Elizabeth Graver

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

A Novel

A dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family's displacement across four countries, Kantika--"song" in Ladino--follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way--a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge--her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.

Exploring identity, place and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body--in work, art and love--serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one's one and only life.

Kantika

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Craig Silvey

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Charlie Bucktin is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the mining town of Corrigan. Jasper takes Charlie to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery.

Jasper Jones

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Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Memoir

A young woman leaves Appalachia for a life as a classical musician in New York--or so she thinks.

When aspiring violinist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman lands a job with a professional ensemble, she imagines she has achieved her lifelong dream. But the ensemble proves to be a sham. When the group "performs," the microphones are never on. Instead, the music blares from a CD. The mastermind behind this scheme is a peculiar and mysterious figure known as The Composer, who is gaslighting his audiences with music that sounds suspiciously like the Titanic soundtrack. On tour with his chaotic ensemble, Hindman spirals into crises of identity and disillusionment as she "plays" for audiences genuinely moved by the performance, unable to differentiate real from fake.

With vulnerability, humor, and sharp insight into ambition and gender, Hindman tells a surreal coming-of-age story that perfectly articulates the anxieties and illusions of her generation. As Sounds Like Titanic swells to a crescendo, it gives voice to the failed promises of a nation that takes comfort in false realities.

Sounds Like Titanic

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Orhan Pamuk

Robert Finn

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Part detective story, part historical epic—a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900 on the imaginary island of Mingheria—a state of the Ottoman Empire—located between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives, the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, an accomplished quarantine expert races to the island, but not everyone is happy with the precautions or the quarantine he enforces. What follows is a shocking murder. The plague continues its rapid spread and stricter quarantine measures are declared, but the incompetence of the island’s governor, increased hostility between the two religions, and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure. As the death count rises to insurmountable amounts, warships blockade the island to keep the disease from spreading. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

Nights of Plague

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Kevin Jared Hosein

"This is a deeply impressive book, and I think an important one. Its intensity, its narrative attack, the fascinations of its era and setting, make it impossible to tear the attention away. Energy and inventiveness distinguish every page." -- Hilary Mantel

From an unforgettable new voice in Caribbean literature, a sweeping story of two families colliding in 1940s Trinidad--and a chilling mystery that shows how interconnected their lives truly are 

Trinidad in the 1940s, nearing the end of American occupation and British colonialism. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognizable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Down below is the Barrack, a ramshackle building of wood and tin, divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops--Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, all three born of the barracks. Theirs are hard lives of backbreaking work, grinding poverty, devotion to faith, and a battle against nature and a social structure designed to keep them where they are.

But when Dalton goes missing and Marlee's safety is compromised, farmhand Hans is lured by the promise of a handsome stipend to move to the farm as a watchman. As the mystery of Dalton's disappearance unfolds, the lives of the wealthy couple and those who live in the barracks below become insidiously entwined, their community changed forever and in shocking ways.

A searing and singular novel of religion, class, family, and historical violence, and rooted in Trinidad's wild pastoral landscape and inspired by oral storytelling traditions, Hungry Ghosts is deeply resonant of its time and place while evoking the roots and ripple effects of generational trauma and linked histories; the lingering resentments, sacrifices, and longings that alter destinies; and the consequences of powerlessness. Lyrically told and rendered with harrowing beauty, Hungry Ghosts is a stunning piece of storytelling and an affecting mystery, from a blazingly talented writer.  

Hungry Ghosts

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John Steinbeck

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression

The Grapes of Wrath

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Mario Vargas Llosa

A Haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town. Through a complicated web of secrets and historical references, Mario Vargas Llosa analyzes the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. More than a historic analysis, Conversation in The Cathedral is a groundbreaking novel that tackles identity as well as the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a people and a nation.

Conversation in the Cathedral

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Alessandro Baricco

Ann Goldstein

A young woman enters a fantastically strange family in this "luminous and alarming lesson on desire" by the international-bestselling author (La Stampa, Italy).

A young woman is promised to the scion of a noble family. While her betrothed is away traveling, she is sent to the family's villa to make her marriage preparations. There, the woman discovers that her future in-laws fear the coming of night, each and every night, and seem to never sleep. As the days pass, the atmosphere turns increasingly surreal, and the young bride's interactions with the family turn increasingly erotic.
In this "virtuoso literary performance," Alessandro Baricco portrays a cast of mysterious characters who exist outside of the normal rules of causation.
The Young Bride is an adult fable about fate, otherness, and the author's own act of creation (European Literature Network).

