In the spirit of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee and Emma Donoghue’s Room, this unforgettable novel set in Nigeria gives voice to both husband and wife as they tell the story of their marriage—and the forces that threaten to tear it apart.
Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage—after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures—Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time—until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin’s second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant. Which, finally, she does—but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine. An electrifying novel of enormous emotional power, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family.
Archives
American War
An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during the war, now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past: his family’s role in the conflict, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying those of untold others.
The Nix
A Nix can take many forms. In Norwegian mythology, it is a spirit who appears as a white horse that steals children away. In Nathan Hill’s remarkable first novel, a Nix is anything you love that one day disappears, taking with it a piece of your heart. It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Andersen—college professor, stalled writer—has a Nix of his own: his mother. Decades ago, when he was a small boy, she abruptly walked out on the family. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and beguiles the internet. She needs Samuel’s help. To save her he’ll have to uncover the secrets of her life, and in so doing perhaps reclaim his own. Moving from the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago and beyond, The Nix explores—with both biting, side-splitting humor and fierce tenderness—the resilience of love and home, even in times of radical change.
All Things Cease to Appear
Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife murdered and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room down the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at the private college nearby teaching art history, and moved his family into this tight-knit, impoverished town. And he is the immediate suspect—the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served. At once a classic “who-dun-it” that morphs into a “why-and-how-dun-it,” this is also a rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, and an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community.
Muse
A sparkling fiction debut from the poet, translator, and FSG publisher that tells the story of the decades-long rivalry between two publishing lions over the work of an iconic female poet.
Paul Dukach is heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of the last independent publishing houses in New York, whose shabby offices on Union Square belie the treasures of its list. Thanks to his boss, the flamboyant Homer Stern, Paul learns well the ins and outs of the book world: how to work an agent over lunch and swim with the literary sharks at Frankfurt; how to marry flattery with criticism when combing over the manuscripts of brilliant, volatile authors. But though things can be shaky in the age of conglomerates and digital, Paul remains obsessed by one dazzling writer: poet Ida Perkins, whose outsize life and audacious verse have shaped America’s contemporary literary landscape, and whose longtime publisher–also her cousin and erstwhile lover–happens to be Homer’s biggest rival. When Paul at last meets Ida at her secluded Venetian palazzo, she entrusts him with her greatest secret–one that will change all of their lives forever. Enriched by juicy details only a quintessential insider could know, written with both satiric sharpness and sensitivity, Muse is a hilarious and touching love letter to the people who write, sell–and, above all, read–the books that shape our lives.