It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, are boldfaced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's power brokers. Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1 percent, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets. Olga and Prieto's mother, Blanca, a Young Lord turned radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives. Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Xochitl Gonzalez's Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

A sweeping story about four women whose lives are shaped by love, longing, and pain. Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in the U.S. who is unlucky in love and coping with the pandemic on her own. Zikora is a successful lawyer living in Washington, DC, who finds herself, unexpectedly, a heartbroken single mother. Omelogor is a scholar researching pornography for a master's thesis in Women's Studies. And Nafissatou, Chiamaka's housekeeper, is trying to reclaim her dignity after a terrible sexual assault. In Dream Count, we come to know these interesting, challenging, and complicated women as they navigate their rich and complex lives.

Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn't align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late '80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts, the AIDS crisis and Rodney King's attack--collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy. At a therapist's encouragement, Isaac begins to write down his story. In the process, he taps into a creative energy that will send him on a journey back to his family, his ancestral home in Arkansas and the inherited trauma of the nation's dark past. But a surprise discovery will either unlock the truths he's seeking or threaten to derail the life he's fought so hard to claim.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Three Asian American teenagers meet in the New York suburbs in the 1980s. Drawn together by their shared sense of alienation from their conventionally domestic immigrant families, each wants to live a meaningful life. They envision a future defined by freedom and creativity, but on the brink of adulthood in New York City, their fortunes quickly diverge. Giselle Chin is a performance artist, pushing the boundaries of the form while socializing with the city's artistic and financial elite. Jackie Ong works at tech start-ups during the early dotcom era, as the internet's egalitarian promise is tested against its rampant monetization. Ellen Ng, a community activist, fights against gentrification overwhelming the city's neighborhoods. Their chosen paths separate them, but their friendship sustains and challenges them across huge divides of class, status, and worldview. Decades later, their sense of what is possible has changed, mutating against the hardscrabble realities of work and love. Moving from the 1980s to the 2040s, spanning multiple eras of a changing New York City, Memory Piece explores the roles of art, friendship, and creativity in self-preservation, chronicling three women as they strive to find value in a radically different world than the one they were promised.

Salma Khatun is hopeful about Blenheim, the suburban development into which she, her husband, and their son have just moved. The Bangladeshi family needs a fresh start, and Blenheim feels like just the place. Soon after they move in, Salma spots her white neighbor, Tom Hutton, ripping out the anti-racist banner her son put in the front garden. Avoiding confrontation, Salma takes the banner inside and puts it in her window. But the next morning, she wakes up to find her window smeared with paint. When she does speak to Tom, battle lines are drawn between the two families. As racial and social tensions escalate and the stakes rise, it's clear that a reckoning is coming ... And someone is going to get hurt.

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, 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, 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.

In 1950s Philadelphia, fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to become the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull Ruby back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC's elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don't let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William's family and grant her the life she's been searching for ... With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.

Graduating into the trough of yet another American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. However mind-numbing the work, her entry-level consulting job is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the check for her growing circle of friends in Milwaukee, send money home to her parents in India, and dare to envision a stable future for herself. She even begins dating who she has long wanted--women--and soon develops a crush on Marina, a beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But then, as quickly as it came together, Sneha's life begins to fall apart. Her job and apartment are both suddenly and maddeningly in jeopardy, and closely-guarded secrets and buried traumas resurface, sending her spiraling into shame and isolation. When a chance encounter with Marina ignites an electric romance, it looks like salvation--if only they can overcome the lie that threatens to undo the trust they've built.

The Guerreros have lived in Nothar Park, a predominantly Dominican part of the city, for over twenty years. When the crash of a wrecking ball signals the demolition of an old neighboring tenement, Eusebia, an elder of the community, quietly devises an increasingly dangerous series of schemes to stop construction of the luxury condos that will take their place. Meanwhile Eusebia's daughter, Luz, a rising associate at a top Manhattan law firm, strives to live the bougie lifestyle her parents worked hard to give her. While her father, Vladimir, secretly designs their retirement home in the Dominican Republic and Eusebia begins masterminding a neighborhood crime ring to save their homes, Luz is wholly distracted with a sweltering romance with the white, handsome developer of the company her mother so vehemently opposes. And when mother and daughter collide, at odds on what it means to save their community, tensions ramp up in Nothar Park, and build toward a near fatal climax.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.

