When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Twain's original novel remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

In 1789 Maine, 54-year-old midwife Martha Ballard is asked to help determine the cause of death for Joshua Burgess, an accused rapist whose body was found frozen in the river. Martha is convinced that Burgess was beaten and hanged before he was thrown into the water. Several months earlier, she treated a woman named Rebecca Foster for injuries sustained from rape, and Rebecca told her the assailants were Burgess and Joseph North, a judge. After a court determines there’s not enough evidence against North for a rape charge, despite Martha’s testimony about Rebecca’s injuries, a trial is arranged on different charges, but North disappears. Martha attempts to prove Burgess was murdered, hoping to bring scrutiny to North as a suspect in the killing, whose motive may have been to keep Burgess from testifying against him about the rape. Lawhon combines modern prose with the immediacy of her source material, making for an accessible and textured narrative. This accomplished historical powerfully speaks to centuries-old inequities that remain in the present day.

When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn't just any camper, she's the daughter of the wealthy family who owns the camp--as well as the opulent nearby estate, and most of the land in sight. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region: Barbara's older brother also went missing 16 years earlier, never to be found. How could this have happened yet again? Out of this gripping beginning, Liz Moore weaves a richly textured drama, both emotionally nuanced and propelled by a double-barreled mystery. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the community working in its shadow, Moore's multi-threaded drama brings readers into the hearts of characters whose lives are forever changed by this eventful summer: Barbara's wounded, grieving mother; the "townie" whose family makes a living off this land; the 13-year-old camper struggling to find her way; and the outsider tasked with seeing the bigger picture, and uncovering the truth.

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch? Evie Porter doesn't exist. The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she's given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job. Evie isn't privy to Mr. Smith's real identity, but she knows this job isn't like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she's starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can't make any mistakes--especially after what happened last time. Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there's still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn't be higher--but then, Evie has always liked a challenge...

In 1975 Missouri, 13-year-old orphan Saint Brown and her scruffy, eye patch–wearing classmate, Patch Macauley, are drawing closer by the day when Patch’s disappearance rips them apart—setting in motion this lyrical, decades-spanning outing from Whitaker (We Begin at the End), which is both a riveting serial killer thriller and a heartrending love story. Before tragedy, however, comes triumph: Patch strikes a man attempting to abduct local golden girl Misty Meyer—Patch’s secret crush—with a rock from his slingshot, allowing Misty to escape. By the time police arrive, however, the only trace of Patch is his bloodied T-shirt. The colder the investigation becomes, the stronger Saint’s resolve grows to find her friend, a task to which she applies both precocious deductive skills and ferocious tenacity—traits that will prove invaluable in her future with the FBI. Meanwhile, Patch withers away in an undisclosed location, growing obsessed with a young woman being held in captivity with him. When Saint and Patch finally do reunite, they’re both irrevocably changed. With deeply affecting characters and ambition to spare, Whitaker has conjured a dazzling epic that defies easy categorization. It’s astonishing.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer's daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women's baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy's Red Scare. Grace's weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?

The pitfalls and traps of artistic success are explored in the latest compelling novel by Senna (New People, 2017). Novelist and creative writing professor Jane and her family have an itinerant lifestyle, moving from one temporary home to another, never feeling settled. They begin house-sitting for a year in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood, while Jane takes a sabbatical to work on the novel about mixed-race characters in history that she’s been writing for years. When she submits it, it is roundly misunderstood, reflecting the way she’s felt as a mixed-race woman and artist for most of her life. Disillusioned and frustrated, she decides to try her hand at writing for television and successfully pitches a biracial comedy show, thus gaining an eye-opening perspective on the cutthroat world of television. Senna is adept at voice and character. Jane is portrayed with humor and pathos, her wry, revealing observations throughout the novel make the story engaging. The Los Angeles and Hollywood settings are vividly described, and Senna's insights about identity, parenthood, and creativity are sure to captivate readers.

