesty and love—about motherhood, sisterhood, what it's like to be a woman—that every paragraph feels like an epiphany. Hanna Halperin knows the fierce love that can exist especially among broken things. Something Wild moved me deeply.'—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of UntamedA searing novel about the love and contradictions of sisterhood, the intoxicating desires of adolescence, and the traumas that trap mothers and daughters in cycles of violenceOne weekend, sisters Tanya and Nessa Bloom pause their respective adult lives and travel to the Boston suburbs to help their mother pack up and move out of their childhood home. For the first time since they were teenagers sharing a bunk bed over a decade ago, they find themselves in the place where long-kept secrets were born, where jealousy, comfort, anger, forgiveness, and repulsion coexist with the fiercest love and loyalty. What they don't expect is for their visit to expose a new, horrifying truth: their mother, Lorraine, is in a violent relationship. As Tanya urges Lorraine to get a restraining order, Nessa struggles to reconcile her fondness for their stepfather with his capacity for brutality. Their differing responses to the abuse bring up the sisters'shared secret—a traumatic, unspoken experience from their adolescence has shaped their lives, their sense of selves, and their relationship with each other and the men in their life. In the midst of this family crisis, they have no choice but to reckon with the past and face each other in the present, in the hope that there's a way out of the violence so deeply ingrained in the Bloom family.Told in alternating perspectives that deftly interweave past and present, Something Wild is a magnetic, unflinching portrait of the bond between sisters, as well as a psychologically acute exploration of the legacy of divorce, the ways trauma reverberates over generations, and how it might be possible to overcome the past.

As a teenager in the 1970s, Sarah is forced to leave her home in upstate New York to accompany a missionary to Idaho. When she falls pregnant, she is dispatched to relatives in Sydney, who place her in a home for unmarried mothers. Years later her daughter, Bet, pieces together her mother's life story, hoping to understand her better. As she learns more about Sarah's past, Bet struggles to come to terms with her own history and identity, yet is determined to make peace with Sarah's choices before it's too late. Lucy Neave's moving and deeply personal novel follows three generations of one family and questions what we can ever truly know of our parents'early lives, even as their experiences weave invisibly into our identities and destinies.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, a searing literary debut novel set in India about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal“I would be lying if I say my mother's misery has never given me pleasure,'says Antara, Tara's now-adult daughter. This is a love story and a story about betrayal—not between lovers but between a mother and a daughter.... In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, embarked on a stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing a disheveled, homeless “artist,” all with little Antara in tow. But now Tara is forgetting things, and Antara is an adult—an artist and married—and must search for a way to make peace with a past that haunts her as she confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter: Is Tara's memory loss real? Are Antara's memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Avni Doshi tells a story at once shocking and empathetic of a mother-daughter relationship and a daughter's search for self. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is the stunning and unforgettable debut of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

On her centennial, a contemporary of Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee joins the Library of America with a volume that restores to print her searing novel about the late Jim Crow South Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was a major figure of the Southern Renaissance, though today her many books and stories are scattered or out of print. This Library of America volume brings together the very best of her writing--three novels and nineteen stories--from a career spanning more than six decades. The Voice at the Back Door (1957), greeted by The New Yorker as'a practically perfect novel'and here restored to print, portrays small-town life in Mississippi during the late Jim Crow era and the self-interest and hatred that kept injustice firmly in place. Published two years after the Emmett Till lynching, it captures the spitting vehemence of its white characters'speech and may have been proven too potentially controversial for the Pulitzer board (which awarded no prize in 1957). Also included in this volume are The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's most famous work, a deftly poignant comedy about Americans abroad that was adapted to the screen by Guy Green; and a second superb Italian novella, Knights and Dragons (1965), reminiscent of Henry James's novels in its atmosphere, interiority, and concern with transplanted Americans. Spencer excelled in the short story form and this volume presents a career-spanning selection by editor Michael Gorra that ranges from the early'First Dark'(1959), a kind of ghost story about a spectral oversized house in a Southern town, to the valedictory'The Wedding Visitor'(2013), about the refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define one's adult life. Spencer's special focus was families, and few writers have so brilliantly plumbed the passions that unite them and the inner upheavals that can tear them apart.