For almost a decade, Claudia Birch has counseled patients at Mercy Street, an embattled clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance. But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of antiabortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia’s days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy’s, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11--the screenname of Victor Prine, an antiabortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs.

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a powerful examination of every day Black life--of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.

When Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California, they hope to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which is the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to meet fellow liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world's troubles Jasmyn's only friends in the community are equally perplexed and frustrated by Liberty's outlook, a frustration that turns to dread when their loved ones start embracing the Liberty way of life. As Jasmyn learns more about Liberty and its founders, she discovers a terrible secret, one that threatens to destroy her world in ways she never could have imagined.

Summer, 1999. Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens lives with her mother and older teenaged brother in building 4950 of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. The high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority, and the neighborhood is beginning to fall down around them. Fe Fe is friends with Precious and Stacia, but when Fe Fe welcomes Tonya into their fold, the dynamics shift. Their friendships fray, as do the structures of the four girls' families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, remembering that fateful summer, Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.

Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. Over the course of twelve sessions, Cara recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her alternately biting and loving relationships with her neighbor Lulú and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification and loss, and, eventually, what really happened between her and her estranged son, Fernando. As Cara confronts her darkest secrets and regrets, we see a woman buffeted by life but still full of fight.

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, For Sale signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block--her neighbor Theo. But Sydney and Theo's deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised. When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other--or themselves--long enough to find out before they, too, disappear?

1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh HaAyin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren't supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man. 1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida's daughter, has been living in New York City--a place that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing that her skin were lighter, that her illiterate mother's Yemeni music was quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn't looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or her sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni's childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket. Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family: dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future.

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.

2017: When Angela Creighton discovers a mysterious letter containing a life-shattering confession, she is determined to find the intended recipient. Her search takes her back to the 1970s when a group of daring women operated an illegal underground abortion network in Toronto known only by its whispered code name: Jane. 1971: As a teenager, Dr. Evelyn Taylor was sent to a home for "fallen" women where she was forced to give up her baby for adoption--a trauma she has never recovered from. Despite harrowing police raids and the constant threat of arrest, she joins the Jane Network as an abortion provider, determined to give other women the choice she never had. 1980: After discovering a shocking secret about her family, twenty-year-old Nancy Mitchell begins to question everything she has ever known. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she feels like she has no one to turn to for help. Grappling with her decision, she locates "Jane" and finds a place of her own alongside Dr. Taylor within the network's ranks, but she can never escape the lies that haunt her.

It's a warm October afternoon, and Ozro Armstead walks out into the brilliant sunshine on his thirty-seventh birthday. At home, his wife, Deborah, and daughter, Trinity, prepare a surprise celebration; down the street, his brother, Tommy, waves goodbye as Oz heads back to his office after a birthday lunch. But Oz won't make it to the party or even to his briefcase at his desk. He's about to disappear. In the days, months, and years to follow, Deborah and Trinity look backward and forward as they piece together the life of the man they love, but whom they come to realize they might never have truly known. In a gripping narrative that moves from the Great Migration to 1970s Detroit and 1990s New York, we follow the hopes, triumphs, losses, and secrets that build up and tear apart an American family.

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she's never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning in the woods, she hears a scream. When she returns to search the area, all she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring. Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don't know what it means to quit; her loving husband, Crow, and their two beautiful children challenge her to be better every day. So when she hears a second woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something about it--starting with investigating the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes. As Quill closes in on the truth about the missing woman, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for all of the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill everything on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being invisible.

