The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world.
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
Archives
Shoot the Moon
An ambitious and evocative debut novel about one brilliant but lonely NASA secretary’s relentless drive to live a big life in a world that would keep her small.
How far would you travel for love?
Intelligent but isolated physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. When she lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, she feels certain this path is her destiny. Her memories of childhood darkened by loss, she’s left behind her home, her mother, and her first love. And now she’s finally found her purpose. Even typing dictation, the work is everything she dreamed, and despite her budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t let herself be distracted. Not now.
So when her inability to ignore an engineer’s mistaken calculations propels her into a new position, Annie finds herself torn between her ambition, her heart, and a mysterious discovery that upends everything she knows to be scientifically true. Can she overcome her fears and reach toward the limits of human advancement? Will she chase her ambitions, and risk losing herself in them? Affectingly achronological in its telling, Shoot the Moon daringly explores one woman’s quest for both intellectual fulfilment and romantic love, the price paid for scientific progress, and the heart’s persistent yearning for home.
Cross-Stitch
A debut novel of female friendship and coming-of-age from Jazmina Barrera, acclaimed author of nonfiction titles Linea Nigra and On Lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney.
It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. Mila, Citali, and Dalia, childhood friends now college aged, leave Mexico City for the England of The Clash and the Paris of Courbet. They anticipate the cafés and crushes, but not the early signs that they are each steadily, inevitably changing.
That feels like forever ago. Mila, now a writer and a new mother, has just published a book on needlecraft—an art form so long dismissed as “women’s work.” But after learning Citali has drowned, Mila begins to sift through her old scrapbooks, reflecting on their shared youth for the first time as a new wife and mother. What has come of all the nights the three friends spent embroidering together in silence? Did she miss the signs that Citali needed help? Jazmina Barrera’s Cross-Stitch, in Christina MacSweeney’s taut translation, encounters its characters hesitating before the specter of adulthood.
Bonfire Night
Spanning from England’s anti-fascism protests of 1936 through the aftermath of WWII, this moving, intricately wrought historical novel brings together a young Irish Catholic photographer and a British Jewish medical student, each discovering the price of love, art, and ambition:
In the autumn of 1936, Irish Catholic Kate Grifferty is making her way as a photojournalist in Fleet Street, an unusual job for a woman. At an anti-fascism protest in East London, she meets David Rabatkin, a lanky, brilliant Jewish medical student as ambitious as she is. Their three-month love affair exposes Kate to the dangers and demands of David’s world, where marrying within the Jewish faith is seen as not only preferable, but key to survival. Kate neither expects nor wants to be any man’s wife, hampered by convention. And though she and David are both outsiders, as war looms, other differences between them are thrown into sharp relief: Four years later, Kate is a single mother in Brighton working at her sister’s seaside boarding house, while David tends patients at a busy London hospital as the Blitz rages. But Kate’s challenges and disappointments have only deepened her desire to capture images of life unfurling around her, the beauty and violence, struggles and surprising joys. And soon fate and ambition will align, providing her with the chance to make her mark at last.
Green Dot
At 24, Hera is a violently unsatisfied disaster. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s a mean little thing, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job as an “online community moderator” of a news outlet’s online comment section—a job even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she’s preferred women to men for years now, she relishes becoming a cliché as their mutual infatuation quickly festers into affair. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup of Arthur’s wife — and that said wife has no idea Hera exists. With her daringly specific and intimate voice, Gray has created an irresistible and messy love story about the terrible allure of wanting something that promises nothing; about the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the 21st century; and the winding, torturous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.
Coleman Hill
Coleman Hill is the exhilarating story of two American families whose fates become intertwined in the wake of the Great Migration. Braiding fact and fiction, it is a remarkable, character-rich tour de force exploring the ties that bind three generations.
First Lie Wins
Evie Porter has everything a nice, Southern girl could want: a perfect, doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence and a garden, a fancy group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.
JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND
Jonathan Abernathy is a loser . . . he’s behind on his debts, he has no prospects, no friends, no ambitions. But when a government loan forgiveness program offers him a literal dream job, he thinks he’s found his big break. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, entering the minds of middle-class workers while they sleep and removing the unsavory detritus of their waking lives from their unconscious, he might have a chance at a new life. As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.
A Nearby Country Called Love
A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which two brothers struggle to find their place in an Iran on the brink of combusting.
DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his unexpected suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, a successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from her reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles—and triples—down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed within Coral’s own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present. A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel Dead in Long Beach, California is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.