Shawntelle Madison

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A Novel

Combining history and fantasy, a sweeping multi-generational epic in the vein of Kindred and The Time Traveler's Wife about a woman who travels through time to end a family curse that has plagued her ancestors for generations. On a rainy day in May 1964, history professor Cecily Bridge-Davis begins to search for the sixty-five acres of land she inherited from her father's family. The quest leads her to uncover a dark secret: In every generation, one offspring from each Bridge family unit vanishes--and is mysteriously whisked back in time. Rules have been established that must be followed to prevent dire consequences: Never interfere with past events. Always carry your free Negro papers. Search for the survival family packs in the orchard and surrounding forest. The ribbon on the pack designates the decade the pack was made to orient you in time. Do not speak to strangers unless absolutely necessary. With only a family Bible and a map marked with the locations of mysterious containers to aid her, Cecily heads to the library, hoping to discover the truth of how this curse began, and how it might be ended. As she moves through time, she encounters a circle of ancestors, including Sabrina Humbles, a free Black woman who must find the courage to seize an opportunity--or lose her heart; Luke Bridge, who traverses battlefields, slavery, and time itself to reunite with his family; Rebecca Bridge, a mother tested by an ominous threat; and Amelia Bridge, a young woman burdened with survivor's guilt who will face the challenge of a lifetime--and change Cecily's life forever. It is a race through time and against the clock to find the answers that will free her family forever. Shawntelle Madison's historical fiction debut is an enthralling, page-turning family saga about the inevitability of fate, the invincibility of love, and the indelible bonds of family.

The Fallen Fruit

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Patricia Raybon

Denver's newest detective. A garden's deadly secrets. On a lovely June night in 1924, amateur detective Annalee Spain is mingling bravely at a high-class political fundraiser in the lush backyard garden of famed political fixer Cooper Coates, one of the wealthiest men in Denver's Black neighborhood of Five Points. When Coates's young daughter discovers a pretty stranger dead in her father's garden shed, Annalee is thrust onto the baffling new case just as she's reeling from another recent discovery--a handwritten letter, found buried in her own garden, that reveals the identity of her mother. Not ready to face the truth about her hidden past, Annalee throws herself into solving the mystery of the young woman's demise. With the help of her pastor boyfriend Jack Blake, her orphaned buddy Eddie, and her trustworthy church friends, Annalee follows the clues to three seemingly disconnected settings--a traveling carnival set up downtown, a Black civic club, and a prestigious white seminary on the outskirts of Denver. Intriguing advice also comes from a famous, real-life Denver visitor. But is Annalee on the right track or just running in circles, fleeing from conflicts racing in her heart? In a taut, heart-gripping narrative driven by secrets, romance, and lies, Annalee must unravel a case with higher stakes than she imagined--one where answers about a lovely woman's death point to truths and tensions still throbbing today. A clean historical mystery featuring an amateur female detective, from the Christy Award-winning author of All That Is Secret Third installment in the Annalee Spain series Includes discussion questions for book groups

Truth Be Told

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Ayana Mathis

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival "Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.”– Oprah Daily • "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." – Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there. In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?

The Unsettled

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Zhang Ling

Shelly Bryant

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A catastrophic disaster in China triggers a mother's heartbreaking choice and a daughter's reconciliation with the past in a powerful novel by the author of A Single Swallow and Where Waters Meet. In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal. Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada with a caring husband and daughter. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realizes the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure. Spanning three decades of the emotional and cultural aftershocks of disaster, Zhang Ling's intimate epic explores the damage of guilt, the healing pull of family, and the hope of one woman who, after so many years, still longs to be saved.

