From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, The Topeka School is a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century. It follows Adam Gordon, a senior at Topeka High School and a renowned debater; his mother, Jane, a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, an expert at getting ‘lost boys’ to open up; and his fellow senior, Darren, a loner and, unbeknownst to Adam, one of his father’s psychiatric patients. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
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Baby of the Family
An addictive and wry debut about a modern-day American dynasty and its unexpected upheaval when the patriarch leaves what’s left of his fortune to his youngest, adopted son––who doesn’t want to be found––setting off a family search and the unearthing of some surprising secrets.
My Own Devices
In her literary debut memoir, rapper and singer Dessa gives a candid account of her life in the van as a hard-touring musician, her determination to beat long odds to make a name for herself, and her struggle to fall out of love with someone in her band. Raw and intimate, Dessa demonstrates just how far the mind can travel while the body is on the six-hour ride to the next rap show.
Final Girls
Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone—the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant and completely against her will, Quincy becomes a member of an exclusive club no one wants to belong to: a group of survivors known to the press as Final Girls—pretty girls with pasts drenched in blood. Now ten years later, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to a Xanax prescription, a caring almost-fiancé, and a picture-perfect apartment in Manhattan. She’s finally normal. That is, until one of the other Final Girls is found dead in her bathtub, and a second Final Girl shows up on her doorstep. As Quincy’s dark past comes crashing into her carefully-curated present, her life becomes a race against time to uncover secrets from her past… before what was started on that fateful night ten years ago is finished. Equal parts ode to slasher films and gripping psychological thriller, Final Girls will keep readers hooked until the very last page.
All Our Wrong Todays
This stunningly assured debut novel is an emotionally compelling and intellectually persuasive novel about the complex and infinite possibilities of life. Tom Barren, the lackluster, ever-disappointing son of a haughty, emotionally-insulated super-genius scientist, lives in a version of our world in which an incredible discovery in 1965 profoundly changed the course of history, creating a futuristic utopia free of conflict, where punk rock never existed because it was never needed. Mourning his recently deceased mother and Penelope, the girl of his dreams who has just broken his heart, Tom steals his father’s greatest invention and goes back in time to the moment of the world-changing discovery, his world erased in a fury of grief and stupidity as if it had never existed. Now stuck in our own 2015, he discovers a newly constituted version of his family and the woman he loved, and must decide whether to fix the flow of history, bring the billions of people living in edenic bliss back into existence and return to his natural dimension, or to try to make a life in our world where he has a girlfriend who just might believe his outrageous tale of alternate histories, a father who seems to genuinely love him, a mother who is very much not dead, and a soul mate of a sister who never existed in his original life. It is a story of friendship and family, of time machines and alternate realities, and of love in its multitude of forms
Let Me Die In His Footsteps
In the spellbinding and suspenseful Let Me Die in His Footsteps, Edgar Award–winner Lori Roy wrests from a Southern town the secrets of two families touched by an evil that has passed between generations.
On a dark Kentucky night in 1952 exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but, armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family’s lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. Not finding what she had hoped for, she turns from the well and when the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, Annie will have much to explain and a past to account for.