The Keeper by Tana French
On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.
In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.
The News from Dublin: Stories by Colm Toibin
From Colm Tóibín, “one of the world’s best living literary writers” (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love.
Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.
The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer…with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald).
Son of Nobody by Yann Martel
The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time―until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later.
As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief.
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself by Jenny Lawson
Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She’s a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She’s an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The questions people most often ask her are, “How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?” This book is her answer.
In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares more than one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn’t working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up.
Lucky Shot: A Hockey Romance by Rebecca Jenshak
Author Ruby Madison has exactly six weeks to change her new baseball romance into one about hockey, a sport she knows precisely nothing about. So to get her up to speed, her agent has arranged for her to spend the summer in Moonshot, a small lake town in Montana, where she’ll work with a local expert to completely rewrite the book. She just has one tall, handsome, grouchy problem . . .
Hockey captain Nick Galaxy doesn’t play around. Not while he’s simultaneously raising his preteen son, caring for his elderly father, and leading his team by example both on and off the ice. He doesn’t have time to school the strange woman staying in his guest cabin in the art of hockey, no matter how easy she is on the eyes. If only his meddling dad had considered this before offering up Nick’s services―and property.
As Ruby learns the difference between a hip check and a hat trick, she starts breaking down Nick’s defenses, revealing the gentle nature hiding behind his gruff exterior. But will their summer fling turn into something more? Or will they fall just short of the goal line?
Arsenio: A Memoir by Arsenio Hall
Arsenio Hall holds a uniquely prominent place in American culture—celebrated late-night host and comedic actor, famed for starring roles in the cultural touchstones Coming to America and Harlem Nights.
Now, he pulls back the curtain and takes us to a different time in Hollywood. Iconic scenes include: starting out as a young magician in Cleveland; hosting his first talk show in the basement of his apartment building when he was in elementary school; cutting his teeth at the world-famous Comedy Store in Hollywood, learning about comedy and life from legendary comedian Richard Pryor; forming lifelong bonds with legendary icons Muhammad Ali, Luther Vandross, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Eddie Murphy; tasting superstar success with Coming to America, the film that preceded The Arsenio Hall Show; conducting unforgettable, groundbreaking interviews with Magic Johnson, Bill Clinton, Tupac Shakur, Maya Angelou, Madonna, and Minister Louis Farrakhan; rescuing a family from a home-fire with Jay Leno; sharing hot sauces and blackjack with Patti LaBelle; and chilling with Prince.
And then, he made the difficult decision to walk away.
Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life by Mason Currey
Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?
The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.
From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.
Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas
Retail worker Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mold of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. Over three hundred pounds, he carries the weight of his childhood trauma and millennial ennui around his waist and in his soul. After trying every diet under the sun, he remains stuck—in his dead-end job, in love, and in his body.
Desperate for help, he enrolls in a clinical trial for a new weight loss product called Obexity. The treatment is as horrifying as the results are miraculous and as Emmett sheds pounds at superhuman speed, every part of his life improves overnight.
Unfortunately, Obexity comes with some killer side effects, including lost stretches of time and overwhelming cravings. Worse, people who were cruel to him have started disappearing and when the police warn of a cannibalistic killer on the loose, he fears that Obexity is turning him into a monster. But how can he give it up now that people are finally starting to treat him like he’s human?
Phases: A Memoir by Brandy
From the moment she first sang at church in McComb, Mississippi, Brandy knew her voice was special. At fourteen she landed her first record deal. At fifteen her album went platinum. At sixteen she was starring in the hit sitcom Moesha and became the first Black actress to play Cinderella on screen alongside fairy godmother, Whitney Houston.
Yet as the accolades piled up, so too did the pressure to maintain a flawless image. To onlookers, she had crafted the blueprint for the teenage “it” girl. But behind closed doors “The Vocal Bible” as she was known, was struggling.