Aftershock

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Valerie Burns

A Bakery Street Mystery

In this feisty new culinary cozy mystery from Agatha and Edgar Award-nominated author Valerie Burns, social media influencer Maddy Montgomery is adjusting to her new life after moving to small-town Michigan to run a bakery and take care of a gigantic English mastiff—all while solving the murder of a one-time nemesis... The small town, fish-out-of-water, baking-themed mystery for fans of Jenn McKinlay, Mia P. Manansala, Abby Collette, Jennifer J. Chow, Danielle Arceneaux, and Joanne Fluke! “Books, dogs and food — and a well-structured sense of fun — connect almost all of Valerie Burns’s cozy mysteries.” — The New York Times Thanks to Maddy’s social media savvy, Baby Cakes Bakery is becoming a huge success—so much so that she’s attracted the attention of her former nemesis, the fiancé-stealing Brandy Denton. When Brandy blows into New Bison like an ill wind and disrupts a vlog Maddy’s filming, their argument goes viral. After Brandy’s body is found at Baby Cakes, Maddy instantly goes from viral sensation to murder suspect. As Maddy is still reeling from the murder, a stranger shows up in the bakery claiming to have been a friend of Octavia. He believes Maddy is in danger. When a second body washes up on the lake shore, it seems clear someone’s out to kill to keep a secret—and it may have to do with her great aunt. Maddy rallies her aunt’s friends, the Baker Street Irregulars; Sheriff April Johnson; and her veterinarian boyfriend Michael—not to mention her English mastiff Baby—to do some digging and root out whoever’s behind the killings . . .

A Cup of Flour, a Pinch of Death

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David Yoon

A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone.

He used to live in a place called California, but how did he wind up here with a head wound and a bottle of pills in his pocket?


    He navigates his surroundings, one rough shape at a time. Here lies a pipe, there a reed that could be carved into a weapon, beyond a city he once lived in.
 
He could swear his daughter's name began with a J, but what was it, exactly?


    Then he encounters an old man, a crow, and a boy--and realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past.
 
He can't even recall the features of his own face, and wonders: who am I?


    Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon's City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.
 

City of Orange

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Laurence Ralph

An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him

A riveting and heart-wrenching story of violence, grief and the American justice system, exploring the systemic issues that perpetuate gang participation in one of the wealthiest cities in the country, through the story of one teenager. In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez--known as Sito-- was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito's. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito's half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito's murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way. Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace.

Sito

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Anamely Salgado Reyes

Three generations of fiercely strong and stubborn Mexican American women face grief head-on as they attempt to shed generational trauma and discover the true meaning of home in this lyrical novel that features magical realism in the tradition of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and The House of the Spirits. For generations, the Olivares women have sought to control their daughters’ destinies, starting with their names. In life, Olvido constantly clashed with her carefree daughter. Then teenage Angustias discovered she was pregnant and left her mother’s home in search of her own. Ten years later, Felicitas finally meets her estranged grandmother and is terribly disappointed when Olvido is nothing like a grandmother should be. She is strict, cold, and…dead. Now, Olvido is convinced the only way her spirit will cross over is if she resolves her unfinished business—to make sure Angustias is in a better place regarding family, job, husband, and God, but maybe not in that order—and Felicitas is the only person who can see or hear her. Heartbroken about her mother’s passing and desperate to put Olvido’s tiny Texas home in her rearview mirror as quickly as possible, Angustias doesn’t understand why suddenly everyone in town seems to be conspiring to set her up with every eligible bachelor in town, offer her jobs, and invite her and Felicitas to church every Sunday. As Olvido attempts to puppeteer her granddaughter to “fix” Angustias’s life from beyond the grave, Angustias tries desperately to find a better place for Felicitas, and Felicitas struggles to keep her ability to see the dead a secret from Angustias, all three Olivares girls are forced to learn how to actually listen to one another, to work to overcome generations’ worth of well-intentioned mistakes and learn the true definition of home.

