In this evocative debut, a girl takes on a series of identities to survive in the U.S. after being trafficked from Guyana, shrouding herself in layer upon layer of secrets. Decades later, she is living in an upscale Atlanta suburb with her unknowing husband and sons, when the arrival of a letter suddenly forces a reckoning with the past that threatens to bring her carefully built existence tumbling down. Written in sensory prose, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl takes the reader on a poignant journey of reinvention and resilience.
Archives
I See You’ve Called in Dead
Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. As Bud awaits his fate at work, he starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live. Thurber Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author John Kenney tells a funny, touching story about life and death, about the search for meaning, about finding and never letting go of the preciousness of life.
EXPOSURE
In 2004, Juliette Marker, a white college freshman, and Noah King, a Black high school senior, are two lonely souls who enter each other’s orbit, forge a connection, and, after a chance meeting, go home together. Twelve years later, Noah has done the impossible and made it in Hollywood. His first film is about to be released, and he and his beloved wife Jesse, a successful writer herself, have just had a baby. Meanwhile, Juliette’s best friend Annie is back in LA for the first time in more than a decade. As teenagers, Juliette and Annie shared an enviable bond, memorialized by Juliette’s mother, Margot, a renowned photographer. When Annie returns to the Topanga Canyon home where they spent their idyllic adolescence, she makes a startling discovery about Juliette that will threaten to blow up the life Noah has struggled to build. Spanning decades, from LA to Chicago, and told through multiple perspectives, this powerful, provocative novel delves into one life-changing night and the complex lives and relationships of those affected by it, exploring how race, artistic ambition, and grief expose different versions of the same story.
THE UNDERCURRENT
It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin—and those memories—far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past. Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history. Bee becomes consumed with a need to uncover the truth about Deecie’s disappearance and what happened to the families who lived across the field from one another—Gus, Leo, and their mothers: Mary, a homemaker, whose only escape is the local community theater, and Diana, a serious academic dedicated to her studies. Told in multiple perspectives with two different timelines, The Undercurrent is a gripping portrait of motherhood, obsession, broken family bonds, and buried secrets.
I WANT YOU MORE
When ghostwriter Zara becomes entwined with celebrity chef client, Jane Bailey, she starts to see the side Jane keeps hidden from the cameras and gets stuck in a plot she never saw coming.
PEARCE OYSTERS
PEARCE OYSTERS (Zibby Books)
SUMMARY
Pearce Oysters, a family drama set on the Louisiana coastline during the historic 2010 oil spill, follows the Pearces, local oyster farmers whose business, family, and livelihood are on the brink of collapse.
Eye-opening, eco-fiction at its best, Pearce Oysters highlights the grit and beauty of lives lived in an overlooked corner of the American South. Diving deep into the bonds of family, culture, class, and industry, the novel elevates the voices of deeply sympathetic characters: Jordan, the reluctant head of his family’s storied oyster company; May, his distressed, widowed mother; and Benny, his beatnik musician brother, who returns from New Orleans in their time of crisis.
HERE AFTER
Here After is an intimate story of deep love followed by dizzying loss; a stunning, taut memoir from debut Canadian author Amy Lin that will resonate deeply with anyone who has had to move forward through unexpected loss.
The Last Love Note
After her husband’s tragically early death, Kate is determined to find new happiness. First, she has to start looking in the right place. Lurching from one comedic crisis to the next, the midlife widow surfs unpredictable waves of grief amid solo parenting her five year old and wrangling a university fundraising job. Then there’s her overbearing mom and a Tinder-obsessed best friend, who’s determined to matchmake Kate with her hot new neighbor. The Last Love Note sweeps readers into unabated hopefulness and delivers them home with tears of laughter, loss, and joy— and a renewed faith in the resilience of the human heart.
The House of Plain Truth
Pearline leaves her life in Brooklyn and returns to her childhood home of Jamaica to care for her dying father, Rupert. Ostracized by her sisters for moving to America decades earlier and only coming “home” due to their father’s imminent passing, Pearline must assert her own familial identity as she strives to hold onto the family’s home over her sisters’ objections. A novel of fractured family and the search to protect – or discard – what unites them, this story traces one older woman’s decision to pursue and hold onto what has deep meaning to her in her blood and in her bones. It addresses what it means to uphold the wishes of those who have departed the world and how sometimes it is the most unlikely characters who crystallize what matters most.
End Credits
Funny, heart-wrenching, and fearlessly candid, Patty Lin’s memoir pulls back the curtain on life as the lone Asian American woman in some of Hollywood’s most famous writers’ rooms (Friends, Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad). It’s an intimate and honest exploration of how she survived the simultaneous impact of criticism and stress, as her wildest dreams as a television writer came true—and how much we’re willing to sacrifice and compromise for success.