Recommended Reads

Category
Audience

The Durrells in Corfu. Complete season 1

Based on author and naturalist Gerald Durrell's much-loved Corfu trilogy of novels, The Durrells sees impoverished but sparky widow Louisa Durrell make the radical decision to leave 1930s England in hopes of a better life for her children. As Louisa relocates her reluctant brood to a dilapidated house in the Greek sun, the Durrells face a whole new set of challenges as they meet new friends, rivals, lovers, and animals. 

View Details >>

From Asparagus to Zucchini

Fairshare CSA Coalition (Madison, Wis.)

Ever wonder how you'll ever be able to use all your vegetables? From Asparagus to Zucchini answers the question of what to do with your armloads of greens, exotic herbs (and the never-before-seen vegetables), with recipes that are as concise and doable as they are appealing. Created for and by Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members, the book is an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to eat seasonally and locally.

Organized by vegetable--fifty-three in all--each section includes nutritional, historical, and storage information, as well as cooking tips. With more than 420 original recipes created, tested, and enjoyed by chefs, CSA members, and farmers, you'll never be without a delicious recipe to make the most of the season's bounty. The best part is that lesser-known vegetables like burdock and kohlrabi have more recipes, not fewer!

From Asparagus to Zucchini is more than just a cookbook. Also included are essays that address the larger picture of sustainable agriculture, how our food choices fit into our economy, environment, and community, and more information on home food preservation and how to help kids appreciate--and even eat--their vegetables. Readers will find an extensive resource section and recipe index to round out this unique resource. With this book, prepare to awaken and reaffirm your dedication to enjoying the unique flavors of local foods while nourishing the life of sustainable family farms.

View Details >>

Malibu Rising: A Read with Jenna Pick

Taylor Jenkins Reid

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the author of Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo . . . 

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Time, Marie Claire, PopSugar, Parade, Teen Vogue, Self • “Irresistible . . . High drama at the beach, starring four sexy, surfing siblings and their deadbeat, famous-crooner dad.”—People

Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, the family drama that ensues will change their lives will change forever.

Malibu: August 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.

Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there.

And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come rising to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.

This edition includes an interview with the author, book club discussion questions, and more!

View Details >>

Pretty little liars. Original sin. Season 1

Takes viewers to Millwood, a blue-collar town still healing from tragic events that took place 20 years ago. An unknown assailant has begun tormenting a disparate group of teen girls, a new generation of 'Little Liars,' to make them pay for their parents' secret sin...as well as their own.

View Details >>

Being John Malkovich

Cusack, John, 1966-

An out-of-work puppeteer takes a filing clerk job on the cramped seventh floor of an office building where he discovers a hidden tunnel allowing him to enter the mind and life of actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes before being ejected onto the New Jersey Turnpike.

View Details >>

Arsenic and old lace

Grant, Cary, 1904-1986.

A young man is shocked when he learns his aunts like to serve men elderberry wine with arsenic, and then bury their bodies in the cellar.  Originally released as a motion picture in 1944.  From the stage play by Joseph Kesselring.

View Details >>

Sandwich

Catherine Newman

Look for Wreck, the new novel by Catherine Newman--a deeply moving story of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn't go as planned--Coming October 2025.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Sandwich is joy in book form. I laughed continuously, except for the parts that made me cry. Catherine Newman does a miraculous job reminding us of all the wonder there is to be found in life."--Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

"If you like my novels, you will love love love this . . . . I stand in awe, it's just perfect."--Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Swan Song

"A total delight."--Kate Christensen

From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family's yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and--thanks to the cottage's ancient plumbing--septic too.

This year's vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past--except, perhaps, for Rocky's hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing--her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family's history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.

View Details >>

When the Sea Came Alive

Garrett M. Graff

2025 AUDIE AWARD: MULTI-VOICED PERFORMANCE WINNER

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Absolutely gripping.” —The Washington Post • “A masterpiece of oral history…stirring, surprising, grim, joyous, moving, and always riveting.” —Evan Thomas

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Pulitzer Prize finalist for Watergate comes the most complete and up-to-date account of D-Day—the largest seaborne invasion in history and the moment that secured the Allied victory in World War II—featuring hundreds of eyewitness accounts.