My Mother Cursed My Name

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Kevin Kwan

A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * From the iconic internationally bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy: A forbidden affair erupts volcanically amid a decadent tropical wedding in this outrageous comedy of manners from the iconic author of Crazy Rich Asians. Rufus Leung Gresham, future Earl of Greshambury and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel has a problem: the legendary Gresham Trust has been depleted by decades of profligate spending, and behind all the magazine covers and Instagram stories manors and yachts lies nothing more than a gargantuan mountain of debt. The only solution, put forth by Rufus's scheming mother, is for Rufus to attend his sister's wedding at a luxury eco-resort, a veritable who's-who of sultans, barons, and oligarchs, and seduce a woman with money. Should he marry Solène de Courcy, a French hotel heiress with honey blond tresses and a royal bloodline? Should he pursue Martha Dung, the tattooed venture capital genius who passes out billions like lollipops? Or should he follow his heart, betray his family, squander his legacy, and finally confess his love to the literal girl next door, the humble daughter of a doctor, Eden Tong? When a volcanic eruption burns through the nuptials and a hot mic exposes a secret tryst, the Gresham family plans--and their reputation--go up in flames. Can the once-great dukedom rise from the ashes? Or will a secret tragedy, hidden for two decades, reveal a shocking twist? In a globetrotting tale that takes us from the black sand beaches of Hawaii to the skies of Marrakech, from the glitzy bachelor pads of Los Angeles to the inner sanctums of England's oldest family estates, Kevin Kwan unfurls a juicy, hilarious, sophisticated and thrillingly plotted story of love, money, murder, sex, and the lies we tell about them all.

Lies and Weddings

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Asha Thanki

“A rich family saga about art and memory's power to inform the present, make peace with the past, and maybe even alter the future.” — Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts “[Asha] Thanki reinvents generational memory, conjuring inheritance as a tapestry of love, trauma, and choices that echo through blood. A profoundly tender and complex debut that I didn't want to put down." — Sequoia Nagamatsu, bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark A heartrending family saga following three generations of women connected by a fantastic tapestry through which they inherit the experiences of those that lived before them, sweeping readers from Partition-era India to modern day Brooklyn. Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she’s long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret her family has kept for centuries, one that Ayukta will be the first to share with someone outside their bloodline: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her. Ayukta invites Nadya into this lineage, carrying her through its past. She relives her grandmother Amla’s life: Once a happy child in Karachi, Amla migrates to Gujarat during Partition, witnessing violence and loss that forever shape her approach to marriage and motherhood. Amla’s daughter, Arni, bears this weight in her own blood in 1974, when gender equity and urban class distinctions divide the community as a bold student movement takes hold. As Ayukta unspools these generations of women—whole decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and revival—she reveals the tapestry’s second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Like all power, both fantastic and societal, this inheritance is more treacherous than it seems. What would it mean, to impart an impossible burden? To withhold these incredible gifts? Sweeping, deeply felt and intergenerational, A Thousand Times Before is a debut as poetic as it is propulsive, as healing as it is heartbreaking, as it examines what it means to carry our past with us and to pass it on. Rooted in a tender love story, and spun with a tremendous amount of care, this book is a rare, remarkable feat from an incredible new literary talent.

A Thousand Times Before

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Minda Honey

A Memoir

A hilariously intimate memoir that gets to the turbulent joys and pains of coming of age and looking for love as a Black woman in America. In the car she'd had since high school--with the boyfriend she'd had just as long riding shotgun--Minda Honey made the cross-country drive to sunny Southern California. By the end of 2008, Obama would be president, she'd be single, and change would be upon us all. Thousands of miles away from her family and friends in the new era of smartphones and online dating, Minda navigates the treacherous waters of early adulthood and love: confounding relationships, steamy hookups, meet-cutes, chillingly narrow escapes, and the realization that nothing plays out quite like the rom-coms she'd bet her heart on as a teenager. She was frustrated, heartbroken, resentful--and free. Kinda. From California to Colorado to her hometown in Kentucky, Minda sets out to relaunch her life outside all that defined her adolescence. In an unflinching memoir, Minda casts her gimlet eye on her past relationships and the complicated dynamics of consent culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class. Remembering the promise and disappointments of her twenties with wisdom and compassion, this is Minda's story of a Black woman coming into herself and changing her own world with resilience and bracing independence.

The Heartbreak Years

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Heather Radke

A Backstory

A fascinating journey into the scientific and cultural history of the female butt, for fans of Mary Roach and Leslie Jamison.

Whether we love them or hate them, think they're sexy, think they're strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman's butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out.

Spanning nearly two centuries, this vivid cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like "Buns of Steel." She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the "Venus Hottentot," Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised.

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion--and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.

