Award-winning author Mary Otis of Yes, Yes, Cherries (“Amazing”—Lorrie Moore) delivers an arresting debut novel that explores the complexities between mothers and daughters, and the conflicting desires for connection and escape. Told from interwoven perspectives with writing as deft as a choreographed dance, this story delves into a mother-daughter relationship filled with immense heart in the face of heartbreak.
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A HISTORY OF BURNING
At the turn of the twentieth century, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor on the East African Railway for the British. One day Pirbhai commits an act to ensure his survival that will haunt him forever and reverberate across his family’s future for years to come. Pirbhai’s children are born and raised under the jacaranda trees and searing sun of Kampala during the waning days of British colonial rule. As Uganda moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai’s granddaughters, Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya, are three sisters coming of age in a divided nation. As they each forge their own path for a future, they must carry the silence of the history they’ve inherited. In 1972, under Idi Amin’s brutal regime and the South Asian expulsion, the family has no choice but to flee, and in the chaos, they leave something devastating behind. As Pirbhai’s grandchildren, scattered across the world, find their way back to each other in exile in Toronto, a letter arrives that stokes the flames of the fire that haunts the family. It makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy to secure their own place in the world. A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home.
Go as a River
A riveting and deeply moving debut—a love story in the spirit of Where the Crawdads Sing—that is both a stunning exploration of the natural world and an unforgettable coming-of-age novel.
Victoria Nash is just a teenager in the 1940s, but she runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the ranch town of Iola, Colorado—the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land in the Four Corners region, who wants to believe one place is just like another. When Victoria encounters Wil on a street corner, their unexpected connection ignites as much passion as danger and as many revelations as secrets. Victoria flees into the beautiful but harsh wilderness of the nearby mountains when tragedy strikes. Living in a small shack, she struggles to survive with no clear notion of what her future will be. What happens afterward is her quest to regain all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River rises to submerge her homeland and the only life she has ever known. Go as a River is a story of love and
We Are a Haunting
We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation. In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization. A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.
THE HISTORY OF A DIFFICULT CHILD
An exhilarating, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia’s socialist revolution.
Berlin
A wickedly insightful, darkly funny novel in which a young woman in the grip of an existential malaise moves to a new city for a fresh start but her attempt at reinvention doesn’t quite go to plan.
THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA: NATIVE PEOPLES AND THE UNMAKING OF U.S. HISTORY
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. The long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a dynamic new generation of historians insisting that Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. In The Rediscovery of America, Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories to tell the full story of America, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this ambitious book, Blackhawk achieves a transformative synthesis of recent scholarship, recording the enduring power, agency, and survival of Native nations to create a truer account of the formation and expansion of the United States.
A Living Remedy
From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee — and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in — where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations — looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of financial instability and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his premature death. And then the unthinkable happens — less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as Covid descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another — and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society.
LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN: MY LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN FIGHTING TO EDUCATE WOMEN
Pashtana Durrani grew up in a Pakistan refugee camp, but she was raised in a school. A third-generation refugee, she was one of 4 million Afghans displaced by decades of war in the camp where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school within their home. Those who lived in the house were recruited as staff, and when Pashtana was seven, she too began to teach. Her students were other girls from the camp — girls without running water and electricity. Girls who were hungry and illiterate, who never left the camp and once they married, wouldn’t even leave their homes. Fueled by her father’s insistence that despite being a girl, she deserved an education at any cost, Pashtana believed against impossible odds that she could help these girls forge a different path—¦Full of optimism and heart even in a world that subjugates the physical and intellectual nourishment of girls and women, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is the story of how just one educated woman can transform a family, a tribe, a country. It’s a testament to the power of learning and, above all, the value of educators in their many forms — from teachers, mentors, and role models, to fathers, mothers, and any one of us with the drive to stand against ignorance.
King: A Life
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.