An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart. Meet Celine and Luke. For all intents and purposes, the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more interested in piano than domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest) is the only one with any emotional distance, and observes her friends like ants in a colony. As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after—but does it lie at the end of an aisle? In her wry, sprightly, and unmistakable voice, Naoise Dolan makes the marriage plot entirely her own in a sparkling ensemble novel that is both ferociously clever and supremely enjoyable.
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The Busy Body
Veep meets Agatha Christie in this intelligent, wildly funny, literary mystery for fans of Richard Osman, Anthony Horowitz, and Nita Prose! The host of the “All About Agatha” podcast injects the spark and fizz of a Golden Age murder mystery into the present-day, as a ghostwriter is chosen to collaborate on a presidential candidate’s memoir, only to discover just how much trouble a smart woman with time on her hands can get up to.
It’s a dream assignment. Former Senator Dorothy Gibson, aka that woman, is the most talked-about person in the country right now, though largely for the wrong reasons. As an independent candidate for President of the United States, Dorothy split the vote and is being blamed for the shocking result. After her very public defeat, she’s retreated to her home in rural Maine, inviting her ghostwriter to join her. Her collaborator is impressed by Dorothy’s work ethic and steel-trap mind, not to mention the stunning surroundings (and one particularly gorgeous bodyguard). But when a neighbor dies under suspicious circumstances, Dorothy is determined to find the killer in their midst. And when Dorothy Gibson asks if you want to team up for a top secret, possibly dangerous murder investigation, the only answer is: Of course! The best ghostwriters are adept at asking questions and spinning stories…two talents, it turns out, that also come in handy for sleuths. Dorothy’s political career, meanwhile, has made her an expert at recognizing lies and double-dealing. Working together, the two women are soon untangling motives and whittling down suspects, to the exasperation of local police. But this investigation—much like the election—may not unfold the way anyone expects…
Ana Turns
A kaleidoscopic story, unspooling over the twenty-four hours of a very contemporary woman’s sixtieth birthday. Nine years have passed since Ana Koehl had sex with her pot-addicted anesthesiologist husband, seven since she began an affair with a gonzo journalist. She’s gratified by her work as a book doula, but burdened by her belief that she need always be on call. Her elderly mother’s birthday greeting is an inflation-adjusted calculation of the cost of raising Ana in a mice-infested house, her brother has hijacked the will of their recently deceased starchitect father, her adult child is changing rapidly before her eyes, and her best friend advocates for “the truth in lies.” Gazing out at the dark moat of Central Park from behind her desk, Ana sees that she can no longer postpone making peace with her past or confronting her present. Narrated by Ana and the key figures in her life—her husband, her brother, her lover’s wife, to name a few—Ana Turns spirals through issues from capital punishment to the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas, culminating in a watershed dinner party, with Ana’s family members’ true colors on full display. By day’s end, the bounds of her own collaboration and forgiveness illuminated, Ana turns towards a vision of what she wants next in this blink of a life.
The Last Love Note
After her husband’s tragically early death, Kate is determined to find new happiness. First, she has to start looking in the right place. Lurching from one comedic crisis to the next, the midlife widow surfs unpredictable waves of grief amid solo parenting her five year old and wrangling a university fundraising job. Then there’s her overbearing mom and a Tinder-obsessed best friend, who’s determined to matchmake Kate with her hot new neighbor. The Last Love Note sweeps readers into unabated hopefulness and delivers them home with tears of laughter, loss, and joy— and a renewed faith in the resilience of the human heart.
The Vaster Wilds
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.
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.