A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive. A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Archives
The House of Plain Truth
Pearline leaves her life in Brooklyn and returns to her childhood home of Jamaica to care for her dying father, Rupert. Ostracized by her sisters for moving to America decades earlier and only coming “home” due to their father’s imminent passing, Pearline must assert her own familial identity as she strives to hold onto the family’s home over her sisters’ objections. A novel of fractured family and the search to protect – or discard – what unites them, this story traces one older woman’s decision to pursue and hold onto what has deep meaning to her in her blood and in her bones. It addresses what it means to uphold the wishes of those who have departed the world and how sometimes it is the most unlikely characters who crystallize what matters most.
The Favorites
An edgy, feminist campus novel about justice, gender, and power, following a woman who enrolls in law school and competes her way into an elite “Law and Literature” cohort to get revenge on the charismatic professor who wronged her sister.
The Bullet Swallower
A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making. This family saga is epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather. The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.
The Pomegranate Gate
The first adventure in the Mirror Realm Cycle, a Spanish Inquisition-era fantasy trilogy inspired by Jewish folklore, with echoes of Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden.
Toba Peres can speak, but not shout; sleep, but not dream. She can write with both hands at once, in different languages, but she keeps her talents hidden at her grandparents’ behest.
Naftaly Cresques sees things that aren’t real, and dreams things that are. Always the family disappointment, Naftaly would still risk his life to honor his father’s last wishes.
After the Queen demands every Jew convert or face banishment, Toba and Naftaly are among thousands of Jews who flee their homes. Defying royal orders to abandon all possessions, Toba keeps an amulet she must never take off; Naftaly smuggles a centuries-old book he’s forbidden to read. But the Inquisition is hunting these particular treasures—and they’re not hunting alone.
Toba stumbles through a pomegranate grove into the mirror realm of the Mazik: mythical, terrible immortals with an Inquisition of their own, equally cruel and even more powerful. With the Mazik kingdoms in political turmoil, this Inquisition readies its bid to control both realms.
In each world, Toba and Naftaly must evade both Inquisitions long enough to unravel the connection between their family heirlooms and the realm of the Mazik. Their fates are tied to this strange place, and it’s up to them to save it.
Brimming with folkloric wonder, The Pomegranate Gate weaves history and magic into a spellbindingly intricate tale suffused with humor and heart.
THE DJINN WAITS A HUNDRED YEARS
Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous.
Brooklyn Crime Novel
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow; some days it may seem that no one knows what happens there. Yet in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules seem obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places. The voices of the past may seem to rise and gather as if in harmony, then make war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its glimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget. Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. Jonathan Lethem, “one of America’s greatest storytellers,” (Washington Post) has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made.
Blood Sisters
A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women: one of them her sister.
There are secrets in the land. As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land’s Indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Even though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister’s disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women. But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her back. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing Indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd. The truth will be unearthed.
The Light on Halsey Street
Two girls’ lives are irrevocably intertwined the summer of 1985 in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, and neither will ever be the same in this coming-of-age story that spans decades.
The Vulnerables
The New York Times—bestselling, National Book Award—winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection
Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.