June 6, 1944—known to us all as D-Day—is one of history’s greatest and most unbelievable military triumphs. The surprise sunrise landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of occupied northern France is one of the most consequential days of the 20th century. Now, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, historian and author of The Only Plane in the Sky and Watergate, brings them all together in a one-of-a-kind, bestselling oral history that explores this seminal event in vivid, heart-pounding detail.

The story begins in the opening months of the 1940s, as the Germany army tightens its grip across Europe, seizing control of entire nations. The United States, who has resolved to remain neutral, is forced to enter the conflict after an unexpected attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. For the second time in fifty years, the world is at war, with the stakes higher than they’ve ever been before. Then in 1943, Allied leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet in Casablanca to discuss a new plan for victory: a coordinated invasion of occupied France, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure is not an option. Over the next eighteen months, the large-scale action is organized, mobilizing soldiers across Europe by land, sea, and sky. And when the day comes, it is unlike anything the world has ever seen.

These moments and more are seen in real time. A visceral, page-turning drama told through the eyes of those who experienced them—from soldiers, nurses, pilots, children, neighbors, sailors, politicians, volunteers, photographers, reporters and so many more, When the Sea Came Alive “is the sort of book that is smart, inspiring, and powerful—and adds so much to our knowledge of what that day was like and its historic importance forever” (Chris Bohjalian)—an unforgettable, fitting tribute to the men and women of the Greatest Generation.

View Details >>

All the Sinners Bleed

S. A. Cosby

2024 AUDIE AWARD: THRILLER/SUSPENSE WINNER

“Fresh and exhilarating. . . Cosby keeps his eye on the story and the pedal to the metal.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

“An atmospheric pressure cooker.” —People

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. 

With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Charon is Titus’s home and his heart. But where faith and violence meet, there will be a reckoning. 

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction” (The Washington Post).

View Details >>

No Two Persons

Erica Bauermeister

2024 AUDIE AWARD: MULTI-VOICED PERFORMANCE WINNER

One book. Nine readers. Ten changed lives. New York Times bestselling author Erica Bauermeister’s No Two Persons is “a gloriously original celebration of fiction, and the ways it deepens our lives.”*

That was the beauty of books, wasn’t it? They took you places you didn’t know you needed to go...

Alice has always wanted to be a writer. Her talent is innate, but her stories remain safe and detached, until a devastating event breaks her heart open, and she creates a stunning debut novel. Her words, in turn, find their way to readers, from a teenager hiding her homelessness, to a free diver pushing himself beyond endurance, an artist furious at the world around her, a bookseller in search of love, a widower rent by grief. Each one is drawn into Alice’s novel; each one discovers something different that alters their perspective, and presents new pathways forward for their lives.

Together, their stories reveal how books can affect us in the most beautiful and unexpected of ways—and how we are all more closely connected to one another than we might think.

“With its beautiful parts that add up to a brilliant whole, No Two Persons made my reader’s heart sing.”—*Nina de Gramont, New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair

View Details >>

Bits and Pieces

Whoopi Goldberg

2025 AUDIE AWARD: NARRATION BY THE AUTHOR WINNER

From multi-award winner Whoopi Goldberg comes a new and unique memoir of her family and their influence on her early life.

If it weren't for Emma Johnson, Caryn Johnson would have never become Whoopi Goldberg. Emma gave her children the loving care and wisdom they needed to succeed in life, always encouraging them to be true to themselves. When Whoopi lost her mother in 2010--and then her older brother, Clyde, five years later--she felt deeply alone; the only people who truly knew her were gone.