Butts

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Leslie Jones

"You are Black; you are female," Leslie Jones' father once said. "But if you work harder and you're better than everybody else, they can't f*cking deny you." Leslie Jones is a warrior. Raised by a tough dad and a loving but often sick mom, her father's military career meant she bounced around as a kid--fighting off bullies because she was tall and loud, sticking up for her troubled kid brother, and generally causing mayhem wherever she went. In the end the family settled in Lynwood, Los Angeles, where in high school she was a star basketball player, heavily recruited for what everyone thought would be a stellar college career. Then, one day in college, she discovered comedy instead, and everything changed. Eventually hitting the road as a working comedian, and holding down regular jobs to fund her dreams, she found herself fighting prejudice, tough crowds, stupid bosses, and people who thought a Black woman could never be funny enough. But she proved herself time and again to be undeniably funnier than most, and in Leslie F*cking Jones, we finally get to meet the woman behind the laughs: tough but full of love, uncompromising but wise, honest, revealing, challenging, and always completely hilarious. From clubs across the country, through hit TV specials, to six years at SNL; through the hell that was the Ghostbusters remake, and on into Twitter and Olympic-commentary stardom, guest hosting Ellen and The Daily Show, and beyond, Leslie F*cking Jones reveals what it took to become one of America's most beloved and plain-speaking superstars. In this audacious memoir, Leslie Jones opens up for the first time about how she faltered and triumphed on the road to success and, in doing so, encourages others to let go of the fear and self-doubt that has holds them back. Leslie F*cking Jones is a love letter to regular people just trying to make it day to day and proof that if you fight for yourself, you can live a bigger life than you ever imagined, and you too can be undeniable.

Leslie F*cking Jones

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Susanna Moore

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * From one of our most compelling and sensual writers comes a searing, immersive novel about a seminal and shameful moment in America's conquest of the West. Drawing partly from a true story, it brings to life a devastating Native American revolt and the woman caught in the middle of the conflict.

In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey from Rhode Island to Minnesota Territory, where she plans to reunite with a childhood friend. When she arrives at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie without family or friends and with no prospect of work or money, she quickly remarries and has two children. Anticipating unease and hardship at the Indian Agency, where her husband Dr. John Brinton is the new resident physician, Sarah instead finds acceptance and kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation.

The Sioux tribes, however, are wary of the white settlers and resent the rampant theft of their land. Promised payments by the federal government are never made, and starvation and disease soon begin to decimate their community. Tragically and inevitably, this leads to the Sioux Uprising of 1862. During the conflict, Sarah and her children are abducted by the Sioux, who protect her, but because she sympathizes with her captors, Sarah becomes an outcast to the white settlers. In the end, she is lost to both worlds.

Intimate and raw, The Lost Wife is a brilliantly subversive tale of the conquest of the American West.

The Lost Wife

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Victor LaValle

Blue skies, empty land--and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and a bracing new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

"If the literary gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, the result would be Victor LaValle."--Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the "lone women" taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can tame it--except that Adelaide isn't alone. And the secret she's tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you've never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past--or redeem it.

Lone Women

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Emily Giffin

A restless golden boy and a girl with a troubled past navigate a love story that may be doomed before it even begins, in this "glorious, satisfying" (Adriana Trigiani) new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All We Ever Wanted and The Lies That Bind.

"I'm a sucker for an iconic, against-all-odds love story, and Meant to Be truly delivers."--Tia Williams, author of Seven Days in June

The Kingsley family is American royalty, beloved for their military heroics, political service, and unmatched elegance. In 1967, after Joseph S. Kingsley, Jr. is killed in a tragic accident, his charismatic son inherits the weight of that legacy. But Joe III is a free spirit--and a little bit reckless. Despite his best intentions, he has trouble meeting the expectations of a nation, as well as those of his exacting mother, Dottie.

Meanwhile, no one ever expected anything of Cate Cooper. She, too, grew up fatherless--and after her mother marries an abusive man, she is forced to fend for herself. After being discovered by a model scout at age sixteen, Cate decides that her looks may be her only ticket out of the cycle of disappointment that her mother has always inhabited. Before too long, Cate's face is in magazines and on billboards. Yet she feels like a fraud, faking it in a world to which she's never truly belonged.