Daphne always loved the way Peter told their story. How they met, fell in love, and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. Too bad it turned out to be more of a prequel, a complication to Peter's actual love story, the one that ends with him dumping Daphne before their wedding to begin a relationship with his lifelong best friend, Petra. And so that's how Daphne's story really begins: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children's librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only other non-Peter-related person she knows: Petra's heartbroken ex, Miles Nowak ... Scruffy and chaotic, Miles is entirely the opposite of buttoned-up Daphne, and they mainly avoid one another until one night, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship. Miles decides he will convince Daphne to give Waning Bay a real shot. He'll show her why he loves this idyllic town and its residents, and if they happen to post deliberately misleading photos of their adventures together--for a particular audience of two--who could blame them? Miles believes Daphne deserves the chance to build a life here, her own life. As she begins to fall for the town, Daphne wonders what this summer is supposed to mean. Is it just for fun? An interlude to her own love story? Or maybe it was never meant to be a love story? Maybe it was just an anecdote to share at future dinner parties: that time she fell in love with her ex-fiancé's new fiancée's ex-boyfriend. Who's to say?

Poet Akbar explores the allure of martyrdom in this electrifying story of a Midwestern poet struggling with addiction and grief. Cyrus Shams, an orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, is fixated on finding meaning in the deaths of his parents—his mother in a plane that was accidentally shot down by the U.S. Navy over the Persian Gulf, his father from a stroke. His obsession strains his relationships, particularly with his closest friend and roommate Zee Novak, as does his heavy drinking and drug use. Immersed in the study of martyrs throughout history, Cyrus finds focus for his project when he meets Orkideh, an older painter foregoing treatment for her terminal breast cancer, and he realizes he has an opportunity to interview a living martyr. More details would spoil the plot, which thickens when connections are revealed between Cyrus and Orkideh as well as secrets about Cyrus’s family history that inform his conflicted feelings about pursuing a queer romance with Zee. Akbar deploys a range of styles with equal flair, from funny wordplay (“Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the right drugs in the wrong order, or the wrong drugs in the right order”) to incisive lyricism (“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes”). This wondrous novel will linger in readers’ minds long after the final page.

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town--until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten, and certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student, is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret. But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita's story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist. Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, this witty examination of power, love, and art, dares to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.

Crystal hauls sugar beets from field to processing plant deep into the night in the Red River Valley in North Dakota. She’s hoping her daughter, Kismet, a high-school senior, will attend college. But Gary, whose family owns the area’s largest beet farm and who is tormented by the deaths of two of his football teammates, is begging Kismet to marry him. Smart and sensitive Hugo, Gary’s opposite, is also in love with Kismet. Homeschooled, he helps his mother in her bookstore. Gary’s mother worries about their use of dangerous agricultural chemicals. It’s 2008 and money it tight. Hugo, entranced by deep time and geology, plans to make his fortune in the oil fields. Martin, Kismet’s theater teacher father, seems to have absconded with looted funds. The story of the land, from holistic family farms to the decimation of the “joinery of creation” by industrial agriculture, shapes Erdrich’s finely woven tale of anguish and desire, crimes and healing. With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich’s latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent hopes and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States' first black president. Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions--about history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood--that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young black man and father in America.

This mystical, action-oriented read delves into the story of King Arthur. Collum, a young knight traveling to Camelot in hopes of joining the Round Table, arrives to learn that King Arthur is dead. Adventure soon calls, and Collum and the knights set off on a quest to heal Britain. The multiple points of view and diverse characters will keep readers engrossed.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she's the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they're long-stemmed roses, she's a dandelion: an adorable bloom that's actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When regal nonagenarian Ms. Della invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth--and chaotic romantic decisions--to realize her dream of opening a flower shop in New York City. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories, and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmer. One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space -- not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts -- from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan -- have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.

It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the west of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from the Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey's long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn't want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

Shanghai begins when Daniel Lohr, sensing the Nazis closing in on the Jews of Berlin, leaves his dying father and agrees to flee to Shanghai on an Italian passenger ship. His passage is dependent upon him agreeing to deliver a package to his shady uncle upon arrival. Aboard the ship he will meet a woman, Leah, also a Jew fleeing the Nazis. They conduct a passionate but brief shipboard affair and then the passenger ship arrives. Will Dan ever see her again? He is met by his uncle--who has changed his name--and soon Dan is plunged into his uncle's world, specifically a big new nightclub, the best and most glitzy in town. Within minutes, violence breaks out as someone tries to assassinate his uncle, and with that, Dan is drawn deep into the underworld that is wartime Shanghai.

