A bighearted and moving debut about a wry retired schoolteacher whose decade-old secret threatens to come to light and send shockwaves through her small Texas town.
Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days. The annual picnic is coming up, but that isn’t nearly enough since the menu never changes and she had the roles mentally assigned weeks ago. At least there’s Ellie, who stops by each morning for coffee and whose reemergence in Mary Alice’s life is the one thing soothing the sting of retirement.
Mary Alice and Ellie were a pair since the day Ellie moved in next door. That they both were single mothers—Mary Alice widowed, Ellie divorced—with sons the same age was a pleasant coincidence, but they were forever linked when they lost the boys, one right after the other. Years later, the two are working their way back to a comfortable friendship. But when Mary Alice’s sister arrives on her doorstep with a staggering piece of news, it jeopardizes the careful shell she’s built around her life. The whole of her friendship with Ellie is put at risk, the fabric of a place as steadfast as Billington is questioned, and the unflappable, knotty fixture that is Mary Alice Roth might have to change after all.
For fans of My Dark Vanessa and Celeste Ng, Bad Fruit is an unforgettable portrayal of a toxic mother-daughter relationship and a young woman’s search for truth and liberation.
Just graduated from high school and waiting to start college at Oxford, Lily lives under the scrutiny of her volatile Singaporean mother, May, and is unable to find kinship with her elusive British father, Charlie. When May suspects that Charlie is having an affair, there’s only one thing that calms May down: a glass of perfectly spoiled orange juice served by Lily, who must always taste it first to make sure it’s just right.
As her mother becomes increasingly unhinged, Lily starts to have flashbacks that she knows aren’t her own. Over a sweltering London summer, all semblance of civility and propriety is lost, as Lily begins to unravel the harrowing history that has always cast a shadow on her mother. The horrifying secrets she uncovers will shake her family to its core, culminating in a shattering revelation that will finally set Lily free.
Beautiful and shocking, Bad Fruit is as compulsive as it is thought-provoking, as nuanced as it is explosive. A masterful exploration of mothers and daughters, inherited trauma and the race to break its devastating cycle, Bad Fruit will leave readers breathlessly questioning their own notions of femininity, race and redemption.
From BBC presenter Craig Henderson comes a brilliant and gripping debut thriller that races through the Motor City at a heart-stopping pace. Perfect for fans of Drive and Blacktop Wasteland, Welcome to the Game follows ex-rally driver Spencer Burnham as he tries to balance his young daughter, drug addiction, and the needs of charismatic gangster Dominic McGrath. As the temperature in the city rises and Child Protective Services circle in closer, Spencer must apply his considerable talents to finally best McGrath and swerve to avoid danger at every turn.
Two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life’s last vital act—find their fates intertwined in this intricately plotted and deeply researched debut novel, set at terminus of the Underground Railroad.
In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town populated by refugees fleeing slavery at the height of the Underground Railroad, young Lensinda works as a maid for a veteran of the War of 1812 and founder of one of the first Black newspapers—with aspirations to become a journalist herself. One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda when a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by Cash, an old refugee woman. The farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from Cash before the woman is condemned.
Eager to prove her skill, sure of her worldliness and her instincts, and confident she can tackle such a sensitive task under pressure, Lensinda slips into the jail where Cash is being held. But the old woman doesn’t want to confess—instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. Lensinda agrees and in swapping life stories learns the interwoven history of America and Canada; of the Indigenous people from both places and the enslaved Black men and women brought to North America; of the patriots and the outlaws equally cast as second-class citizens.
As Cash’s time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed—not just about the complicated tapestry of her people’s ancestry but about her family history as well. Moving along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Kentucky, to the backroom Black militias of Detroit, through the territory of the Ojibwe nation, and north into the Owen Sound, In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.
In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.
A stranded detective tries to solve a murder in a tiny Alaskan town where everyone winters in the same high-rise building, in this gripping debut by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita.
A captivating debut novel about five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their lives
In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen-turned-refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters’ fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents’ expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.
As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.
A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.
A captivating psychological suspense debut about a young woman still haunted by her teenage best friend’s death who learns of an eerily similar death and must find her way back to a cabin in the New England woods, armed only with hazy memories, to finally find out the truth that has eluded her.
A dramatic and undeniably addictive psychological thriller about a young woman whose life changes in an instant, and nothing is ever the same.
Before…Life is idyllic for Julie Dolan and her husband Owen. They’ve bought their dream house in the Berkshires; their careers are on the upswing; and they have the world at their fingertips. They’ve never been so in love. They’ve never been happier. The only thing that’s missing is a baby—but Julie’s got a plan, and they’re right on schedule.
Until Owen falls ill with food poisoning, leaving Julie to attend a neighborhood holiday party alone. When she wakes up, half-naked in her neighbor’s bathtub, Julie doesn’t know how to tell Owen, the police, her friends—anyone—that she has been sexually assaulted. So she keeps it secret until she realizes that she’s pregnant with her assailant’s baby.
After…Life is unmanageable for Julie. She can’t function in the world with a newborn, and she’s unable to be present for her husband, her family, her friends. Desperate to solve the mystery of what happened to her, Julie’s driven to more and more erratic behavior, until the truth about that night is revealed. Afterward, no one will be the same ever again. Not Owen. Not the baby. And especially not Julie.
From a stunning new voice, Perish is a powerful debut novel about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intergenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed. Told in alternating chapters that follow four members of the Turner family: Julie B., a woman who regrets her wasted youth and the time spent under Helen Jean’s thumb; Alex, a police officer grappling with a dark and twisted past; Jan, a mother of two, who yearns to go to school and leave Jerusalem, Texas, and all of its trauma behind for good; and Lydia, a woman whose marriage is falling apart because her body can’t seem to stay pregnant, as they’re called home to say goodbye to their mother and grandmother. This family’s “reunion” unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame. Tackling themes like family, trauma, legacy, home, class, race, and more, this beautiful yet heart-wrenching novel, will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of family and the ways bonds can be made, maintained, or irrevocably broken.
