A story full of passion and revenge, following one family living on the Texas Mexico border and a curse that reverberates across generations—“Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women.” (Erika L. Sanchez)
Archives
HEADSHOT
An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer” (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition.
UNLEARNING SILENCE
A paradigm-shifting book looking at the pervasive influence of silence and how we can begin to dismantle it in order to find our voices at home and at work
THE DJINN WAITS A HUNDRED YEARS
Rebecca meets Fatima Farheen Mirza in this sweeping, gorgeously atmospheric novel about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous.
A Nearby Country Called Love
A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which two brothers struggle to find their place in an Iran on the brink of combusting.
Hope
A hilarious and heartfelt novel about a seemingly-perfect family in an era of waning American optimism, from the acclaimed author of The Altruists.
THE HISTORY OF A DIFFICULT CHILD
An exhilarating, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia’s socialist revolution.
The Unfolding
From a writer who is always “razor sharp and furiously good” (Zadie Smith), a darkly comic political parable braided with a Bildungsroman that takes us inside the heart of a divided country.
The Big Guy loves his family, money and country. Undone by the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of the American Dream. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family. His wife, Charlotte, grieves a life not lived, while his 18-year-old daughter, Meghan, begins to realize that her favorite subject “history” is not exactly what her father taught her.
In a story that is as much about the dynamics within a family as it is about the desire for those in power to remain in power, Homes presciently unpacks a dangerous rift in American identity, prompting a reconsideration of the definition of truth, freedom and democracy—and exploring the explosive consequences of what happens when the same words mean such different things to people living together under one roof.
The Lemon
Set in the intersecting worlds of fine dining, Hollywood, and the media, a darkly hilarious and ultimately devastating satire about the underside of success and fame, and our ongoing complicity in devouring our cultural heroes
While filming on location in Belfast, Northern Ireland, John Doe, the universally adored host of the culinary travel show Last Call, is found dead in a hotel room in an apparent suicide. As the news of his untimely demise breaks, a group of friends, fixers, hustlers, and opportunists vie to seize control of the narrative: Doe’s chess-master of an agent Nia, ready to call in every favor she is owed to preserve his legacy; down-on-her-luck journalist Katie, who fabricates a story about Doe to save her job at a failing website; and world-famous chef Paolo Cabrini, Doe’s closest friend and confidant, who finds himself entangled with a deranged Belfast hotel worker whose lurid secret might just take them all down.
With raucous, deliciously cutting prose, crackling dialogue, and an unpredictable, tightly plotted story line—bolstered by the authors’ insider knowledge of high-end restaurants and low-end digital media—The Lemon is a darkly hilarious and ultimately devastating interrogation of the underside of success and fame, and our ongoing complicity in devouring the cultural heroes we hardly deserve.
In the Upper Country
Two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life’s last vital act—find their fates intertwined in this intricately plotted and deeply researched debut novel, set at terminus of the Underground Railroad.
In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town populated by refugees fleeing slavery at the height of the Underground Railroad, young Lensinda works as a maid for a veteran of the War of 1812 and founder of one of the first Black newspapers—with aspirations to become a journalist herself. One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda when a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by Cash, an old refugee woman. The farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from Cash before the woman is condemned.
Eager to prove her skill, sure of her worldliness and her instincts, and confident she can tackle such a sensitive task under pressure, Lensinda slips into the jail where Cash is being held. But the old woman doesn’t want to confess—instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. Lensinda agrees and in swapping life stories learns the interwoven history of America and Canada; of the Indigenous people from both places and the enslaved Black men and women brought to North America; of the patriots and the outlaws equally cast as second-class citizens.
As Cash’s time runs out, Lensinda realizes she knows far less than she believed—not just about the complicated tapestry of her people’s ancestry but about her family history as well. Moving along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Kentucky, to the backroom Black militias of Detroit, through the territory of the Ojibwe nation, and north into the Owen Sound, In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.