"Baricco spins it all together into a work of elegance, eroticism and playful make-believe."--The Wall Street Journal

The Young Bride

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Ferrol Sams

From the author of The Whisper of the River and Epiphany. In this coming-of-age story, Porter Osbourne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the Depression. On a red-clay farm in Georgia, he learns all there is to know about cotton-chopping, hog-killing, watermelon-thumping, and mule-handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex. But it is Porter’s family-- his genteel, patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother, and, most of all, his beloved though flawed father--who teaches Porter the painful truths about growing up strong enough to run with the horsemen. "The writing is elegant, reflective, and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience . . . gifted with perfect timing."--The New York Times Book Review "Remarkable both for its humor and its sustained and detailed picture of a mischievous Southern farmboy’s life during the Great Depression."--The Washington Post

Run with the Horsemen

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Pat Barker

She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives--and it is nothing short of magnificent"--.

The Silence of the Girls

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Anthony Horowitz

From the New York Times bestselling author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, this fiendishly brilliant, riveting thriller weaves a classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie into a chilling, ingeniously original modern-day mystery. When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the bestselling crime writer for years, she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan’s traditional formula has proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job. Conway’s latest tale has Atticus Pünd investigating a murder at Pye Hall, a local manor house. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but the more Susan reads, the more she’s convinced that there is another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript: one of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition, and murder. Masterful, clever, and relentlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage English crime fiction in which the reader becomes the detective.

Magpie Murders

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Anthony Marra

Stories

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena--dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.

In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

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Erika T. Wurth

White Horse is a gritty, vibrant debut from Erika T. Wurth about an Urban Native woman who must face her past when she discovers a bracelet haunted by her mother's spirit.

Some people are haunted in more ways than one.

Heavy metal, ripped jeans, Stephen King novels, and the occasional beer at the White Horse have defined urban Indian Kari James's life so far. But when her cousin Debby finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to Kari's mother, it inadvertently calls up both her mother's ghost and a monstrous entity, and her willful ignorance about her past is no longer sustainable...

Haunted by visions of her mother and hunted by this mysterious creature, Kari must search for what happened to her mother all those years ago. Her father, permanently disabled from a car crash, can't help her. Her Auntie Squeaker seems to know something but isn't eager to give it all up at once. Debby's anxious to help, but her controlling husband keeps getting in the way. Kari's journey toward a truth long denied by both her family and law enforcement forces her to confront her dysfunctional relationships, thoughts about a friend she lost in childhood, and her desire for the one thing she's always wanted but could never have.

White Horse

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Before there was Catherine the Great, there was Catherine Alexeyevna: the first woman to rule Russia in her own right. This rich, sweeping first-person narrative is the story of her rise to power. St. Petersburg, 1725. Peter the Great lies dying in his magnificent Winter Palace. The weakness and treachery of his only son has driven his father to an appalling act of cruelty and left the empire without an heir. Russia risks falling into chaos. Into the void steps the woman who has been by his side for decades: his second wife, Catherine Alexeyevna, as ambitious, ruthless and passionate as Peter himself. Born into devastating poverty, Catherine used her extraordinary beauty and shrewd intelligence to ingratiate herself with Peter’s powerful generals, finally seducing the Tsar himself. But even amongst the splendor and opulence of her new life—the lavish feasts, glittering jewels, and candle-lit hours in Peter’s bedchamber—she knows the peril of her position. Peter’s attentions are fickle and his rages powerful; his first wife is condemned to a prison cell, her lover impaled alive on a stake in Red Square. And now Catherine faces the ultimate test: can she keep the Tsar’s death a secret as she plays a lethal game to destroy her enemies and take the Crown for herself? From the sensuous pleasures of a decadent aristocracy, to the incense-filled rites of the Orthodox Church and the terror of Peter’s torture chambers, the intoxicating and dangerous world of Imperial Russia is brought to vivid life. Tsarina is the story of one remarkable woman whose bid for power would transform the Russian Empire.

Nickie Lucrezia

@nickie622639

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Elizabeth Graver

Kantika

Craig Silvey

Jasper Jones

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Sounds Like Titanic

Orhan Pamuk; Robert Finn

Nights of Plague

Kevin Jared Hosein

Hungry Ghosts

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

Mario Vargas Llosa

Conversation in the Cathedral

Alessandro Baricco; Ann Goldstein

The Young Bride

Ferrol Sams

Run with the Horsemen

Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls

Anthony Horowitz

Magpie Murders

Anthony Marra

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Erika T. Wurth

White Horse

Ellen Alpsten

Tsarina

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Elizabeth Graver

Kantika

Craig Silvey

Jasper Jones

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Sounds Like Titanic

Orhan Pamuk; Robert Finn

Nights of Plague

Kevin Jared Hosein

Hungry Ghosts

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

Mario Vargas Llosa

Conversation in the Cathedral

Alessandro Baricco; Ann Goldstein

The Young Bride

Ferrol Sams

Run with the Horsemen

Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls

Anthony Horowitz

Magpie Murders

Anthony Marra

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Erika T. Wurth

White Horse

Ellen Alpsten

Tsarina

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