Lena wants her life back. Her wealthy, controlling, humorless husband has just died, and now she contends with her controlling, humorless son, Drew. Lena lands in Naxos with her best friend in tow for the unveiling of her son’s, pet project—the luxurious Agape Villas. Years of marriage amongst the wealthy elite has whittled Lena’s spirit into rope and sinew, smothered by tasteful cocktail dresses and unending small talk. On Naxos she yearns to rediscover her true nature, remember the exuberant dancer and party girl she once was, but Drew tightens his grip, keeping her cloistered inside the hotel, demanding that she fall in line. Lena is intrigued by a group of women living in tents on the beach in front of the Agape. She can feel their drums at night, hear their seductive leader calling her to dance. Soon she’ll find that an ancient God stirs on the beach, awakening dark desires of women across the island. The only questions left will be whether Lena will join them, and what it will cost her.
Archives
When Javi Dumped Mari
On the eve of their college graduation, best friends Javier Báez and Marisol Campos swore never to date someone the other doesn’t approve of. Now, ten years later, Javi has a problem. Mari, the woman he’s secretly pined for since sophomore year, is engaged—and Javi didn’t even get the chance to vet the Pedro Pascal knockoff she plans to marry. Mari, a successful entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, is no longer seeking Javi’s dating advice or waiting for him to declare his love for her. Instead, Mari’s made a different pact—with herself. And to succeed, she’s vowing to build a future with someone else. With his life and theater career finally on track, Javi’s ready to confess his feelings. Except Mari’s changed the script and moved on without him. Javi has just eight weeks to convince Mari this marriage is a flop. If that means he needs to ruffle some feathers to help Mari avert a disaster, well, he’s up for the challenge. After all, isn’t that what best friends are for?
All the Other Mothers Hate Me
Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. Single, broke and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son Dylan. But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen food empire, mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name, or risk losing Dylan forever. The only problem? Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her. Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe…
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town of Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction. When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs’s youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn’t seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath. The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a crime saga like no other, with a ferocious matriarch at its bruised, beating heart. With sharp wit and profound empathy, award-winning author Ron Currie, delivers an unforgettable novel exploring love, retribution, and the ancestral roots that both nurture and trap us.
HOMESEEKING
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?
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.