This epic novel explores the lives of three generations of women tied together by love, hope, dreams, ambition...and family secrets. Meet Grace: raised by her beloved grandmother in tension-filled, post-segregation Virginia, Grace is barely a teenager when she loses her grandmother. Shellshocked, she is shipped up North to live with her formidably ambitious Aunt Hattie--a woman who firmly left behind her Southern roots in pursuit of upward mobility. Feeling like a fish out of water in the high society world filled with fancy teas and coveted debutante balls, Grace's only place of comfort is with the smart, handsome son of one of the society's grand dames. Meet Delores: beautiful, intelligent and fierce, Delores a.k.a. Lolo has never had it easy. Once she makes it north, she puts aside her dream of being a model to do what she has to do to survive as a woman with little money and no mooring: get married and have a family of her own. When secrets start to spill out and she and her family slowly begin to unravel, Lolo is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her dream intact and those she loves together. Meet Rae: when Lolo's headstrong daughter Rae discovers that she is adopted, it's just one secret among others that her family is keeping. When Rae finds out that she's about to become a mother herself, she knows that there is an important reckoning that must be faced about herself and her two mothers. Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women's equality in early 2000s, Denene Millner's beautifully wrought novel explores three women's intimate, and often complicated, struggle with what it truly means to be to be family.

"This masterfully written story brings you deep into the hearts and souls of a tight-knit group of friends--girls growing up in Queens, the polyglot borough of New York. Here Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, and Angelique become friends for life--or so they vow. Together they learn to survive all that the street throws at them--schoolyard bullies, clueless teachers, and the leering gaze of men who trail behind them wherever they walk. Exuberant and wild, they are daughters of immigrants from different diasporas, but in Queens their backgrounds blur and blend: they sing Mariah Carey at the tops of their lungs, pine for boyfriends who pay them no mind--and break the hearts of those who do--all while balancing the cultures they came from and the one they find themselves in. But as the years go by, and their own adulthood nears, choices must be made about their futures. Some of the girls become wives and mothers to a new generation of brown girls; while others embark on a migration baffling to the generation before them, journeying back to the countries their parents fled for the "better life" in America.

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 potent novel-in-stories follows a group of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. In “Ride Along,” Marcus Salameh, a U.S. Marine, is trying to mediate a conflict between his father and his sister, who’s graduating from college with honors after coming out of a rough patch following an abortion. “Escorting the Body” finds Marcus returning to Palestine to bury his father and reflect on how his Baba’s American dream had turned sour because of his inability to be more compassionate to his family. The title story looks at the power dynamics between rich and poor immigrants, as a young woman named Maysoon Baladi takes a job as a cleaner for the Ammars, a wealthy fellow Palestinian family. In “Gyroscopes,” high school student Layla Marwan, a cousin of the Ammars, expresses concern about the negative representation of Arabs in her school’s production of Aladdin, but is ignored by her adviser. Throughout, Muaddi Darraj brilliantly depicts complex characters reckoning with the costs of holding tightly to their principles. This is a beautiful portrait of a family reaching for their dreams while holding onto their roots.

Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And he is the Cure. Martin begins slipping into an alternate consciousness, with new physical strengths, to violently defend his family--the only Black family in their neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles--against pure evil.

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.

Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, she's shocked to learn that her new patients, India and Erica, are children--just eleven and thirteen years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family's welfare benefits, that's reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them. Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace, and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten. That must not be forgotten. Because history repeats what we don't remember.

Recent Dartmouth dropout Mei, in search of a new direction in life, drives a limo to make ends meet. Her grandfather convinces her to take on private clients who pay under the table, and before she knows it she is working as a trusted chauffeur for sex workers. Mei does her best to mind her own business, but her knack for discretion soon leads her on a life-changing trip from San Francisco to Syracuse with a new client. Handsome and reserved, Henry piques Mei's interest. Toting an enormous black suitcase with him everywhere he goes, he's more concerned with taking frequent breaks than making good time on the road. When Mei discovers Henry's secret, she does away with her usual close-lipped demeaner and decides she has no choice but to confront him. What Henry reveals rocks her to her core and shifts this once casual, transactional road trip to one of moral stakes and dangerous consequences.