A single choice can define an entire life. Suchi first sees Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood when she is seven years old, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossoms into love, but when Haiwen secretly enlists in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, Suchi is left with just his violin and a note: Forgive Me. Sixty years later, recently widowed Haiwen spots Suchi at a grocery store in Los Angeles. It feels to Haiwen like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. In the twilight of their lives, can they reclaim their past and the love they lost?
Archives
OLD SOUL
In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss their flight, and over dinner discover they have both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with a beguiling woman no one has laid eyes on since.
Following the traces this woman left behind, Jake gathers testimonies from other troubled souls who encountered her across the years, and lands on a sculptor in Taos County, New Mexico. She knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is. Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a wildly innovative and fearlessly bold genre-defying tale that explores vulnerability, loss, and predation, spanning centuries and crossing the globe, and is ultimately a moving portrait of love and the will to live.
WILLIAM
Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career—he’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William. No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily. When Lily’s coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house—the smartest of smart homes—Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it in.
ALL OUR YESTERDAYS
(Putnam)
SUMMARY
A propulsive and piercing debut, set ten years before the events of Shakespeare’s historic play, about the ambition, power, and fate that define one of literature’s most notorious figures: Lady Macbeth.
Scotland, the 11th Century. Born in a noble household and granddaughter of a forgotten Scottish king, a young girl carries the guilt of her mother’s death and the weight of an unknowable prophecy. When she is married, at fifteen, to the Mormaer of Moray, she experiences firsthand the violence of a sadistic husband and a kingdom constantly at war. To survive with her young son in a superstitious realm, she must rely on her own cunning and wit, especially when her husband’s downfall inadvertently sets them free.
Suspicious of the dark devices that may have led to his father’s death, her son watches as his mother falls in love with the enigmatic thane Macbeth. Now a woman of stature, Lady Macbeth confronts a world of masculine power and secures the protection of her family. But the coronation of King Duncan and the political maneuvering of her cousin Macduff set her on a tragic course, one where her own success might mean embracing the very curse that haunts her and risking the child she loves.
TAKE ME HOME
Road Trip Rules: No bad music. No detours. No falling in love.
Hazel Elliot doesn’t look back. If the universe closes a door, she burns the whole house down. But when she’s summoned home for her father’s wedding, she’s forced to return to small-town Lockett Prairie, Texas, for the first time since she fled for college.
Ash Campbell has been in love with Hazel since they were teenagers, when she dated his best friend. Now, Ash works at Hazel’s favorite coffee shop, where they feud over the best chair, and his sizzling attraction to the prickly girl from home has only gained steam.
When Ash’s car breaks down just as family obligations pull him home, there’s only one person who can get him there on time. But Hazel has one condition: everything between them must stay the same. And if he fails to oblige? She gets the coffee shop. So the frenemies endure bad music, inclement weather, and B&Bs with only one bed—and that’s just the drive across Texas. When they finally arrive, Hazel must face the bridges she’s burned, because there’s nowhere in a small town to hide, not even from herself. And, right where she least expects it, she might just find a man worth changing everything for . . .
NEGOTIATING WHILE BLACK
A real-world, one-of-a-kind resource for anyone who has ever been underestimated, overlooked, or misunderstood at the negotiating table—whether you’re haggling for a car, asking for a promotion, or advocating for your kids—to help you leverage your unique strengths and walk away with the best deal possible.
There’s no shortage of negotiation books that advise you to “get to yes,” urge you to “never split the difference,” and entreat you to “ask for more.” But none of them take into account the very real implicit bias in the room when a non-white, non-male negotiator sits at the table. Simply put: a one-size-fits-all negotiation style doesn’t work in a complex, multifaceted, multicultural world. The only constant in every negotiation is you. So you’d better learn to leverage who you are to your advantage.
Negotiating While Black is the book lawyer and mediator Damali Peterman wishes had existed as she was faced with the kind of situations that other negotiation scripts just don’t consider, like navigating workplaces where she was the only Black woman or advocating for her young son in his all-white classroom. Drawing on decades of training and experience as a negotiator in high-stakes situations, Peterman has developed successful strategies that will help you become the best communicator that you can be—like the Foundational Five skills all negotiators need, and the Negotiation Superpowers that will lift you to the next level. She also takes readers out of the boardroom and into real life, showing the application of negotiation and how everything is potentially up for discussion—from the trade-in value of your car to the permission for your kid to use the employee bathroom in the back of the store.
At every step, Peterman acknowledges that the unique way you show up in the world will impact your negotiations in all sorts of surprising ways—and that this can in fact be a good thing. Because when you show up prepared and proud of who you are, you’ll reap the rewards.
Come And Get It
From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.
It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue.
A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior—and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.
Shoot the Moon
An ambitious and evocative debut novel about one brilliant but lonely NASA secretary’s relentless drive to live a big life in a world that would keep her small.
How far would you travel for love?
Intelligent but isolated physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. When she lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, she feels certain this path is her destiny. Her memories of childhood darkened by loss, she’s left behind her home, her mother, and her first love. And now she’s finally found her purpose. Even typing dictation, the work is everything she dreamed, and despite her budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t let herself be distracted. Not now.
So when her inability to ignore an engineer’s mistaken calculations propels her into a new position, Annie finds herself torn between her ambition, her heart, and a mysterious discovery that upends everything she knows to be scientifically true. Can she overcome her fears and reach toward the limits of human advancement? Will she chase her ambitions, and risk losing herself in them? Affectingly achronological in its telling, Shoot the Moon daringly explores one woman’s quest for both intellectual fulfilment and romantic love, the price paid for scientific progress, and the heart’s persistent yearning for home.
The Three of Us
Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.
What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion?
The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky friend with whom to laugh about facile men, and an affectionate husband who loves her above all else. The only thing missing from this portrait is a baby. But motherhood is a serious undertaking, especially for the wife who has valued her selfhood more than anything.
On a seemingly normal day, the best friend comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made that threaten to throw everything off balance, the wife’s two confidantes are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions. Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts—the wife, the husband, the best friend—the day quickly unfolds to show how the trio’s dented visions of each other finally unravel, throwing everyone’s integrity into question—and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over pivotal years, into utter chaos.
At once subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive, The Three of Us explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal, ultimately asking: who are we if not for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the people we’re meant to love?
The Old Place
A bighearted and moving debut about a wry retired schoolteacher whose decade-old secret threatens to come to light and send shockwaves through her small Texas town.
Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first day of school at Billington High. A few months into her retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days. The annual picnic is coming up, but that isn’t nearly enough since the menu never changes and she had the roles mentally assigned weeks ago. At least there’s Ellie, who stops by each morning for coffee and whose reemergence in Mary Alice’s life is the one thing soothing the sting of retirement.
Mary Alice and Ellie were a pair since the day Ellie moved in next door. That they both were single mothers—Mary Alice widowed, Ellie divorced—with sons the same age was a pleasant coincidence, but they were forever linked when they lost the boys, one right after the other. Years later, the two are working their way back to a comfortable friendship. But when Mary Alice’s sister arrives on her doorstep with a staggering piece of news, it jeopardizes the careful shell she’s built around her life. The whole of her friendship with Ellie is put at risk, the fabric of a place as steadfast as Billington is questioned, and the unflappable, knotty fixture that is Mary Alice Roth might have to change after all.