Fiction
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Bustle's "16 Novels About Viral Outbreaks To Make You Feel Less Alone"
The Hollywood Reporter's "8 Pandemic-Themed Books to Read Amid Coronavirus"
Refinery29's "Books That Hit A Little Too Close To Home During The Pandemic"
SYFY.com's "Eight SFF Novels You Shouldn't Miss This March" Station Eleven meets Never Let Me Go in this debut novel set in an unsettling near future where the dead can be uploaded to machines and kept in service by the living. In the wake of a highly contagious virus, California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high rise towers, the living can't go out, but the dead can come in--and they come in all forms, from sad rolling cans to manufactured bodies that can pass for human. Wealthy participants in the "companionship" program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people--a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will. Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate, leased to a family of strangers. But when she realizes she's able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away, searching for the woman who killed her. Lilac's act of rebellion sets off a chain of events that sweeps from San Francisco to Siberia to the very tip of South America. While the novel traces Lilac's journey through an exquisitely imagined Northern California, the story is told from eight different points of view--some human, some companion--that explore the complex shapes love, revenge, and loneliness take when the dead linger on.
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Confession Club: A Novel
The Confession Club is charming, heartwarming, and inspiring. And as in the previous books that take place in Mason, readers will find friendship, community, and kindness on full display. Advance praise for The Confession Club "[A] feel-good testament to taking risks, falling love, and reinvention . . . Berg effortlessly wraps her arms around this busy universe of quirky characters with heartbreaking secrets and unflagging faith. . . . Readers new to Berg's Mason will be dazzled by this bright and fascinating story, and fans will be cheering for the next volume."--Publishers Weekly
Confessions of Frannie Langton: A Novel
This breathtaking debut, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, is a murder mystery that travels across the Atlantic and through the darkest channels of history. A brilliant, searing depiction of race, class, and oppression that penetrates the skin and sears the soul, it is the story of a woman of her own making in a world that would see her unmade.
All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being tried at the Old Bailey.
The testimonies against Frannie are damning. She is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, a whore.
But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even if remembering could save her life. She doesn't know how she came to be covered in the victims' blood. But she does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who stretched all bounds of ethics, and the events that brought her into the Benhams' London home--and into a passionate and forbidden relationship.
Though her testimony may seal her conviction, the truth will unmask the perpetrators of crimes far beyond murder and indict the whole of English society itself.
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Consensual Hex
When Lee, a first year at Smith, is raped under eerie circumstances during orientation week by an Amherst frat boy, she's quickly disillusioned by her lack of recourse. As her trauma boils within her, Lee is selected for an exclusive seminar on Gender, Power, and Witchcraft, where she meets Luna (an alluring Brooklyn hipster), Gabi (who has a laundry list of phobias), and Charlotte (a waifish, chill international student). Granted a charter for a coven and suddenly in possession of real magic, the four girls are tasked by their aloof Professor with covertly retrieving a grimoire that an Amherst fraternity has gotten their hands on. But when the witches realize the frat brothers are using magic to commit and cover up sexual assault all over Northampton, their exploits escalate into vigilante justice. As Lee's thirst for revenge on her rapist grows, things spiral out of control, pitting witch against witch as they must wrestle with how far one is willing to go to heal. Consensual Hex is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of a young woman coming of age, uncovering the ways in which love and obsession and looking to fit in can go hand in hand. Lee, an outstanding, magical anti-heroine, refuses to be pigeonholed as a model victim or a horrific example. Instead, her caustic voice demands our attention, clawing out from every page, equally vicious and vulnerable as she lures us, then dares us, to transgress. Dark, biting, and archly camp, Consensual Hex announces Harlowe as a significant talent.
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories (LOA #327)
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Convert
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Cornelius Sky
"The novel is set against a backdrop of a crumbling Manhattan, where tensions are high and things seem to be at a breaking point, mirroring the chaos in Sky's own life. Brandoff comes to the material honestly, having worked as a city doorman at several buildings over the course of five years in the 1980s."
--New York Post, Buzz Book pick
"Five nights a week, 60-year-old Timothy Brandoff spends eight hours driving the M72 bus along its crosstown route through Central Park. He's also taken on an additional route, on which Brandoff transports passengers across time to 1974 and the only stop is one where riders can immerse themselves in his new novel...[Cornelius Sky] is the result of Brandoff's upbringing in New York City, his family's history, and his relentless passion for dramatic prose."
--AM New York, included in a feature on Timothy Brandoff
"Brandoff paints an emotionally searing portrait of his protagonist, slowly divvying out details of Connie's past and showing how that past shaped him--his strengths, the pitfalls to which he succumbs and the gaps in his character. Rich, beautiful writing enlarges dramatic scenes that serve to amplify the gritty authenticity of a powerful story."
