Archives

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.

Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways

A masterfully written memoir of self-preservation, Means tells the engrossing story of her upbringing as a Chicana girl whose family is overwhelmed by poverty, addiction, patriarchy, and violence. Spending her childhood riding shotgun as her mother runs from one abusive relationship to another, Means’s life is a blur of highways and traumas that collapse any effort to track time. With no money and only burned bridges behind them, Means is forced to take care of her younger brother, manage the instability of her home life, her mother’s unexpected comings and goings, and make sense of the troublesome world around her. Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways will astonish and challenge readers—and will never be forgotten.

Wednesdays at One

A compulsively readable psychological thriller about a life upended when a mysterious woman arrives from nowhere and blurs the lines between one man’s current reality and his buried memories. A renowned clinical psychologist, Gregory Weber, has a seemingly idyllic life—a lovely wife, two kids, a thriving therapy practice, and a country club membership in an affluent Boston suburb. But lately, Gregory is starting to feel increasingly disconnected, retreating to his backyard shed and rebuffing any attempts of closeness with his wife and family. When a mysterious woman begins appearing in his office each week, Gregory’s life is upended and what was once clear is now thrown out of focus. Just who is this mysterious patient and how can Greg stop the lines between memory and reality from blurring completely?