Margaret Murphy is a natural-born weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Margaret’s first memory is of the day she locked her friend in an old cooler and then ran away in terror when she couldn’t get the lid back open. Her friend died. No one ever blamed Margaret for the incident—not in so many words—but in the aftermath, Margaret receives either euphemistic platitudes or subtle suspicion. Left on her own to make sense of this tragedy, Margaret invents ever more imaginative and superstitious fictions as a way to avoid thinking about what she has done. The only one in her life who forces Margaret to face the truth is Poor Deer, a vengeful creature who insists that Margaret tame her temptation to give every story a happy ending. When teenage Margaret flees home in the aftermath of another loss, Poor Deer offers her the sudden chance to atone for her sins. Poor Deer orders Margaret to commit an act that she promises will sweep the ledger clean. But is Poor Deer’s offer to be trusted? Or is it another made-up tale, too good to be true? Heartrending and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding who we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to help make sense of life’s most difficult moments.
Archives
Come And Get It
From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.
It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.
A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.
FLORES AND MISS PAULA
A wry, tender novel about a Peruvian immigrant mother and a millennial daughter who have one final chance to find common ground. Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It’s been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín, who had always been the bridge between them. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother’s handwriting: Perdóname si te fallé. Recuerda que siempre te quise.
(“Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.”) But what would Paula need forgiveness for? Now newfound doubts and old memories come flooding in, complicating each woman’s efforts to carve out a good life for herself—and to support the other in the same. Paula thinks Flores should spend her evenings meeting a future husband, not crunching numbers for a floundering aquarium startup. Flores wishes Paula would ask for a raise at her DollaBills retail job, or at least find a best friend who isn’t a married man. When Flores and Paula learn they will be forced to move, they must finally confront their complicated past—and decide whether they share the same dreams for the future. Spirited and warm-hearted, Melissa Rivero’s new novel showcases the complexities of the mother-daughter bond with fresh insight and empathy.
Evil Eye
After Yara is placed on probation at work for fighting with a racist coworker, her Palestinian mother claims the provocation and all that’s come after were the result of a family curse. While Yara doesn’t believe in old superstitions, she finds herself unpacking her strict, often volatile childhood growing up in Brooklyn, looking for clues as to why she feels so unfulfilled in a life her mother could only dream of. Etaf Rum’s follow-up to her 2019 debut, A Woman Is No Man, is a complicated mother-daughter drama that looks at the lasting effects of intergenerational trauma and what it takes to break the cycle of abuse
Blackouts
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay—playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized—has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories—moments of joy and oblivion—and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Pajramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres’s Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.
Fair Rosaline
Shattering everything we thought we knew about Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline is the spellbinding prequel to Shakespeare’s best known tale. The first time Romeo Montague sees young Rosaline Capulet he falls instantly in love. Rosaline, headstrong and independent, is unsure of Romeo’s attentions but with her father determined that she join a convent, this handsome and charming stranger offers her the chance of a different life. Soon though, Rosaline begins to doubt all that Romeo has told her. She breaks off the match, only for Romeo’s gaze to turn towards her cousin, thirteen-year-old Juliet. Gradually Rosaline realizes that it is not only Juliet’s reputation at stake, but her life. With only hours remaining before she will be banished behind the nunnery walls, will Rosaline save Juliet from her Romeo? Or can this story only ever end one way?
Familia
Against the bold beauty of San Juan, a baffling genealogy test connects two twenty-something women across cultures and class in this emotional yet refreshing story about sisterhood and self-discovery for fans of Nina LaCour, Xochitl Gonzalez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Annette Chavez Macias, and Julia Alvarez:
As the fact checker for a popular magazine, Gabby DiMarco believes in absolute, verifiable Truths—until they throw the facts of her own life into question. The genealogy test she took as research for an article has yielded a baffling result: Gabby has a sister—one who’s been desperately trying to find her. Except, as Gabby’s beloved parents would confirm if they were still alive, that’s impossible. Isabella Ruiz can still picture the face of her baby sister, who disappeared from the streets of San Juan twenty-five years ago. Isabella, an artist, has fought hard for the stable home and loving marriage she has today—yet the longing to find Marianna has never left. At last, she’s found a match, and Gabby has agreed to come to Puerto Rico. But Gabby, as defensive and cautious as Isabella is impulsive, offers no happy reunion. She insists there’s been a mistake. And Isabella realizes that even if this woman is her sister, she may not want to be. With nothing—or perhaps so much—in common, Gabby and Isabella set out to find the truth, though it means risking everything they’ve known for an uncertain future—and a past that harbors yet more surprises . . .
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
A love song one hundred years in the making…
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time, and for some people, it will change their whole life:
Ricki Wilde has always felt like she was born into the wrong family. As the daughter of a funeral home dynasty, she is the complete opposite of her poised, excelling, and perfectly quaffed sisters. Instead, Ricki is creative, spontaneous, and dramatic. She knows that a different kind of life must be waiting for her just around the corner.
When Ricki meets the regal 90-something Ms. Della, they have an instant connection. Ms. Della invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, and Ricki knows this is her chance for something new. She leaves behind her family, wealth and disastrous romantic decisions to live her dream of owning her own flower shop. In February 2024, with the magic of the leap year and the heady, unseasonable scent of night blooming jasmine filling the air, Ricki encounters a mysterious, handsome stranger who will knock her world off balance.
In 1928—many leap years earlier— Ezra “Breeze” Walker is the toast of the town. After fleeing a brutally painful past in the South and moving to Harlem, he’s now one of the most celebrated jazz pianists of the Renaissance. In Harlem, there’s beauty, talent, and music on every block, but Breeze can’t shake the grief he left behind. When he becomes romantically entangled with Felice Fabre, a volatile and irresistible dancer who’s also been rumored to dabble in Voodoo, his life is turned upside down.
Like so many before them, Ricki and Breeze are both drawn to Harlem—to the magic, romance, and opportunity—and their lives are uniquely linked. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is an epic, swoon worthy love story, one that’s perhaps been a hundred years in the making…
Family Meal
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.
Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai’s ghost won’t leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ’s family bakery. TJ’s not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said – and left unsaid – to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?
MIDNIGHT IS THE DARKEST HOUR
For fans of Verity and A Flicker in the Dark, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all…even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners’ bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.