--Shelf Awareness for Readers, Starred review
"Brandoff's memorable debut follows the unraveling of Connie Sky, a doorman at a posh apartment building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue...The author impresses as a master of street-smart dialogue in the tradition of George V. Higgins. Connie's world is made up of lost souls, all lucidly etched, and Brandoff recreates a vanished New York of Alexander's, Blarney Stones, and Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel on the local TV news. In the end, Brandoff makes Connie's path to understanding himself feel well-earned. This is a dramatically satisfying and emotional resonant novel."
--Publishers Weekly
"Brandoff writes precisely about Connie's mental state and lucidity...When Brandoff focuses on the details of New York City life, he establishes an atmospheric, lived-in quality...[Cornelius Sky's] detailed portrait of a self-destructive character retains a haunting power."
--Kirkus Reviews
Timothy Brandoff has been selected as a Poets & Writers 5 Over 50 featured author for 2019!
Included in BookRiot's New Release Round-up!
Cornelius Sky is a doorman in a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building that houses New York City's elite, including a former First Lady whose husband was assassinated while in office. It is 1974 and New York City is heading toward a financial crisis. At work, Connie prides himself on his ability to buff a marble floor better than anyone, a talent that so far has kept him from being fired for his drinking. He pushes the boundaries of his duties, partying and playing board games with the former First Lady's lonely thirteen-year-old son in the service stairwell--the only place where the boy is not spied upon mercilessly by the tabloid press and his Secret Service detail.
Connie believes he is the only one who can offer true solace and companionship to this fatherless boy, but his constant neglect of his own sons and their mother reaches a boiling point. His wife changes the locks on his own door, and he finds himself wandering the mean streets of the city in his uniform, where unlikely angels offer him a path toward redemption. Cornelius Sky is an elegant picaresque that beautifully captures an opulent city on the edge of ruin and recovery.
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Country for Dying
Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona.
Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan.
Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira. Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Taïa writes, So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future.
Courting Mr. Lincoln: A Novel
A May Indie Next Pick
An Apple Books Best of the Month for April
A People Magazine Best Book of the Week "Exquisite." --People
"A triumph of a novel." --Bookreporter.com
"Rich, fascinating, and romantic." --Newsday When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's short list to be president. A country lawyer living above a dry goods shop, he is lacking both money and manners, and his gift for oratory surprises those who meet him. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with an interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. "I can only hope," she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, "that his waters being so very still, they also run deep."
It's not long, though, before she sees the Lincoln that Speed knows: an amiable, profound man who, despite his awkwardness, has a gentle wit to match his genius, and who respects her keen political mind. But as her relationship with Lincoln deepens, she must confront his inseparable friendship with Speed, who has taught his roommate how to dance, dress, and navigate the polite society of Springfield. Told in the alternating voices of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, and inspired by historical events, Courting Mr. Lincoln creates a sympathetic and complex portrait of Mary unlike any that has come before; a moving portrayal of the deep and very real connection between the two men; and most of all, an evocation of the unformed man who would grow into one of the nation's most beloved presidents. Louis Bayard, a master storyteller, delivers here a page-turning tale of love, longing, and forbidden possibilities.
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Cover Your Tracks
Margo Fletcher, eight months pregnant, is traveling by train from Chicago to Spokane, her childhood home. While passing through an isolated portion of the Rockies in blizzard conditions, the train unexpectedly brakes. Up ahead, deadly snow from a massive avalanche plummets down the mountain. Despite the conductor's order for the passengers to stay seated, former Army Ranger Nick Eliot insists that survival depends on moving to the back of the train. Only Margo believes him. They take refuge in the last train car, which Nick heroically uncouples in time to avoid the avalanche. The rest of the train is hurled down the mountainside and is soon lost forever in a blanket of snow. Margo and Nick, the sole survivors, are stranded in the snowstorm without food, water, or heat. Rescuers might not arrive for days.
When the weather turns violent again, the pair must flee the shelter of the passenger car and run for their lives into the wilderness. They must fend off the deadly cold as well as predatory wild animals foraging for food. Eventually, Nick leads Margo to shelter in a watchtower atop a mountain. There, we learn that both Margo and Nick have secrets that have brought them together and threaten to destroy them.
Cover Your Tracks is a chilling story of love and hate, the devastating power of nature, and the will to survive.
Crooked Tree
A haunting, suspenseful literary debut that combines a classic coming of age story with a portrait of a fractured American family dealing with the fallout of one summer evening gone terribly wrong.
"The night we left Ellen on the road, we drove up the mountain in silence."
It is the early 1980s and fifteen-year-old Libby is obsessed with The Field Guide to the Trees of North America, a gift her Irish immigrant father gave her before he died. She finds solace in "The Kingdom," a stand of red oak and thick mountain laurel near her home in suburban Pennsylvania, where she can escape from her large and unruly family and share menthol cigarettes and lukewarm beers with her best friend.
One night, while driving home, Libby's mother, exhausted and overwhelmed with the fighting in the backseat, pulls over and orders Libby's little sister Ellen to walk home. What none of this family knows as they drive off leaving a twelve-year-old girl on the side of the road five miles from home with darkness closing in, is what will happen next.