Emma raised her children not just to survive, but to thrive. In this intimate and heartfelt memoir, Whoopi shares many of the deeply personal stories of their lives together for the first time. Growing up in the projects in New York City, there were trips to Coney Island, the Ice Capades, and museums, and every Christmas was a magical experience. To this day, she doesn't know how her mother was able to give them such an enriching childhood, despite the struggles they faced--and it wasn't until she was well into adulthood that Whoopi learned just how traumatic some of those struggles were.

Fans of personal memoirs such as Finding Me by Viola Davis and In Pieces by Sally Field will be touched by Bits and Pieces: a moving tribute from a daughter to her mother, and a beautiful portrait of three people who loved each other deeply. Whoopi writes, "Not everybody gets to walk this earth with folks who let you be exactly who you are and who give you the confidence to become exactly who you want to be. So, I thought I'd share mine with you."

View Details >>

When No One Is Watching

Alyssa Cole

2021 AUDIE AWARD: THRILLER/SUSPENSE WINNER

"If Rear Window and Get Out got married and had a baby that was a book, it would indeed be When No One Is Watching, which takes place in contemporary Brooklyn and combines a page-turning thriller with shrewd social commentary on race, gentrification and greed." -- Seattle Times

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block--her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo's deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other--or themselves--long enough to find out before they too disappear?



 

View Details >>

The Chestnut Man

Soren Sveistrup

2020 AUDIE AWARD: MYSTERY WINNER

“A full-throttle thriller in the tradition of classic Stieg Larsson, drenched in atmosphere and charged with adrenaline. Buckle up. You’ll gulp down every word. I loved this book.”—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

If you find one, he’s already found you.

A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen.

His calling card is a “chestnut man”—a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts—which he leaves at each bloody crime scene.

Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery—a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago.

A tragic coincidence—or something more twisted?

To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.

Because it’s clear that the madman is on a mission that is far from over.

And no one is safe.

View Details >>

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Jesse Q. Sutanto

2024 AUDIE AWARD: MYSTERY WINNER

A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to. 

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. 

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

View Details >>

The True Love Experiment

Christina Lauren

2024 AUDIE AWARD: ROMANCE WINNER

Sparks fly when a romance writer and a documentary filmmaker join forces to craft the ultimate Hollywood love story—but only if they can keep the chemistry between them from taking the whole thing off script—from the “divine” (Jodi Picoult) New York Times bestselling authors of Love and Other Words and The Unhoneymooners.

Felicity “Fizzy” Chen is lost. Sure, she’s got an incredible career as a beloved romance novelist with a slew of bestsellers under her belt, but when she’s asked to give a commencement address, it hits her: she hasn’t been practicing what she’s preached.

Fizzy hasn’t ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that swoon-worthy, can’t-stop-thinking-about-him, all-encompassing feeling? Nope. Nothing. What happens when the optimism she’s spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie?

Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and single father, loves his work but when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show, putting his job on the line, Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with an exasperated Fizzy offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? Fizzy gives him a hard pass—unless he agrees to her list of demands. When he says yes, and production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.

“Full of big laughs, a few tears, and some seriously steamy scenes” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The True Love Experiment is the book fans have been waiting for ever since Fizzy’s debut in the New York Times bestselling The Soulmate Equation.

View Details >>

Fairy Tale

Stephen King

2023 AUDIE AWARD: BEST MALE NARRATOR WINNER

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.

Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: “What could you write that would make you happy?”

“As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city—deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”

View Details >>

Fire in Paradise

Alastair Gee

2021 AUDIE AWARD: NON-FICTION WINNER 

The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.
 

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.

This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.

View Details >>

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

2022 AUDIE AWARD: AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER; SCIENCE FICTION WINNER

HUGO AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST BOOKS: Bill Gates, GatesNotes, New York Public Library, Parade, Newsweek, Polygon, Shelf Awareness, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library JournalNew York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 

“An epic story of redemption, discovery and cool speculative sci-fi.”—USA Today

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

View Details >>

Unprotected

Billy Porter

2023 AUDIE AWARD: AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR WINNER

From Billy Porter, the incomparable Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winner, Unprotected is a powerful and revealing autobiography about race, sexuality, art, and healing.

