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List: One Book, One Village: Books with Ensemble Casts


A photo of The Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the friends suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. They might be senior citizens, but they are cleverer than most. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?

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A photo of Anxious People

Anxious People

Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers--including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages, and a plucky octogenarian--discover their unexpected common traits.

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A photo of The Other Americans

The Other Americans

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Told by multiple narrators--Nora herself, Jeremy (the Iraq war veteran with whom she develops an intimacy), widow Maryam, Efrain (an immigrant witness to the accident who refuses to get involved for fear of deportation), Coleman (the police investigator), and Driss (the dead man himself), The Other Americans deftly explores one family's secrets and hypocrisies even as it offers a portrait of Americans riven by race, class, and religion, living side by side, yet ignorant of the vicissitudes that each tribe, as it were, faces.

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A photo of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us.

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A photo of The Lost Bookshop

The Lost Bookshop

The Keeper of Stories meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets. "The thing about books,' she said 'is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of." On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found... For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder...where nothing is as it seems.

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A photo of Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

Nobody ever talks to strangers on the train. It's a rule. But what would happen if they did? A heartwarming novel about unexpected friendships and the joy of connecting. Every day Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the ten stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname: Impossibly-Pretty-Bookworm and Terribly-Lonely-Teenager. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He'd have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver. This single event starts a chain reaction, and an eclectic group of people with almost nothing in common except their commute discover that a chance encounter can blossom into much more. It turns out that talking to strangers can teach you about the world around you--and even more about yourself.

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A photo of River Spirit

River Spirit

This enchanting and eye-opening new novel follows an embattled young woman coming of age during the Mahdist War in nineteenth-century Sudan, and illuminates the tensions that shape her course: between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. In River Spirit, Aboulela gives us the unforgettable story of a people who--against the odds and for a brief time--gained independence from foreign rule through their willpower, subterfuge, and sacrifice.

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A photo of Unlikely Animals

Unlikely Animals

A lost young woman returns to small-town New Hampshire under the strangest of circumstances in this one-of-a-kind novel of life, death, and whatever comes after from the acclaimed author of Rabbit Cake. The Starlings live in Everton, an ordinary enough New Hampshire town. It's notable only for Corbin Park, an enormous hunting park, and for Maple Street Cemetery--home to many former residents of Everton. There's also the town legend that Emma Starling was born with healing hands. But Emma has never found the right use for her healing abilities, and they've been on the fritz ever since her childhood best friend, Crystal, fell prey to addiction and disappeared. No one went looking for her; the police don't spend much time looking for drug addicts. Now Emma has come back to Everton to see her dying father, the only person who has kept up the search for Crystal. Ever since his recent diagnosis with a rare brain disease, Clive Sterling has been seeing ghosts, including Ernest Harold Baynes, the long-dead naturalist who worked in Corbin Park, and who seems to have some unfinished business in Everton. The residents of Maple Street have their own agenda, too--they'd like to see Emma live up to her potential as a miracle worker and cure her father. Emma's not exactly up for the challenge, though. Recently expelled from medical school, she takes a job as a substitute fifth-grade teacher to get back on her feet and stay close to home. As her father's condition worsens, it's all Emma can do to stay afloat. She isn't trying to be a hero--just a passable guardian to her father and her fifth-graders--but somehow she still sets in motion just the kind of miracle the town needs. Set against the backdrop of a small town in the throes of a very real opioid crisis, Unlikely Animals is a novel about familial expectations, imperfect friendships, and the possibility of resurrecting that which had been thought irrevocably lost.

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A photo of Women are the Fiercest Creatures

Women are the Fiercest Creatures

In this wildly addictive novel, three overlooked women take on the charming, manipulative tech CEO who wrote them out of his startup's history.

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A photo of Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

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A photo of True Biz

True Biz

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another--and changed forever. This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.

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A photo of VenCo

VenCo

Lucky St. James, a Métis millennial living with her cantankerous but loving grandmother Stella, is barely hanging on when she discovers she will be evicted from their tiny Toronto apartment. Then, one night, something strange and irresistible calls out to Lucky. Burrowing through a wall, she finds a silver spoon etched with a crooked-nosed witch and the word SALEM, humming with otherworldly energy. Hundreds of miles away in Salem, Myrna Good has been looking for Lucky. Myrna works for VenCo, a front company fueled by vast resources of dark money. Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon links her to VenCo's network of witches throughout North America. Generations of witches have been waiting for centuries for the seven spoons to come together, igniting a new era, and restoring women to their rightful power. But as reckoning approaches, a very powerful adversary is stalking their every move. He's Jay Christos, a roguish and deadly witch-hunter as old as witchcraft itself. To find the last spoon, Lucky and Stella embark on a rollicking and dangerous road trip to the darkly magical city of New Orleans, where the final showdown will determine whether VenCo will usher in a new beginning...or remain underground forever.

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A photo of There There

There There

Here is a story of several people, each of whom has private reasons for travelling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and unspeakable loss.

