A bighearted page-turner, set on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean, about love, community, and what it means to come home. Passionate about conservation and fleeing an argument with her mother, newly qualified London vet Charlotte Walker has taken up a fellowship on the tiny South Atlantic island of Tuga de Oro to study the endangered Gold Coin tortoises in the jungle interior. She can claim the best of reasons for this year in paradise—What better motivation than to save a species?—but the reality is more complex. For Charlotte has secretly come to believe that she has her own connection to this remote and eccentric community, and she is finally determined to solve the mystery that has dominated her life. But she will have little time for any of her declared or covert investigations. She is inconveniently attracted to the new island doctor. And not only do Tuga’s tortoises need attention but so too do the island’s dogs, goats, and donkeys, not to mention the islanders themselves, determined to win Charlotte over with cake and homemade jam until she relents and becomes vet to all their animals. A complete, vivid world unto itself, Welcome to Glorious Tuga is a bewitching combination of warmth and humor. Immersive and uplifting, it transports the reader to an island that time forgot, bringing to life a cast of flawed, loveable people, like a contemporary James Herriot beneath the coconut palms.
Archives
SISTER SNAKE
A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret. Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim as she freely uses her beauty and charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang Dynasty China. A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park, and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both in an affluent city where everything runs like clockwork, but no deviation from the norm can be tolerated. Dark, hilarious, razor-sharp, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Boldly reimagining the Chinese folktale the Legend of the White Snake, this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.
OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES
For fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale: an elderly woman recounts her Dutch family’s survival during the final years of Nazi occupation, shedding new light on old secrets that rippled through subsequent generations. Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn’s life is one of quiet routine. Widowed for many years, she enjoys the view from her home on the New Jersey shore, visits with friends, and tai chi at the local retirement community. But when her beloved grandson, Will, and his wife, Teru, show up for a visit, things are soon upended. Their marriage is threatening to unravel, and Will has questions for his grandmother—questions about family secrets that have been lost for decades and are now finally rising to the surface. But telling Will the truth involves returning to the past, and to Mieke’s childhood in coastal Holland. There, in the last years of World War II, she survived the Hunger Winter, a brutal season when food and heat were cut off and thousands of Dutch citizens starved. Her memories weave together childhood magic and the madness of history, and carry readers from the windy beaches of The Hague to the dark cells of a concentration camp, through the bends of eel-filled rivers, and, finally, to the story of Will’s father, absent since Will’s childhood. Our Narrow Hiding Places is a sweeping story of survival and of the terrible cost of war—and a reminder that sometimes the traumas we inherit come along with a resilience we never imagined.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
An epic novel of the construction of the Panama Canal, casting light on the unsung people who lived, loved, and labored there, by Cristina Henríquez, acclaimed author of The Book of Unknown Americans. It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection. Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid. John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice. Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.
The Happy Couple
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.
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.
Poor Deer
Margaret Murphy is a natural-born weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Margaret’s first memory is of the day she locked her friend in an old cooler and then ran away in terror when she couldn’t get the lid back open. Her friend died. No one ever blamed Margaret for the incident—not in so many words—but in the aftermath, Margaret receives either euphemistic platitudes or subtle suspicion. Left on her own to make sense of this tragedy, Margaret invents ever more imaginative and superstitious fictions as a way to avoid thinking about what she has done. The only one in her life who forces Margaret to face the truth is Poor Deer, a vengeful creature who insists that Margaret tame her temptation to give every story a happy ending. When teenage Margaret flees home in the aftermath of another loss, Poor Deer offers her the sudden chance to atone for her sins. Poor Deer orders Margaret to commit an act that she promises will sweep the ledger clean. But is Poor Deer’s offer to be trusted? Or is it another made-up tale, too good to be true? Heartrending and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding who we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to help make sense of life’s most difficult moments.
FLORES AND MISS PAULA
A wry, tender novel about a Peruvian immigrant mother and a millennial daughter who have one final chance to find common ground. Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It’s been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín, who had always been the bridge between them. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother’s handwriting: Perdóname si te fallé. Recuerda que siempre te quise.
(“Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.”) But what would Paula need forgiveness for? Now newfound doubts and old memories come flooding in, complicating each woman’s efforts to carve out a good life for herself—and to support the other in the same. Paula thinks Flores should spend her evenings meeting a future husband, not crunching numbers for a floundering aquarium startup. Flores wishes Paula would ask for a raise at her DollaBills retail job, or at least find a best friend who isn’t a married man. When Flores and Paula learn they will be forced to move, they must finally confront their complicated past—and decide whether they share the same dreams for the future. Spirited and warm-hearted, Melissa Rivero’s new novel showcases the complexities of the mother-daughter bond with fresh insight and empathy.
The Librarianist
From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself. Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.
Terrace Story
From the author of the acclaimed novel Temporary, an intimate exploration of time, a fable about love, an epic daydream for a broken-hearted world.
Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.
Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?
Based on the National Magazine award–winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.