"Bold, hilarious, honest, and singular. Unprotected is a record of survival, commitment to authenticity, and healing; a road map out of hell." --Leslie Odom Jr.

Billy Porter is a multitalented, multifaceted treasure at the top of his game, and Unprotected is a resonant, inspirational story of trauma and healing, shot through with his singular voice.

It's easy to be yourself when who and what you are is in vogue. But growing up Black and gay in America has never been easy.

Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic Emmy-winning performance in the celebrated TV show Pose; before he was the groundbreaking Tony and Grammy award-winning star of Broadway's Kinky Boots; and before he was an acclaimed recording artist, actor, playwright, director, and all-around legend, Porter was a young boy in Pittsburgh who was seen as different, who didn't fit in.

At five years old, Porter was sent to therapy to "fix" his effeminacy. He was endlessly bullied at school, sexually abused by his stepfather, and criticized at his church. Porter came of age in a world where simply being himself was a constant struggle.

Unprotected is the story of a boy whose talent and courage opened doors for him, but only a crack. It is the story of a teenager discovering himself, learning his voice and his craft amid deep trauma. And it is the story of a young man whose unbreakable determination led him through countless hard times to where he is now; a proud icon who refuses to back down or hide.

Billy Porter's Unprotected is the life story of a singular artist and survivor in his own words.

View Details >>

The City We Became

N. K. Jemisin

2021 AUDIE AWARD: FANTASY WINNER; BEST FEMALE NARRATOR WINNER 

Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a "glorious" story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City. In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power. In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it's as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels. And they're not the only ones. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. 

"A glorious fantasy." --Neil Gaiman

View Details >>

Such a Fun Age

Kiley Reid

2021AUDIE AWARD: FICTION WINNER 

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right. 

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other. 

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

View Details >>

Tom Lake

Ann Patchett

2024 AUDIE AWARD: FICTION WINNER 

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers.

"Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." --The Guardian

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

View Details >>

Still True

Maggie Ginsberg

One summer evening, Lib Hanson is confronted by her painful past when Matt Marlow, the forty-year-old son she abandoned as an infant, shows up on her porch. Fiercely independent, Lib has never revealed her son's existence--or her previous marriage--to her husband, Jack. Married nearly three decades but living in separate houses (to the confusion but acceptance of their neighbors), they enjoy an ease and comfort together in small-town Anthem, Wisconsin. But Jack is a stickler for honesty, and Lib's long-dormant secret threatens to unravel their lives.



When ten-year-old Charlie Taylor arrives at Jack's workshop shortly thereafter, he's not the first kid in town to need help with a flat tire, and Jack gladly makes the repair to his bike. The Taylors are new to Anthem, and Jack soon discovers that Charlie and his mom, Claire, are struggling to fit in, even as Charlie's dad, Dan, is thriving in his new job. Extending friendship and kindness, as well as introductions around the local café, Jack assumes a grandfatherly role. What he doesn't see is the drinking that Claire hides from everyone, or the secret son that Lib has allowed to move into her house and the growing attraction between Claire and Matt. When the terrible events of a fateful evening threaten everyone's carefully crafted lives, Jack, Lib, and their new friends must each determine the value of truth for the ones they love.

View Details >>

I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around

Ann Garvin

In Ann Garvin's "eccentric and endearing" (Publishers Weekly) novel, Tig Monahan, a radio therapist, finds out the hard way that nothing is fair in love and war...or family.

Everything is falling apart in psychologist Tig Monahan's life. Her mother's dementia is wearing her out; her boyfriend takes off for Hawaii without her; and her sister inexplicably disappears, leaving her newborn behind.

When a therapy session goes horribly wrong, Tig finds herself unemployed and part of the sandwich generation trying to take care of everyone—and failing miserably. Just when she thinks she can redefine herself on the radio as an arbiter of fairness, she discovers a family secret that nobody saw coming.

It will take everything plus a sense of humor to see her way clear to a better life...but only if she can let go of her past.