An unforgettable novel of mothers and daughters, wives and muses, secrets and outright lies'Freud is a modern literary rarity: a born storyteller'THE TIMES'Such a powerful book'RICHARD CURTIS'Delivers an emotional punch that left me in tears'RACHEL JOYCE'Utterly compelling'HANNAH ROTHSCHILD'I couldn't love it more'POLLY SAMSON'I loved this book'AMANDA CRAIG'Completely, inspiringly wonderful'BARBARA TRAPIDO'Breathtakingly beautiful'JULIET NICOLSONAN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF 2021Rosaleen is still a teenager, in the early Sixties, when she meets the famous sculptor Felix Lichtman. Felix is dangerous, bohemian, everything she dreamed of in the cold nights at her Catholic boarding school. And at first their life together is glitteringly romantic – drinking in Soho, journeying to Marseilles. But it's not long before Rosaleen finds herself fearfully, unexpectedly alone. Desperate, she seeks help from the only source she knows, the local priest, and is directed across the sea to Ireland on a journey that will seal her fate. Kate lives in Nineties London, stumbling through her unhappy marriage. But something has begun to stir in her. Close to breaking point, she sets off on a journey of her own, not knowing what she hopes to find. Aoife sits at her husband's bedside as he lies dying, and tells him the story of their marriage. But there is a crucial part of the story missing and time is running out. Aoife needs to know: what became of Rosaleen? Spanning three generations of women, I Couldn't Love You More is an unforgettable novel about love, motherhood, secrets and betrayal – and how only the truth can set us free.

Anne's diagnosis of terminal cancer shines a spotlight onto fractured relationships with her daughter and granddaughter, with surprising, heartwarming results. A moving, elegant and warmly funny novel by the Norwegian Anne Tyler.'Helga Flatland writes with such astuteness... Her portrayal of a fractured family trying to cope through emotional personal circumstances was perfect. I devoured this in two sittings and was overwhelmed with feelings for the characters'Nina Pottell, Prima'Sometimes you simply don't have words to express the beauty and experience of a book – this is one of them'Louise Beech _______________ Anne's life is rushing to an unexpected and untimely end. But her diagnosis of terminal cancer isn't just a shock for her – and for her daughter Sigrid and granddaughter Mia – it shines a spotlight onto their fractured and uncomfortable relationships. On a spur-of-the moment trip to France the three generations of women reveal harboured secrets, long-held frustrations and suppressed desires, and learn humbling and heart-warming lessons about how life should be lived when death is so close. With all of Helga Flatland's trademark humour, razor-sharp wit and deep empathy, One Last Time examines the great dramas that can be found in ordinary lives, asks the questions that matter to us all – and ultimately celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, in an exquisite, enchantingly beautiful novel that urges us to treasure and rethink... everything.For fans of Elena Ferrante, Maggie O'Farrell, Mike Gayle, Joanna Cannon, Sally Rooney and Carol Shields. _______________'The most beautiful, elegant writing I've read in a long time. If you love Anne Tyler, you will ADORE this'Joanna Cannon'Flatland is hailed as'the Norwegian Anne Tyler', but, for me, she writes like Flatland, which is more than good enough'Saga'A poignant and beautifully written story... intimate, evocative and moving'Kristin Gleeson'Helga Flatland possesses a pen made from fluent wisdom, subtle humour and elegance'Carol Lovekin'Absolutely loved its quiet, insightful generosity'Claire King'So perceptive and clever'Rónán Hession'A thoughtful and reflective novel about parents, siblings and the complex – and often challenging – ties that bind them'Hannah Beckerman, Observer'This is a super exploration of families that I'd urge you to read for the subtle prose, with well defined characters and a strong storyline'Sheila O'Reilly'Love the sophistication, directness and tenderness of this book'Claire Dyer'The most clear-eyed, honest, yet sympathetic examination of relationships that I have ever read'Sara Taylor'The author has been dubbed the Norwegian Anne Tyler and for good reason... If you love books about dysfunctional families, you'll love this'Good Housekeeping'In quiet prose, Helga Flatland writes with elegance and subtle humour to produce a shrewd and insightful examination of the psychology of family and of loss'Daily Express