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A photo of Late Bloomers

Late Bloomers

After thirty-six years of marriage, recently divorced Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life. Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman named Malika, who seems to be smitten with him. Meanwhile, Lata is enjoying her newfound independence after decades in an arranged marriage, but she's caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her. Priya, the former couple's unmarried daughter, thinks her father's online pursuits are distasteful but hides a secret affair of her own, while their son Nikesh pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails.

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A photo of Murder Your Employer : From the Chronicles of Dean Harbinger Harrow

Murder Your Employer : From the Chronicles of Dean Harbinger Harrow

Preparing you for an education you'll never forget, this introduction to The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of homicidal arts, follows students as they prepare for graduation by getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live.

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A photo of Behind You is the Sea

Behind You is the Sea

A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore--from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich--shows lives which intersect across divides of class, generation and religion.

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A photo of What Have We Done

What Have We Done

What Have We Done is a tale about the lives we leave behind and the secrets we carry with us forever. A stay-at-home mom with a past. A has-been rock star with a habit. A reality TV producer with a debt. Three disparate lives. One deadly secret. Twenty five years ago, Jenna, Donnie, and Nico were the best of friends, a bond forged as residents of Savior House, an abusive group home for parentless teens. When the home was shut down-after the disappearance of several kids-the three were split up. Though the trauma of their childhood has never left them, each went on to live successful, if troubled, lives. They haven't seen one another since they were teens but now are reunited for a single haunting reason: someone is trying to kill them. To save their lives, the group will have to revisit the nightmares of their childhoods and confront their past-a past that holds the secret to why someone wants them dead. It's a reunion none of them asked for . . . or wanted. But it may be the only way to save all their lives. What Have We Done is both an edge-of-your seat thriller and a gut-wrenching coming-of-age story.

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A photo of Calling For A Blanket Dance

Calling For A Blanket Dance

A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.

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A photo of The Holdout

The Holdout

It's the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school, and her teacher, Bobby Nock, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect. The subsequent trial taps straight into America's most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous. It's an open-and-shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed--until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, convinced of Nock's innocence, persuades the rest of the jurors to return the verdict of not guilty, a controversial decision that will change all their lives forever. Flash forward ten years. A true-crime docuseries reassembles the jury, with particular focus on Maya, now a defense attorney herself. When one of the jurors is found dead in Maya's hotel room, all evidence points to her as the killer. Now, she must prove her own innocence--by getting to the bottom of a case that is far from closed.

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A photo of Lady in the Lake

Lady in the Lake

The revered New York Times bestselling author returns with a novel set in 1960s Baltimore that combines modern psychological insights with elements of classic noir, about a middle-aged housewife turned aspiring reporter who pursues the murder of a forgotten young woman. In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to know--everyone, that is, except Madeline "Maddie" Schwartz. Last year, she was a happy, even pampered housewife. This year, she's bolted from her marriage of almost twenty years, determined to make good on her youthful ambitions to live a passionate, meaningful life. Maddie wants to matter, to leave her mark on a swiftly changing world. Drawing on her own secrets, she helps Baltimore police find a murdered girl--assistance that leads to a job at the city's afternoon newspaper, the Star. Working at the newspaper offers Maddie the opportunity to make her name, and she has found just the story to do it: a missing woman whose body was discovered in the fountain of a city park lake. Cleo Sherwood was a young African-American woman who liked to have a good time. No one seems to know or care why she was killed except Maddie--and the dead woman herself. Maddie's going to find the truth about Cleo's life and death. Cleo's ghost, privy to Maddie's poking and prying, wants to be left alone. Maddie's investigation brings her into contact with people that used to be on the periphery of her life--a jewelery store clerk, a waitress, a rising star on the Baltimore Orioles, a patrol cop, a hardened female reporter, a lonely man in a movie theater. But for all her ambition and drive, Maddie often fails to see the people right in front of her. Her inability to look beyond her own needs will lead to tragedy and turmoil for all sorts of people--including the man who shares her bed, a black police officer who cares for Maddie more than she knows.

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A photo of A Burning

A Burning

After a fiery attack on a train leaves 104 people dead, the fates of three people become inextricably entangled. Jivan, a bright, striving woman from the slums looking for a way out of poverty, is wrongly accused of planning the attack because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir, a slippery gym teacher from Jivan's former high school, has hitched his aspirations to a rising right wing party, and his own ascent becomes increasingly linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely, a spirited, impoverished, relentlessly optimistic hjira, who harbors dreams of becoming a Bollywood star, can provide the alibi that would set Jivan free--but her appearance in court will have unexpected consequences that will change the course of all of their lives. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths.

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A photo of Long Island Compromise

Long Island Compromise

In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end. But forty years later, when Carl's mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that nobody ever really got over anything. Carl's wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. Their three grown children are each a mess: Nathan cannot seem to advance at his law firm and may have made a terrible investment with his trust fund; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything-substance, foodstuff, women-in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she is not a product of the family's pathology that she comes to define it. Then there's Carl himself, the prickly, still-terrified father, who has been secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping for years, and the unthinkable act he commits that will alter the family's path forever.