View Details >>

The Ascent

Allison Buccola

What would you do if the past showed up on your doorstep?

A woman who grew up in a cult must decide if she can trust the stranger claiming to have answers to the dark mysteries of her childhood in “a standout thriller with something deeper on its mind: how the past doesn’t just haunt you, it reshapes you” (The Seattle Times).

“I tore through this book and was genuinely shocked by its ending!”—Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines

For decades, the whereabouts of The Fifteen has been an unsolved mystery. All the members of this reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished twenty years ago, except for one: a twelve-year-old girl found wandering alone on the side of the road.

In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her, building a new identity for herself with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter, Lucy. But motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She doesn’t want to let Lucy out of her sight even for a moment. She can’t return to work. She’s not sleeping, and she has started spiraling into paranoia.

Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering answers to all of Lee’s questions about her past—if Lee could only trust that this woman is who she says she is. Can Lee keep her safe, stable life? Or will new revelations about “the cult that went missing” shatter everything? In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.

View Details >>

The Quiet Librarian

Allen Eskens

After the murder of her best friend, a librarian's search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this "searing and timely" novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from the author of the beloved bestseller The Life We Bury (Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter).



"Fans of Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale or Kate Quinn's books will be caught up in this story of a courageous woman."―Library Journal (starred review)



"Exquisitely written, profoundly affecting, and undoubtedly one of the best books I will read this year."―Louise Fein, author of The London Bookshop Affair



Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.



Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia--until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend--the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.



Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana's care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora--and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.

 

View Details >>

The peanut butter falcon

An adventure story set in the world of a modern Mark Twain that begins when Zak, a young man with Down syndrome, runs away from a nursing home where he lives to chase his dream of becoming a professional wrestler and attending the wrestling school of the Salt Water Redneck. Through circumstances beyond their control, Tyler, a small-time outlaw on the run, becomes Zak's unlikely coach and ally.

View Details >>

Life in pieces. Season 1

Life in pieces follows one big happy family and their sometimes awkward, often hilarious, and ultimately beautiful milestone moments as told by the family's various members. Adoring matriarch, Joan (Dianne Wiest), would do anything for her kids - as long as she agrees with them. Gregarious patriarch, John (James Brolin), is searching for ways to soften the blow of turning 70. Together with their three adult children, Greg (Colin Hanks), Matt (Thomas Sadoski) and Heather (Betsy Brandt), they try to savor the little pieces of life that go by in a flash but are treasured forever.

View Details >>

Justified. Season 1

After a shooting raises questions about his style of law enforcement, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is transferred to his hometown in Kentucky and unexpectedly encounters people from his past.

View Details >>

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Tom Hanks portrays Mister Rogers in a timely story of kindness triumphing over cynicism, based on the true story of a real-life friendship between Fred Rogers and journalist Tom Junod. After a jaded magazine writer is assigned a profile of Fred Rogers, he overcomes his skepticism, learning about kindness, love, and forgiveness from America's most beloved neighbor.

View Details >>

Falling skies. Season 1

Chronicles the chaotic aftermath of an alien attack that leaves most of the world completely incapacitated. In the six months since the initial invasion, survivors band together to begin the difficult task of fighting back against the aggressive aliens. Outside of Boston, history professor Tom Mason helps lead a small army named 2nd Massachusetts in the battle of their lives to preserve their families and what's left of mankind.

View Details >>

Pulling strings

After his daughter's Visa request to visit her grandparents in America is rejected, a single father and his loyal best friend do everything it takes to win over the Embassy worker who turned her down.

View Details >>

Ammonite

In the 1840s, acclaimed self-taught palaeontologist Mary Anning works alone on the wild English coastline. She hunts for common fossils to sell to rich tourists to support herself. When one such tourist arrives in Lyme, he entrusts Mary with the care of his young wife Charlotte, who is recuperating from a personal tragedy. Despite their differences, it is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.

