Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo
Alex Stern made it to hell and back more than once, but this time she left the door open behind her. Demons are creeping through the streets of New Haven and the Yale campus, feeding on the souls of the living, terrifying the dead. Alex and her allies can hunt them, but it’s only a matter of time before the gates to the underworld open and they face a war they cannot win. To stop it, they’ll have to reach deep into the secrets of Yale and its societies, and discover the truth hidden in Alex’s own blood.
While she struggles to hold onto the dream of a future Yale once offered, Alex must contend with the machinations of a corrupt Lethe Board and a deadly vampire with his own connection to the societies. But for the first time in her life, she won’t have to face the fight alone. Dawes, Turner, Mercy, and even Tripp will have a role to play, none more so than Alex’s mentor Darlington, the golden boy who lived so long in her head, now back in the flesh and cursed with dangerous powers of his own. Hell itself is stalking the delegates of Lethe House, and they’re all about to learn that demons don’t play by human rules.
Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult
On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn’t have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters.
Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse—a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis—have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew.
Never Say Die: A Memoir by Ke Huy Quan
Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood adventure began when he was twelve years old, a mere five years after his family escaped Communist Northern Vietnam and settled down to a relatively peaceful life in L.A.’s Chinatown. After attending an open call audition on a whim, he was unexpectedly swept up in the wild world of filmmaking: learning to swim from Harrison Ford on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, receiving trucks full of toys from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for his birthday, meeting Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and making lifelong friends on the set of The Goonies.
A star of two of the most beloved movies of the ‘80s, there appeared to be no limit to Ke’s rise. But just a few years later, the roles had dried up and it seemed like Hollywood no longer had a place for him. He eventually left acting to work odd jobs behind the scenes for directors like Wong Kar Wai. His confidence was badly shaken, but his love of performing never abated. It wasn’t until decades later, when he was 49 years old, that he stepped back in front of the camera to star in a strange little indie film called Everything Everywhere All at Once, which surprised everyone with its incredible box-office and awards season success. To call Ke’s Oscar-winning performance a triumphant return would be an understatement.
In this moving, inspirational memoir, Ke paints a vivid self-portrait, telling both heart-wrenching and funny stories of his early rise, slow fall from the spotlight, the resilience that kept him going through his darkest times, and his eventual resurrection on one of the biggest stages in Hollywood. Never Say Die is the story of Ke’s extraordinary life, a love letter to the movies and people that shaped him, and a powerful testament to never giving up on your dreams.
Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
When crime correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain from Singapore in 1945, he takes a quiet job with the Festival of Britain, a government-funded endeavor aimed at celebrating the nation’s creativity, grit, and ingenuity. There, he joins a team of misfits and eccentrics as they help to ready the Festival for launch.
When a Frenchwoman goes missing, Flynn becomes the central suspect in her disappearance—and possible murder. He was the last person to see her alive, yet he has no memory of the evening they spent together. As evidence against him mounts, Flynn begins to wonder if he might actually be to blame. To make matters worse, he is surrounded by people who have their own secret agenda.
There may be a carnival atmosphere in London as the country attempts to throw off the drab privations of war, yet beneath the frivolity there is also a worthy attempt to hold up a mirror to both its history and its future. With her unique voice and her skill at conjuring the past, Kate Atkinson turns her light on a nation reconstructing its image and the lengths to which some might go to manipulate the outcome. Witty, brilliantly plotted, and with an unforgettable cast of characters, Our Noble Selves paints a vivid portrait of a former empire struggling with its identity in the aftermath of war.
Soldiers & Sailors by Terrence Holt
Pursued by a past he cannot bring himself to remember, Hal returns to his decaying Midwestern birthplace, where he takes a job as staff physician at a decrepit veteran’s home. There, Hal finds himself the unwilling audience of his patients’ horrific stories, and descends with them into a Dantesque vision of the hell of war. Fleeing one hell for another, Hal searches the ruins of his ancestral home for clues to his own family’s descent into murder and madness. Between these two worlds, Hal finds a guide in Nell, the wryly attentive receptionist―who harbors her own secrets about both worlds.
The ancient veterans compel Hal to hear what they did and what they suffered, remembering a blood-spattered village in France, or the infernal jungles of New Guinea, the terrors of the Murmansk run or the rail yards of Dachau. Their anguished recollections illuminate this novel like star shells over a darkened battlefield. As the veterans’ war stories grow stranger and more terrible, they lead Hal to a terrifying discovery: about his patients, his family, and his collapsing world.