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A photo of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

The Lonely Hearts Book Club

Sloane Parker lives a small, contained life as a librarian in her small, contained town. She never thinks of herself as lonely...but still she looks forward to that time every day when old curmudgeon Arthur McLachlan comes to browse the shelves and cheerfully insult her. Their sparring is such a highlight of Sloane's day that when Arthur doesn't show up one morning, she's instantly concerned. And then another day passes, and another. Anxious, Sloane tracks the old man down only to discover him all but bedridden...and desperately struggling to hide how happy he is to see her. Wanting to bring more cheer into Arthur's gloomy life, Sloane creates an impromptu book club. Slowly, the lonely misfits of their sleepy town begin to find each other, and in their book club, find the joy of unlikely friendship. Because as it turns out, everyone has a special book in their heart--and a reason to get lost (and eventually found) within the pages.

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A photo of The Floating Feldmans

The Floating Feldmans

Sink or swim. Or at least that's what Annette Feldman tells herself when she books a cruise for her entire family. It's been over a decade since the Feldman clan has spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof, but Annette is determined to celebrate her seventieth birthday the right way. Just this once, they are going to behave like an actual family. Too bad her kids didn't get the memo. Between the troublesome family secrets, old sibling rivalries, and her two teenage grandkids, Annette's birthday vacation is looking more and more like the perfect storm. Adrift together on the open seas, the Feldman's will each face the truths they've been ignoring - and learn that the people they once thought most likely to sink them are actually the ones who help them stay afloat.

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A photo of The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

The British-born Punjabi Shergill sisters--Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirnia--were never close and barely got along growing up, and now as adults, have grown even further apart. Rajni, a school principal is a stickler for order. Jezmeen, a thirty-year-old struggling actress, fears her big break may never come. Shirina, the peacemaking "good" sister married into wealth and enjoys a picture-perfect life. On her deathbed, their mother voices one last wish: that her daughters will make a pilgrimage together to the Golden Temple in Amritsar to carry out her final rites. After a trip to India with her mother long ago, Rajni vowed never to return. But she's always been a dutiful daughter, and cannot, even now, refuse her mother's request. Jezmeen has just been publicly fired from her television job, so the trip to India is a welcome break to help her pick up the pieces of her broken career. Shirina's in-laws are pushing her to make a pivotal decision about her married life; time away will help her decide whether to meekly obey, or to bravely stand up for herself for the first time. Arriving in India, these sisters will make unexpected discoveries about themselves, their mother, and their lives--and learn the real story behind the trip Rajni took with their Mother long ago--a momentous journey that resulted in Mum never being able to return to India again.

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A photo of The Next Mrs. Parrish

The Next Mrs. Parrish

Daphne and Amber Parrish are thrust back into one another's lives upon the resurgence of a long-forgotten threat, forcing a vicious game of cat and mouse where everything is on the line, in this thrilling sequel to the million-copy-bestselling Reese's Book Club Pick The Last Mrs. Parrish. Amber Patterson Parrish has come a long way from being an invisible wallflower. Her hard work and immaculate planning have paid off now that she's a prominent socialite, but that doesn't mean she's had it easy along the way. Less than a year since her husband Jackson's tax evasion scandal, Amber is still at the top of the Bishops Harbor community pecking order, free to do as she wishes while Jackson sits in prison. But that freedom is quickly coming to an end. With Jackson getting released from prison, Amber's time--and money--is vanishing. Meanwhile, Daphne Parrish left Bishops Harbor after her divorce from Jackson Parrish, swearing she would never go back. But when her daughter, Tallulah, runs away from home, desperate to see her father, Daphne agrees to return for the summer to allow him supervised visits. Once out of prison, Jackson swears he's a changed man but Daphne knows all too well that Jackson can't be trusted. When a ghost from Amber's past emerges looking for revenge, the three of them find unlikely allies in one another, but who is playing who? When all is said and done, they'll have to fight tooth and nail for everything they have left in this zero-sum game. With shocking turns and entertaining characters, The Next Mrs. Parrish will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about duplicity and betrayal.

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A photo of West Side Love Story

West Side Love Story

Two familias in Texas, both alike in dignity, rivalries, and passion... Having grown up in the nurturing household of Casa Capuleta, Mariana will do anything for familia. To solve her adoptive parents' financial problems amid their rapidly changing San Antonio comunidad, Mariana and her younger sisters are determined to win the Battle of the Mariachi Bands. That means competing against Hugo Montero, their father's archnemesis, and his band and escalating a decades-old feud. It also raises the stakes of Mariana's forbidden attraction for a certain dark-eyed mariachi who sets her heart racing. To Angelo Montero's familia, Mariana is also strictly off-limits. But that doesn't stop him from pursuing her. As their secret affair intensifies and the competition grows fierce, they're swept up in a brewing storm of betrayals, rivalries, and broken ties. Against the odds, they vow to bring peace. But sacrifices must be made and consequences weighed for two star-crossed lovers to make beautiful music together.

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A photo of The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent, a great red rift has been been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries. But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes -- those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon -- are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back. She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

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