A Crooked Tree is a surprising, indelible novel, both a poignant portrayal of an unmoored childhood giving way to adolescence, and a gripping tale about the unexpected reverberations of one rash act.
Crossing to Safety
Afterword by T. H. Watkins Called a "magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom" by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers
Joyce Carol Oates pulls out all the stops in this chilling female-centric noir collection featuring brand-new writing from Margaret Atwood, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, and more.
Livia Llewellyn's "One of These Nights" has won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, presented by the Mystery Writers of America!
"Miss Martin" by Sheila Kohler has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2021
"An eclectic anthology edited by Joyce Carol Oates. It features the work of 16 distinguished writers, including Margaret Atwood, Valerie Martin, Steph Cha and Ms. Oates herself. The theme is 'female noir, ' with shades encompassing 'sociological realism...Grand Guignol surrealism...erotic playfulness [and] dark fairy-tale determinism.' Noir sensibility, male or female, Ms. Oates concludes, is 'not so much pessimistic as starkly realist, free of romantic illusion, expecting the less benign, resigned to the worst.' If not the ideal cup of holiday cheer, then, perhaps a perfect tonic for the New Year?"
--Wall Street Journal
"The indefatigable Joyce Carol Oates gathers a strong list of names for Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers. Emerging and established authors provide attention-grabbing short works: especially notable are Edwidge Danticat's story on the quotidian horror of domestic violence, Bernice L. McFadden's comic take on the appropriation of racial friendship, and Lisa Ling's illustrations of a grotesque marriage."
--Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
"But of course, in the end, it isn't the themes or the innovations on the format of the short story anthology that make the tales collected in Cutting Edge most 'feel' as if you were reading Joyce Carol Oates herself. It is the writing. The tight plots and fresh, flowing prose that go about their business until--snap!--the story's well-oiled mousetrap does its job."
--New York Journal of Books
Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and tired of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.
Featuring brand-new stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood (poems), Valerie Martin, Aimee Bender, Edwidge Danticat, Sheila Kohler, S.A. Solomon, S.J. Rozan, Lucy Taylor, Cassandra Khaw, Bernice L. McFadden, Jennifer Morales, Elizabeth McCracken, Livia Llewellyn, Lisa Lim, and Steph Cha.
From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:
"The particular strength of the female noir vision isn't a recognizable style but rather a defiantly female, indeed feminist, perspective. Cutting Edge brings together a considerable range of twenty-first-century female voices, from sociological realism (Cha) to Grand Guignol surrealism (Oates); from erotic playfulness (Bender) to dark fairy-tale determinism (Khaw). Here is a brilliantly deadpan graphic story by Lisa Lim, and here are brilliantly executed poems by Margaret Atwood. Artwork by Laurel Hausler is striking and original, sinister and triumphant; Noir Dame (on the front cover) is the perfect image of a mysterious beauty, far more than merely skin-deep, and essentially unknowable."
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Cuyahoga
Damascus Nights
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Dancer in the Dust
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Daphne: A Novel
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Dark Library
Libraries are magical places. But what if they're even more magical than we know?
In Cyrille Martinez's library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. He's tired of people reading bestsellers, so he places himself on the desks of those who might appreciate him. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Mauve Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian trying to banish coffee cups and laptops.
Then one day there are no empty desks anywhere in the Great Library. A great horde of student workers has descended, and they will scan every single book in the library: the much-borrowed, the neglected, the popular, the obscure. What will happen to the library then? Will it still be necessary?
The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.
Dark Tides: A Novel
Darling Rose Gold
"Sensationally good - two complex characters power the story like a nuclear reaction..."--Lee Child
A most anticipated book of 2020 by Newsweek ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Bustle ∙ Shondaland ∙ PopSugar ∙ Woman's Day ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BookRiot ∙ She Reads
Mothers never forget. Daughters never forgive.
For the first eighteen years of her life, Rose Gold Watts believed she was seriously ill. She was allergic to everything, used a wheelchair and practically lived at the hospital. Neighbors did all they could, holding fundraisers and offering shoulders to cry on, but no matter how many doctors, tests, or surgeries, no one could figure out what was wrong with Rose Gold. Turns out her mom, Patty Watts, was just a really good liar. After serving five years in prison, Patty gets out with nowhere to go and begs her daughter to take her in. The entire community is shocked when Rose Gold says yes. Patty insists all she wants is to reconcile their differences. She says she's forgiven Rose Gold for turning her in and testifying against her. But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty Watts always settles a score. Unfortunately for Patty, Rose Gold is no longer her weak little darling... And she's waited such a long time for her mother to come home. "Dazzling, dark and utterly delicious"--J. P. Delaney, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Before
"One of the most captivating and disturbing thrillers I've read this year. An astonishing debut"--Samantha Downing, USA Today bestselling author of My Lovely Wife
Daughter's Tale: A Novel
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Daughters of Erietown
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Days Without End: A Novel
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making.--Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, "a master storyteller" (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars
Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars--against the Sioux and the Yurok--and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.
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Dear Mrs. Bird: A Novel
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