From #1 New York Times best-selling author Julie Murphy comes the first in a brand-new adult series inspired by the classic fairy tale stories we all know and love, perfect for adult readers who crave contemporary, escapist rom-coms. After having just graduated with a degree in shoe design, and trying to get her feet on the ground, Cindy is working for her stepmother, who happens to be the executive producer of America’s favorite reality show, Before Midnight. When a spot on the show needs filling ASAP, Cindy volunteers, hoping it might help jump-start her fashion career, or at least give her something to do while her peers land jobs in the world of high fashion. Turns out being the only plus size woman on a reality dating competition makes a splash, and soon Cindy becomes a body positivity icon for women everywhere. What she doesn’t expect? That she may just find inspiration—and love—in the process. Ultimately, Cindy learns that if the shoe doesn’t fit, maybe it’s time to design your own.
Archives
Eternal
#1 bestselling author Lisa Scottoline offers a sweeping and shattering epic of historical fiction fueled by shocking true events, the tale of a love triangle that unfolds in the heart of Rome…in the creeping shadow of fascism.
In the Country of Others
Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco to start a farm. While Amine tries to cultivate the rocky and unforgiving terrain, Mathilde feels suffocated by the harsh climate. Alone and isolated with her two children, she struggles with assimilation and classism. The ten years of the novel are also those of a rise in tensions and violence that will lead in 1956 to Morocco’s independence. All the characters in this novel live “in the country of others”: settlers vs. natives, soldiers vs. peasants, and exiles. Women, especially, live in the country of men, and must constantly fight for their emancipation.
Good Company
“Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney plumbs the depths of marriage, motherhood and friendship with warmth and wit. I devoured it in one gulp! Treat yourself to some Good Company.”—Maria Semple, author of Today Will Be Different. A warm, incisive new novel about the enduring bonds of marriage and friendship from Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Nest. Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than twenty years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring—the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five. Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting work to raise Ruby in Manhattan and keep Julian’s small theater company—Good Company—afloat. A move to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes, a chance to breathe easier, and a reunion with Margot, now a bona fide television star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now? With Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature tenderness, humor, and insight, Good Company tells a bighearted story of the lifelong relationships that both wound and heal us.
The Perfect Ruin
From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Shanora Williams comes a tale of revenge served ice cold––and a warning to be careful what you scheme for. To the world Lola Maxwell is perfection––a gorgeous, giving woman with a heart made of gold. CEO of a popular charity, and owner of a billion-dollar company, she is admired by everyone she knows, especially the elite women and men of South Beach. But there is one thing the world should know about their sweet, sweet Lola––something that proves she is far from being the pure woman they all think she is. Lola dearest is a thief. She stole from Ivy and took something that Ivy will never get back. And now? Well, now Ivy is watching her every move, and it’s just Ivy’s luck that she has no idea who Ivy really is. Ivy’s getting closer to her, volunteering for her charity, joining her gym class, and even getting acquainted with her husband. Soon Ivy will become her best friend and a person she trusts, and once Ivy has her trust, she’ll stop at nothing to ruin the perfect life she built…
Seven Days in June
Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again… From the author of The Perfect Find, this is a witty, romantic, and sexy-as-hell new novel of two writers and their second chance at love.
Dear Miss Metropolitan
Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing—and what we owe one another. Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwen finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts them and holds them captive in a dilapidated house in Queens. On the night they are finally rescued, throngs line the block gawking and claiming ignorance. Among them is lifetime resident Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist for the local weekly, but how could anyone who fancies herself a “newspaperwoman” have missed a horror story unfolding right across the street? And why is it that only two of the three girls—now women—were found? The mystery haunts the two remaining victim girls, who are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as they continuously adapt to their present and their unrelenting past. Like Emma Donoghue’s Room, Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. Inspired by real events, the story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.
Her Here
Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation.
Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself—a novel that heralds the arrival of a gifted young writer who Rebecca Makkai lauds for her “ferocious intellect” and predicts will claim “her place in the literary world.”
Of Women and Salt
A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter’s fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born.
In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals––personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others––that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots
The Music of Bees
A heartwarming debut novel for readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, following three lonely strangers in a rural Oregon town, each working through grief and life’s curveballs, who are brought together by happenstance on a local honeybee farm where they find surprising friendship, healing—and maybe even a second chance—just when they least expect it.