Now, for the first time, Brandy reveals the real story behind her life in the spotlight, the stratospheric highs and the unimaginable lows, the groundbreaking moments and the relatable journey she had to take to discover her authentic self—as a woman, a mother, an artist—as Brandy.
Sorry for Your Loss by Georgia McVeigh
Meet Iris: a dark soul with a propensity for obsession, still reeling from a recent loss, who relies on a local grief group to keep her grounded and out of trouble. And now meet Jack: a cagey widower who shows up at a meeting one night and jolts both of them back to life.
From the moment Jack first takes a shabby plastic chair in the circle, he is positively dashing. And Iris can’t help but feel that fate has brought them together.
But their chance encounter sends them racing through a series of hairpin twists where nothing is as it seems and no one plays by the rules. As Iris is drawn deeper into Jack’s world, she begins to realize that her own deceptions may be no match—or maybe they’re the perfect match?—for all the dirty secrets Jack has been hiding.
The Fourth Wife by Linda Hamilton
Hazel Russon’s life in 1882 Utah territory is defined by three things: the Mormon church, polygamy, and the men who control both. She knows she’s supposed to suppress her sinful dreams of a monogamous life with her sweetheart, and her desire for the freedom to play her beloved piano. Every Mormon woman’s duty is to live obediently and meekly, devoted to her husband and her calling as a sister wife. Her eternal salvation depends upon it.
Commanded to become the fourth wife of a man she’s never met, Hazel is relieved that Jacob Manwaring is attentive and handsome. However, she is shocked to discover that instead of living separately as is custom, all of Jacob’s wives and children live in the same house—a large, dilapidated manor that inexplicably fills Hazel with dread.
Despite Jacob’s tenderness, Hazel senses dark secrets and resentments among her sister wives. She hears strange music, sees blood oozing from the very walls, and glimpses apparitions that grow more terrifying every day. And as her nightmares worsen, Hazel can’t be sure if she has more to fear from the living—including her mysterious husband—or from a sinister presence that seems to animate the house itself . . .
A Crime Through Time by Amelia Blackwell
Pemberley, 1799. When Miss Georgiana Darcy attempts to escape an unwanted marriage proposal, she isn’t expecting to end up quite so far from home. But after encountering a mysterious object in the nearby woods, she finds herself transported almost two hundred years into the future.
Saltram, 1995. At a grand country house where a film crew are busy shooting the latest Jane Austen adaptation, a terrible crime has been committed. And Miss Darcy – newly arrived, impeccably dressed and thoroughly confused – is the only witness.
It soon becomes clear that, somehow, Georgiana was meant to solve this riddle. With the help of a distractingly handsome Irishman named Quinn and a border collie named Watson, she sets out to stop the killer before they can strike again. But trouble is brewing back at Pemberley and time, it seems, is not on her side…
The Most Mysterious Bookshop in Paris by Mark Pryor
Hugo has led an exciting life as an FBI profiler and the US embassy’s head of security, but now he’s ready to embrace a quieter existence as a bookseller in the Marais district of Paris. His former employer, however, has other plans for him. A prominent American citizen is the COO of a boutique chocolate emporium in Paris, where they’ve received a mysterious and threatening note. A blackmailer who goes by the name The Shadow wants half a million euros or else their “darkest secret will be revealed.”
Eclat de Chocolat is housed in a chateau dating back to the 1700s. The building, which served as a convent in the first half of the twentieth century, where the angelic Sister Evangeline and her order of nuns helped countless orphans during World War II, has been beautifully converted into a chocolate factory. So what dark secrets could a chocolatier be hiding? The COO has no idea.
Involving his friend, Lieutenant Camille Lerens, Hugo begins to investigate. But soon a second note appears on the premises, canceling the blackmail threat. The same day, the body of an employee is found in an old graveyard behind the chocolatier. Now Hugo and Lerens have a murder on their hands, but is it connected to the blackmail attempt? As they dig for secrets and motives, it becomes clear The Shadow’s grave work has just begun…
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews
When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.
Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war.
Upward Bound by Woody Brown
Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.