When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.

Jen has dumped Andy, and he's handling the breakup in exactly the way all his friends and family might have expected: very, very badly. Crashing at his mother's house and obsessively photographing his hairline, Andy embraces the rites and rituals of every breakup--the ill-advised decision to move onto a houseboat, the forced merriment of a lads' night out, the accidental late-night text to the ex-all resulting in a never-ending shame spiral. Even as Andy tests the waters of a new relationship, he finds himself drawn back to Jen, revisiting old texts and emails, trying to figure out what truly went wrong.

It's 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English country fair with her two best friends. But Frances's life takes a hair-pin turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn't happened yet, compiling dirt on every person who crosses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades, no one takes Frances seriously. Until, that is, nearly sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered. In the present day, Annie Adams has been summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is already dead. Annie is determined to catch the killer, but thanks to Frances's lifelong habit of digging up secrets, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for her murder. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer?

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home--and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company--are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family's pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion--Tomoko's dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family's patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko's cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand--her uncle's mysterious absences, her great-aunt's experience of the Second WorId War, her aunt's misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina's Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time--and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.

A fictional account of the final days of the Aztec empire, imagining sly schemes, languid moments, and confused cultural interactions among powerful men and their retinues. The year is 1519. Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors have entered the Aztec capital, Mehxicoh-Tenoxtitlan, but it’s not clear if they are guests or prisoners. The Mexica worry about the Castillians’ intentions and covet their horses but have fallen into infighting and debauchery. Their ruler, Moctezuma, spends his days in a drugged-out haze, eating magic-mushroom paste, napping, and condemning various subordinates to death. Communications flow messily, through multiple translators; diplomatic entreaties are hopelessly bungled. The temple passageways overflow with skulls; violence, we know, is imminent. Enrigue sketches his characters with light, vivid strokes, and fills his sentences with abundant Nahuatl terms. He folds in a few playful metafictional touches to keep readers guessing.

British Cambodian writer Bradley’s clever debut features time travel, romance, cloak-and-dagger plotting, and a critique of the British Empire. The unnamed narrator, who works as a translator for Britain’s Ministry of Defence sometime in the near future, is selected by the government to aid a newly formed agency to process time travelers from the past. Her assigned “expat” is real-life polar explorer Lt. Graham Gore, who has arrived in the future sometime before his death during the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition, a mind-bender Bradley heads off at the pass (“Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel... will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit”). The narrator, whose mother was a Cambodian refugee, feels a kinship with Gore’s sense of disorientation. The roguishly handsome naval officer lives with her as part of the terms of the assignment, and her account of their burgeoning mutual attraction is interspersed with episodes from Gore’s disastrous journey to the Arctic. A thriller-like scenario regarding mortal threats to the narrator and Gore feels secondary; more fruitful are Bradley’s depictions of the ways in which time travelers react to modern nightclubs, sexual freedoms, and the news that the empire has “collapse.” It’s a sly and ingenious vehicle for commentary on the disruptions and displacements of modern life.

The most anticipated graphic novel of 2024, concluding the story of young Karen Reyes, the most inspiring "monster" in contemporary fiction. Karen attends the Yippie-organized Festival of Life in Chicago, and finds herself swept up in a police stomping. Privately, she wrestles with her sexual identity, and she continues to investigate her neighbor’s recent death. She discovers one last cassette tape, which sheds light on Anka’s heroic activities.