View Details >>

Crazy rich Asians

A native New Yorker Rachel Chu accompanies her longtime boyfriend, Nick Young, to his best friend's wedding in Singapore. Excited about visiting Asia for the first time but nervous about meeting Nick's family, Rachel is unprepared to learn that Nick has neglected to mention a few key details about his life. It turns out that he is not only the scion of one of the country's wealthiest families but also one of its most sought-after bachelors.

View Details >>

The adventures of Priscilla, queen of the desert

With a contract to perform a drag show way out in the Australian desert, Tick, Adam, and Ralph each has his own reason for wanting to leave the safety of Sydney. Christening their battered pink tour bus "Priscilla, " the trio heads for the outback and into crazy adventures in even crazier outfits.

View Details >>

Arabiyya

Reem Assil

IACP AWARD WINNER • A collection of 100+ bright, bold recipes influenced by the vibrant flavors and convivial culture of the Arab world, filled with moving personal essays on food, family, and identity and mixed with a pinch of California cool, from chef and activist Reem Assil 
  
“This is what a cookbook should be: passion, politics, and personality are woven through the fabulous recipes.”—Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums

ONE OF THE TEN BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle
ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Food & Wine, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Epicurious

Arabiyya celebrates the alluring aromas and flavors of Arab food and the welcoming spirit with which they are shared. Written from her point of view as an Arab in diaspora, Reem takes readers on a journey through her Palestinian and Syrian roots, showing how her heritage has inspired her recipes for flatbreads, dips, snacks, platters to share, and more. With a section specializing in breads of the Arab bakery, plus recipes for favorites such as Salatet Fattoush, Falafel Mahshi, Mujaddarra, and Hummus Bil Awarma, Arabiyya showcases the origins and evolution of Arab cuisine and opens up a whole new world of flavor. 
  
Alongside the tempting recipes, Reem shares stories of the power of Arab communities to turn hardship into brilliant, nourishing meals and any occasion into a celebratory feast. Reem then translates this spirit into her own work in California, creating restaurants that define hospitality at all levels. Yes, there are tender lamb dishes, piles of fresh breads, and perfectly cooked rice, but there is also food for thought about what it takes to create a more equitable society, where workers and people often at the margins are brought to the center. Reem's glorious dishes draw in readers and customers, but it is her infectious warmth that keeps them at the table. 
  
With gorgeous photography, original artwork, and transporting writing, Reem helps readers better understand the Arab diaspora and its global influence on food and culture. She then invites everyone to sit at a table where all are welcome.

View Details >>

The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin

Beatrice McKenzie

Through family interviews, original photographs, and national records, Beatrice Loftus McKenzie traces the many lives of a resilient multigenerational family whose experiences parallel the complicated relationship between America and China in the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Charles Wong moved from Guangdong Province to the United States and opened the Nan King Lo Restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin. Soon after, his wife Yee Shee joined him to build the "Chop House" into a local institution and start a family. When the Great Depression hit, the Wongs shared what they had with their neighbors. In 1938, Charles's tragic murder left Yee Shee to raise their seven children—ages one through fourteen—on her own. Rather than return to family property in Hong Kong, she and her children stayed in Beloit, buoyed by the friendships they had forged during the worst parts of the 1930s. 

The Wongs thrived in Beloit despite facing racism and classism, embracing wartime opportunities, education, love, and careers within the U. S. McKenzie's collaboration with descendent Mary Wong Palmer reveals a poignant story of Chinese immigrant life in the Upper Midwest that adds a much-needed Wisconsin perspective to existing literature by and about Asian Americans.

View Details >>

American Dervish

Ayad Akhtar

Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.

Mina is Hayat's mother's oldest friend from Pakistan. She is independent, beautiful and intelligent, and arrives on the Shah's doorstep when her disastrous marriage in Pakistan disintegrates. Even Hayat's skeptical father can't deny the liveliness and happiness that accompanies Mina into their home. Her deep spirituality brings the family's Muslim faith to life in a way that resonates with Hayat as nothing has before. Studying the Quran by Mina's side and basking in the glow of her attention, he feels an entirely new purpose mingled with a growing infatuation for his teacher.

