From the co-creator of How I Met Your Mother, a hilarious and thought-provoking comedy of manners set in New York City, following a sprawling cast of characters as they navigate life, love, loss, ambition, and spirituality—without ever looking up from their phones. It’s the summer of 2015, and Alice Quick needs to get to work. She’s twenty-eight years old, grieving her mother, barely scraping by as a nanny, and freshly kicked out of her apartment. If she can just get her act together and sign up for the MCAT, she can start chasing her dream of becoming a doctor . . . but in the Age of Distraction, the distractions are so distracting. There’s her tech millionaire brother’s religious awakening. His picture-perfect wife’s emotional breakdown. Her chaotic new roommate’s thirst for adventure. And, of course, there’s the biggest distraction of all: Love. From within the story of one summer in one young woman’s life, an epic tale is unearthed, spanning continents and featuring a tapestry of characters tied to one another by threads both seen and unseen. Filled with all the warmth, humor, and heart that gained How I Met Your Mother its cult following, The Mutual Friend captures in sparkling detail the chaos of contemporary life, a life lived simultaneously in two different worlds—the physical one and the one behind our screens—and reveals how connected we all truly are.
Archives
Out of Love
A novel for anyone who has loved and lost, and lived to tell the tale, this gorgeously written debut is a love story told in reverse, starting with the heart-rending breakup, and weaving back together an already unraveled tapestry, from tragic break-up to magical first kiss.
The Music of Bees
A heartwarming debut novel for readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, following three lonely strangers in a rural Oregon town, each working through grief and life’s curveballs, who are brought together by happenstance on a local honeybee farm where they find surprising friendship, healing—and maybe even a second chance—just when they least expect it.
The Familiar Dark
A spellbinding story of a mother with nothing left to lose who sets out on an all-consuming quest for justice after her daughter is murdered on the town playground.
Sometimes the answers are worse than the questions. Sometimes it’s better not to know.
Set in the poorest part of the Missouri Ozarks, in a small town with big secrets, The Familiar Dark opens with a murder. Eve Taggert, desperate with grief over losing her daughter, takes it upon herself to find out the truth about what happened. Eve is no stranger to the dark side of life, having been raised by a hard-edged mother whose lessons Eve tried not to pass on to her own daughter. But Eve may need her mother’s cruel brand of strength if she’s going to face the reality about her daughter’s death and about her own true nature. Her quest for justice takes her from the seedy underbelly of town to the quiet woods and, most frighteningly, back to her mother’s trailer for a final lesson.
The Familiar Dark is a story about the bonds of family—women doing the best they can for their daughters in dire circumstances—as well as a story about how even the darkest and most terrifying of places can provide the comfort of home.
All My Mother’s Lovers
Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause—despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss—until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris’s will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter’s sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris’s second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents’ perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall? Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother’s Lovers is the exciting debut novel from fiction writer and book critic Ilana Masad. A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother’s Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.
Just Watch Me
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.
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