In Hal’s struggle to rebuild his world on the ruins of his father’s war, Terrence Holt has created a gripping saga, one ringing with the echoes of America’s bloodstained history, and the dire possibilities of our collective future. An epic celebration of the storyteller’s craft, Soldiers & Sailors offers a literary testament to the heroism of those whose sacrifice must never be forgotten.
The Perilous Fight by Colin Kaepernick
On September 1, 2016, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, but the world has never fully understood the whole story. Not the “why.” Not what it cost. Not what it took to become the man who was ready for that moment. That story begins in Turlock, California, where Kaepernick, a Black kid adopted into a white family, spent his earliest years navigating an identity the world around him didn’t always know how to hold. Everything that connected him to who he truly was—his Blackness, his culture, his sense of self—was met with resistance. Sports became his refuge and his proving ground. On the field, his talent could not be questioned, minimized, or taken from him. It was the one space that was entirely his. And what that space produced was extraordinary: a quarterback whose arm and instincts would carry him to the Super Bowl and into the history books.
When Kaepernick knelt, he was not acting on impulse. He was acting on years of becoming, of absorbing, reckoning, and refusing to look away. In response, the NFL blackballed him, the country revealed its true self, and the man who had spent his whole life earning his place chose, deliberately, to risk all of it for something larger than himself.
But in the ten years since he took a knee, the questions his protest raised about race, power, identity, and the courage it takes to fight for a more equitable world have not gone away. They are the questions of our time. They are the questions this book answers. In The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick delivers his story with the same unflinching conviction that defined the moment the world watched. Equal parts memoir and manifesto, it traces the off-the-field battles that turned a single act of protest into a movement that changed American sports and culture forever. This is the story of a man who became someone the moment demanded. It is a story about identity, sacrifice, and the cost of courage. And it is, ultimately, a story about all of us and the future we are still fighting to build.
The Thoroughbreds by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham
September at Tiffin Academy is always a heady time, especially for the senior class―“sixth formers,” in Tiffin-speak―a season of college applications and intense pressure, of partying hard and last hurrahs. As the chapel bells ring in students and staff, everyone has something to look forward to―but in the midst of the anticipation and excitement, nagging questions and dark secrets lurk beneath the surface…
Are Tiffin’s It Couple, Charley and East, on the rocks? What sparked the rift between football star Dub and his best friend Hakeem? Will Pippa Sacks, posh day student, topple the delicate social hierarchy―or wreak even worse havoc? Can Head of School Audre Robinson save her job―and the school―after a disastrous financial mistake? And what was in that email attachment Cinnamon Peters sent to Dub before she died?
We Chase Shadows: A We Solve Murders Mystery by Richard Osman
Back at We Solve Murders HQ, Amy, Rosie, and Steve leap at the chance to take on their first proper case. So what if their new client seems to have his own reasons for avoiding the police? All they need to do is uncover who left the note, and then find them. Simple.
But once they start digging, the suspects keep piling up: there’s Sweden’s most-wanted criminal, a canny ex-wife and a fierce business rival – yet the murderer keeps evading them. And as the trio chase a villain through the shadows, danger travels closer to home . . .
Between Italy and Palm Springs, via Barcelona and Steve’s village pub, can the team catch an elusive killer who knows EXACTLY where to hide?
Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni
As an adult, Liv leads a quiet life, tending to the beekeeping business that supports her and her brother. But when a dead body is discovered in her town, she is forced to grapple with a legacy of violence from when she was small.
As a child, she shared a home in rural Iowa with her brother Finn and their father Ulf. Swedish-born Ulf, a direct descendant of the infamous Erik the Red, raises his children as if they are Vikings. They are homeschooled, speak only Swedish, learn swordplay and archery, celebrate the Norse holidays, and worship the old gods with blood sacrifices.
But when Liv is fourteen, her family’s sanctum is broken apart by an FBI raid. Separated from their father, Liv and Finn must learn to adapt to normal life.
Now, twenty years later, Liv and Finn have changed their last names and moved to Haven, Michigan. Through her work as a beekeeper, Liv meets Penny, a secretive, unusual, beguiling woman. Just as her life is beginning to open up in new ways, Liv notices a strange and upsetting pattern in the area around Haven: men are disappearing. As she tallies up the missing, she senses disturbing similarities to her own father’s crimes.