When Mina meets and begins dating a man, Hayat is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing passions, both spiritual and romantic, force him to question all that he has come to believe is true. Just as Mina finds happiness, Hayat is compelled to act -- with devastating consequences for all those he loves most.

American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life. Ayad Akhtar was raised in the Midwest himself, and through Hayat Shah he shows readers vividly the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America. This is an intimate, personal first novel that will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.

View Details >>

Behold the Dreamers

Imbolo Mbue

A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy

New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award • Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award • An ALA Notable Book

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 
NPR • The New York Times Book Review • San Francisco Chronicle • The Guardian • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Chicago Public Library • BookPage • Refinery29 • Kirkus Reviews 

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

Praise for Behold the Dreamers

“A debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse . . . Mbue is a bright and captivating storyteller.”The Washington Post

“A capacious, big-hearted novel.”The New York Times Book Review

“Behold the Dreamers’ heart . . . belongs to the struggles and small triumphs of the Jongas, which Mbue traces in clean, quick-moving paragraphs.”Entertainment Weekly

“Mbue’s writing is warm and captivating.”People (book of the week)

“[Mbue’s] book isn’t the first work of fiction to grapple with the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, but it’s surely one of the best. . . . It’s a novel that depicts a country both blessed and doomed, on top of the world, but always at risk of losing its balance. It is, in other words, quintessentially American.”—NPR

“This story is one that needs to be told.”Bust 

Behold the Dreamers challenges us all to consider what it takes to make us genuinely content, and how long is too long to live with our dreams deferred.”O: The Oprah Magazine

“[A] beautiful, empathetic novel.”The Boston Globe

“A witty, compassionate, swiftly paced novel that takes on race, immigration, family and the dangers of capitalist excess.”St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Mbue [is] a deft, often lyrical observer. . . . [Her] meticulous storytelling announces a writer in command of her gifts.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

View Details >>

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín’s New York Times bestselling novel—also an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture—is “a moving, deeply satisfying read” (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

“One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

Author “Colm Tóibín…is his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times). “Written with mesmerizing power and skill” (The Boston Globe), Brooklyn is a “triumph…One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations” (USA TODAY).

View Details >>

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. 
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

View Details >>

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez

The Garcías—Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. García’s part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. 

They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves—by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father’s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America. 


 

View Details >>

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok

From the author of Searching for Sylvie Lee, the iconic, New York Times-bestselling debut novel that introduced an important Chinese-American voice with an inspiring story of an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures. 

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles. 

Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

View Details >>

House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus

Tense with suspense from the first line, this is one of the great American realist novels. In this page-turning, breathtaking novel, the characters will walk off the page and into your life. And a small house will seem like the most important piece of territory in the world.



On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes available on county auction for a fraction of its value, he sees a great opportunity for himself, his wife, and his children. But the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, doesn't see it that way, nor does her lover, a married cop driven to extremes to win her love and get her house back.



House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph in which a traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story are turned upside down with brutal, heartrending consequences. It is an American tragedy, and a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

View Details >>

In the Midst of Winter

Isabel Allende

New York Times Bestseller

Worldwide bestselling “dazzling storyteller” (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil.

In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident—which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster—a 60-year-old human rights scholar—hits the car of Evelyn Ortega—a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala—in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen and far more serious turn when Evelyn turns up at the professor’s house seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant Lucia Maraz—a 62-year-old lecturer from Chile—for her advice. These three very different people are brought together in a mesmerizing story that moves from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil, sparking the beginning of a long overdue love story between Richard and Lucia.

Exploring the timely issues of human rights and the plight of immigrants and refugees, the book recalls Allende’s landmark novel The House of the Spirits in the way it embraces the cause of “humanity, and it does so with passion, humor, and wisdom that transcend politics” (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post). In the Midst of Winter will stay with you long after you turn the final page.