When Joe and Cate unexpectedly cross paths one afternoon, their connection is instant and intense. But can their relationship survive the glare of the spotlight and the so-called Kingsley curse? In a beautifully written novel that captures a gilded moment in American history, Emily Giffin tells the story of two people searching for belonging and identity, as well as the answer to the question: Are certain love stories meant to be?

Meant to Be

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Janika Oza

An epic, sweeping historical debut novel "about what it means to be part of a family and lineage, in all its heartbreaking and wondrous complexity" spanning continents and a century, and how one act of survival can reverberate through generations (Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin).



At the turn of the twentieth century, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor on the East African Railway for the British. One day Pirbhai commits an act to ensure his survival that will haunt him forever and reverberate across his family's future for years to come.

  

 Pirbhai's children are born and raised under the jacaranda trees and searing sun of Kampala during the waning days of British colonial rule. As Uganda moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's granddaughters, Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya, are three sisters coming of age in a divided nation. As they each forge their own path for a future, they must carry the silence of the history they've inherited. In 1972, under Idi Amin's brutal regime and the South Asian expulsion, the family has no choice but to flee, and in the chaos, they leave something devastating behind.

  

As Pirbhai's grandchildren, scattered across the world, find their way back to each other in exile in Toronto, a letter arrives that stokes the flames of the fire that haunts the family. It makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy to secure their own place in the world.



A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home.

A History of Burning

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The Duke of Sussex Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother's coffin as the world watched in sorrow--and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling--and how their lives would play out from that point on.
 
For Harry, this is that story at last.
 
With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

Spare

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Janice Pariat

#hardcover #fiction #everythingthelighttouches #FRC2022

"Wise, funny, touching, wide-ranging, deep-delving; whip-smart dialogue and graceful, paced sentences, thousands upon thousands of them. Written by a novelist with the eye of a poet, and a poet with the narrative powers of a novelist, this is a book that needed to be written, that tells true things, and is entirely its own being."--Robert Macfarlane, author of The Lost Words and Underland

One of the most acclaimed and revered writers of her generation returns with her most ambitious novel yet--an elegant, multi-layered work, rich in imagination and exquisitely told, that interweaves a quartet of journeys across continents and centuries.

As emotionally resonant as Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, as inspired as Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land, as inventive as Louisa Hall's Speak, and as visionary as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Everything the Light Touches is Janice Pariat's magnificent epic of travelers, of discovery, of time, of science, of human connection, and of the impermanent nature of the universe and life itself--a bold and brilliant saga that unfolds through the adventures and experiences of four intriguing characters.

Shai is a young woman in modern India. Lost and drifting, she travels to her country's Northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her.

Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe's botanical writings, she leaves Cambridge on a quest to wander the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas.

Linnaeus, a botanist and taxonomist who famously declared "God creates; Linnaeus organizes," sets off on an expedition to an unfamiliar world, the far reaches of Lapland in 1732. 

Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for "The Metamorphosis of Plants," a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind's propensity to reduce plants--and the world--into immutable parts.

Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and "song and stone." Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy between different ways of seeing, those that fix and categorize and those that free and unify. Pariat questions the imposition of fixity--of our obsession to place permanence on plants, people, stories, knowledge, land--where there is only movement, fluidity, and constant transformation. "To be still," says a character in the book, "is to be without life."

Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet as it artfully reveals, all is resonance; all is connection.

Everything the Light Touches

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Christine Nolfi

She's always wanted a sense of belonging. The last place she expects to find it is home.

Vale Lightner's dreams turn to ash when the Pittsburgh bar she owns goes up in flames. Just like the past she escaped, very little seems salvageable. Facing unavoidable change, Vale returns to her hometown of Philadelphia to stay with her grandmother.

She knows that returning also means facing everything she left behind: a mother and stepfather who shunted her into the background from the day they married, and her charmed and favored half sister, Blythe, who has abandoned a perfect marriage and is now at a crossroads of her own. Everyone has their secrets, and this reunited family racked by them is about to reach a crisis point.