To untangle his family’s secrets, an Ethiopian American writer must confront demons similar to those that afflicted his complicated father. As a child, Mamush knew that Samuel, the taciturn insomniac taxi driver, was his father, and not just his mother’s childhood friend. But the details of Mamush’s parents’ history, like so much about Samuel’s life, are opaque. For what crime was he arrested in Chicago? Where did Samuel go, all those times he vanished in the night? And why was someone trying to break into the bedroom Samuel shared with his wife, Elsa? Depressive and restless, Mamush seeks answers even as his self-destructive tendencies flare, and his own marriage flounders. As with his previous novels, Mengestu blurs historical details in favor of crisply remembered experience—dwellings in the Washington, DC, suburbs and the textures of 20-year-old taxi cabs. Here, too, he defies standard immigrant-narrative tropes in which successes compensate for feelings of longing, displacement, and loss. But this time, it’s bleaker as Mengestu emphasizes his characters’ fears of deportation, of being pulled over by police, and their utter exhaustion as work and anxiety rob them of sleep. A moving, memorable novel.

It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamed of coming for years--she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan--which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can't stop confiding in each other. An incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined--and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father's jailer. Under Pratt's harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodline. Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals which he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth. A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an "Asia for Asians." Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction--and she will do anything to save them. Spanning years of pain and triumph, told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, this dazzling saga is about the horrors of war, the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.

As befits a novel about one of literature’s most astute, witty, and persecuted playwrights, Bayard structures his poignant portrayal of Oscar Wilde as a drama in five acts, complete with interludes. In the prelude to and aftermath of the sexual scandal that sent Wilde to prison, his wife, Constance, and sons Cyril and Vyvyan walk the tightrope of loving a genius while turning a blind eye to the flaws that inform and inspire his work. When the family escapes London for a farm cottage in rural Norfolk, Constance believes her marriage to be solid if unconventional. The appearance of Lord Alfred Douglas slowly alerts her to the reality of her husband’s sexuality. When Wilde is jailed, the family, disgraced and impoverished, lives in exile. WWI ensnares Cyril who, as a child, witnessed his family’s dissolution. Vyvyan, as the sole survivor, struggles to understand and accept his family’s fate. Scandal knows no century nor season; historically, its villains and victims remain tragically entwined. Bayard considers these themes through dialogue as crackling as any Wilde himself would write and unfolds the Wilde family's story with the same attention to conflict and resolution as Wilde's legendary plays.

Misery definitely doesn’t love company in this funny and thoughtful urban fantasy romance. As the daughter of a leading Vampyre council member, Misery Lark is used to being used. She spent ages eight through 18 as the collateral in an uneasy Vampyre-human alliance, essentially held hostage in the human world. Just when she’s finally free to live her life as a computer security expert, her best friend disappears and Misery is summoned back to her father, who aims to use her as collateral once more, this time in a Vampyre-Werewolf alliance that must be sealed with a marriage. She’s ready to refuse—until she realizes her future husband may be linked to her missing friend and she sees a chance to get answers. Alpha Lowe Moreland isn’t a stranger to duty, but even he’s a bit surprised with this marriage of inconvenience and how much he enjoys having a member of the much-hated Vampyre race in his territory. With the specter of an interspecies war on the horizon as well as threats from within, he has to balance attraction and protection while still holding on to his sanity. It’s a new subgenre for Hazelwood , and she navigates it well, slowly teasing out the sweet and spicy supernatural romance.

Real Americans begins in New York City on the precipice of Y2K, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything she is not: poised, confident, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical fortune. Lily, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution, was raised in Tampa and is flat broke. Despite their differences, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen feels like an outsider on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the quest threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton--and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet. These satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds. With Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, this year promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

1950s Hollywood: Every actress wants to be Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary woman whose story has inspired artists since ancient times. So when the film's mercurial director casts an unknown Mexican ingenue in the lead role, Vera Larios quickly becomes the talk of the town. She's also the object of envy of Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves. Two actresses, both determined to make it in Golden Age Hollywood, a city overflowing with gossip, scandal and intrigue, make for a sizzling combination. But this is the tale of three women, for it is also the story of princess Salome, consumed with desire for the fiery prophet who foretold her stepfather Herod's doom: a woman torn between what duty decrees and the yearning of her heart. Before the curtain comes down, there will be tears and tragedy aplenty in this sexy Technicolor saga.