Fiction

Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America.

Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Tackling some of humanity's oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic--revelatory.

C. S. Malerich's The Factory Witches of Lowell is a riveting historical fantasy about witches going on strike in the historical mill-town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Faced with abominable working conditions, unsympathetic owners, and hard-hearted managers, the mill girls of Lowell have had enough. They're going on strike, and they have a secret weapon on their side: a little witchcraft to ensure that no one leaves the picket line.

For the young women of Lowell, Massachusetts, freedom means fair wages for fair work, decent room and board, and a chance to escape the cotton mills before lint stops up their lungs. When the Boston owners decide to raise the workers' rent, the girls go on strike. Their ringleader is Judith Whittier, a newcomer to Lowell but not to class warfare. Judith has already seen one strike fold and she doesn't intend to see it again. Fortunately Hannah, her best friend in the boardinghouse--and maybe first love?--has a gift for the dying art of witchcraft.

2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist

2019 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist

"A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood" (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Bee Season, about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood--a balancing act familiar to women of every generation.

Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: "America's Worst Mother, America's Bravest Mother, America's Worst Photographer, or America's Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking." After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter's sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives, and especially Lillian's career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.

"A searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time" (The New Yorker), Feast Your Eyes shares Samantha's memories, interviews with Lillian's friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian's journals and letters--a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity. Myla Goldberg has gifted us with "a mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit" (Lit Hub)--and, in the end, "a universal and profound story of love and loss" (New York Newsday).

A New York Times Bestseller

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.

No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman's haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as "a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book" (Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award-winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.

In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio's father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami's plans and changes his life forever.

Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.

A haunted, surreal debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal--one that upends our understanding of power, predation, and agency.

Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals--or "Cures"--by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson's widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover--and eventually comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Slim but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after its final page, pulling the reader into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book - "Strange and affectionate, like Almost Famous penned by Shakespeare. A love letter to music in all its myriad iterations."--Kirkus Reviews - "This book has no business being as good as it is."--Christian Wiman

In the year 2063, on the edge of the Crater formerly known as Montréal, a middle-aged man and his ex's daughter search for a cult hero: the leader of a short-lived band named after a forgotten work of poetry and known to fans through a forgotten work of music criticism. In this exuberantly plotted verse novel, Guriel follows an obsessive cult-following through the twenty-first century. Some things change (there's metamorphic smart print for music mags; the Web is called the "Zuck"). Some things don't (poetry readings are still, mostly, terrible). But the characters, including a robot butler who stands with Ishiguro's Stevens as one of the great literary domestics, are unforgettable.

Splicing William Gibson with Roberto Bolaño, Pale Fire with Thomas Pynchon, Forgotten Work is a time-tripping work of speculative fiction. It's a love story about fandom, an ode to music snobs, a satire on the human need to value the possible over the actual--and a verse novel of Nabokovian virtuosity.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2019:

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"Jessica Barry's Freefall is not only an enthralling, impossible-to-put down mystery that keeps the pages flying, but it is also a gorgeous, resonant tale of a mother's unconditional love for her daughter. I could not recommend this more!"
-- Aimee Molloy, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Mother

"An absorbing treat." - PEOPLE Magazine

"The corporate malfeasance and shady conspiracies of John Grisham, with the frank feminism of two rounded female protagonists." -- Entertainment Weekly

They say your daughter is dead.

You know they're wrong.

When her fiancé's private plane crashes in the Colorado Rockies, everyone assumes Allison Carpenter is dead.

But Maggie, Allison's mother back home in Owl Creek, Maine, refuses to believe them. Maggie knows her daughter - or she used to, anyway. For the past two years, the two women have been estranged, and while Maggie doesn't know anything about Ally's life now - not even why she was on a private plane to begin with - she still believes in her girl's strength, and in their love for each other.

As Allison struggles across the treacherous mountain wilderness, Maggie embarks on a desperate search for answers about the world Allison has been involved in. What was she running from? And can Maggie uncover the truth in time to save her?

Told from the perspectives of a mother and daughter separated by distance but united by an unbreakable bond, Freefall is a heart-stopping, propulsive thriller about two tenacious women overcoming unimaginable obstacles to protect themselves and the ones they love.

"[A] double bildungsroman" of two British women "set against a background of political and cultural upheavals" in the direct aftermath of WWII (The New Yorker).

It begins on May 8, 1945. The streets of London are alive with VE-Day celebrations. In the crowd, twenty-year-old Freya Wyley meets eighteen-year-old Nancy Holdaway. Freya's acerbic wit and free-wheeling politics complement Nancy's gentle, cautious nature, and what begins on that eventful day in history is the story of a transformative friendship that spans two decades.
As Freya chooses journalism and Nancy realizes her ambitions as a novelist, their friendship takes on the nuances of sexual, emotional, and professional rivalries. Beneath the relentless thrum of changing times are the eternal battles fought by women in pursuit of independence and the search for love. Stretching from the war haunted halls of Oxford and Nuremburg to the cultural shifts of the early 1960s, Freya brings to life two extraordinary women facing down an era of political and personal tumult.

"With this three-dimensional portrait of his headstrong heroine, whose hard-gloss shell conceals a hard-fought vulnerability, Quinn achieves a distinct and unusual creation."--The New York Times

Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night), she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her influencer sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore. Enter Sam, a senior at the local women's college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she's always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She's worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close. But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth's father-in-law, the true differences between the women's lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences.

A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.