For a mother and her two daughters, this reunion is a chance for closure, newfound love, and forgiveness. As each of them reassesses her own memories of the past, only the truth can bring them together--in ways that could last forever. From the bestselling author of The Passing Storm comes a poignant novel about family secrets, healing, and the hope of second chances.

A Brighter Flame

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Jeannette Walls

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

From Jeannette Walls, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle, comes a riveting new novel about an indomitable young woman in Virginia during Prohibition.

Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who'd amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans.

Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father's daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother's son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out.

Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That's a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.

You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.

Hang the Moon

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Jeff Boyd

A powerful coming-of-age novel about a twenty-something Black musician living in predominantly white Portland, Oregon, playing in a rock band on the verge of success while struggling with racism, romance, and the legacy of his strict religious upbringing.

Julian Strickland is seemingly the lone Black man in the hipster dreamland of Portland, Oregon. To his friends, he's the coolest member of the scene: the soulful drummer from Chicago in an indie rock band that's just about to break through. But to himself, he's a sheltered Christian homeschool kid who used to write book reports on Leviticus. A virgin until the night of his marriage, divorced at twenty-four, he's still in disarray two years later--pretending to fit in, wondering if any of his relationships are real, estranged from his family, and struggling to reconcile his relationship with God.

Then he meets Ida Blair, a Black painter at the start of a promising career. They begin a tentative relationship, and Ida seems to offer Julian relief from his confusion. But suddenly she stops responding to his texts. Things only get worse when Julian's best friend mysteriously turns on him, his house burns down, and the band considers breaking up on the eve of their most important show yet. It seems the only thing Julian has left--the only thing he's ever had, really--is the weight he is carrying.

Jeff Boyd's beguiling first novel is a piercing exploration of faith, racial identity, love, and friendship--woven of acid humor, disarming vulnerability, and unforgettable poignance.

The Weight

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Marie Myung-Ok Lee

A "moving and captivating" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) novel following a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he's worked so hard to build come crumbling down.

Dr. Yungman Kwak is in the twilight of his life. Every day for the last fifty years, he has brushed his teeth, slipped on his shoes, and headed to Horse Breath's General Hospital, where, as an obstetrician, he treats the women and babies of the small rural Minnesota town he chose to call home.

This was the life he longed for. The so-called American dream. He immigrated from Korea after the Korean War, forced to leave his family, ancestors, village, and all that he knew behind. But his life is built on a lie. And one day, a letter arrives that threatens to expose it.

Yungman's life is thrown into chaos--the hospital abruptly closes, his wife refuses to spend time with him, and his son is busy investing in a struggling health start-up. Yungman faces a choice--he must choose to hide his secret from his family and friends or confess and potentially lose all he's built. He begins to question the very assumptions on which his life is built--the so-called American dream, with the abject failure of its healthcare system, patients and neighbors who perpetuate racism, a town flawed with infrastructure, and a history that doesn't see him in it.

Toggling between the past and the present, Korea and America, Evening Hero is a "soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel" (The New York Times) about a man looking back at his life and asking big questions about what is lost and what is gained when immigrants leave home for new shores.

The Evening Hero

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Lakiesha Carr

Heat. Fire. Rain so blue. The blackness. The color of our hue.

A magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood: the grief that is carried within the body and the bonds of love that grant strength.

"Powerful in its love for the generations of Black women at its heart... Lakiesha Carr unspools her stories with a patient fearlessness, venturing into unexpected places and unique perspectives to fully illuminate them." --Dawnie Walton, author of The Final Revival of Opal and Nev

A middle-aged woman feed slots at a secret, back-room parlor. A new mother descends into a devastating postpartum depression, wracked with the fear that she is unable to protect her children. A daughter returns home to join the other women in her family waging spiritual combat with the ghosts of their past.

An Autobiography of Skin is a dazzling and masterful portrait of interconnected generations in the South from a singular new voice, offering a raw and tender view into the interior lives of Black women. It is at once a powerful look at how experiences are carried inside the body, inside the flesh and skin, and a joyous testament to how healing can be found within--in love, mercy, gratitude, and freedom.

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