View Details >>

The Son of Good Fortune

Lysley A. Tenorio

A Recommended Book From:

USA Today * The Chicago Tribune * Book Riot * Refinery 29 * InStyle * The Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Publishers Weekly * Baltimore Outloud * Omnivoracious * Lambda Literary * Goodreads * Lit Hub * The Millions

FINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

WINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD

From award-winning author Lysley Tenorio, comes a big hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place he calls home

Excel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he's not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town's seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight.

But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima's lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel's tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. "We are 'TNT'--tago ng tago," she told him, "hiding and hiding." Excel is undocumented--and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life.

Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies--and existing outside the normal constructs of American society--Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider?

Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their country--and to each other.

View Details >>

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature

Dohra Ahmad

[Ahmad's] "introduction is fiery and charismatic... This book encompasses the diversity of experience, with beautiful variations and stories that bicker back and forth." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

The first global anthology of migration literature featuring works by Mohsin Hamid, Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Salman Rushdie, and Warsan Shire, with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside

Every year, three to four million people move to a new country. From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. This selection of works collected together for the first time brings together the most compelling literary depictions of migration.

Organized in four parts (Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature conveys the intricacy of worldwide migration patterns, the diversity of immigrant experiences, and the commonalities among many of those diverse experiences. Ranging widely across the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, across every continent of the earth, and across multiple literary genres, the anthology gives readers an understanding of our rapidly changing world, through the eyes of those at the center of that change. With thirty carefully selected poems, short stories, and excerpts spanning three hundred years and twenty-five countries, the collection brings together luminaries, emerging writers, and others who have earned a wide following in their home countries but have been less recognized in the Anglophone world. Editor of the volume Dohra Ahmad provides a contextual introduction, notes, and suggestions for further exploration.

View Details >>

My Side of the River

Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez

A New York Times Editor's Pick
A People Magazine Best Book to Read in February
A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of 2024

My Side of the River is both fierce and poetic. It brilliantly reframes border writing while embracing nature and familial history. There are moments one sees greatness appear. This is one of those moments.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, New York Times bestselling author of Good Night, Irene 

Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this captivating and tender memoir.

Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips. She was preparing to enter her freshman year of high school as the number one student when suddenly, her own country took away the most important right a child has: the right to have a family.

When her parents’ visas expired and they were forced to return to Mexico, Elizabeth was left responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education. Determined to break the cycle of being a “statistic,” she knew that even though her parents couldn’t stay, there was no way she could let go of the opportunities the U.S. could provide. Armed with only her passport and sheer teenage determination, Elizabeth became what her school would eventually describe as an unaccompanied homeless youth, one of thousands of underage victims affected by family separation due to broken immigration laws. 

For fans of Educated by Tara Westover and The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande, My Side of the River explores separation, generational trauma, and the toll of the American dream. It’s also, at its core, a love story between a brother and a sister who, no matter the cost, is determined to make the pursuit of her brother’s dreams easier than it was for her.

View Details >>

Feeding Ghosts

Tessa Hulls

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOKS CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2025 ANISFIELD WOLF PRIZE
WINNER OF THE LIBBY AWARD FOR BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL

KIRKUS NONFICTION PRIZE FINALIST, LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL, SHORTLISTED FOR THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Time, Forbes, NPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library

"Feeding Ghosts reminds us how much the personal is political . . . an audacious, awe-inspiring feat. For me, it was an essential read." —Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.

In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, andthe love that holds them together.

View Details >>

Small Acts of Courage

Ali Velshi

A captivating family history that illustrates how small actions can have an outsized political impact.

Small acts of courage matter. Sometimes, they change the world. Our history books are filled with the stories of those who fought for democracy and freedom—for idealism itself—against all odds, from Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. These iconic struggles for social change illustrate the importance of engagement and activism, and offer a template for the battles we are fighting today. But using the right words is often easier than taking action; action can be hard, and costly.

More than a century ago, MSNBC host Ali Velshi’s great-grandfather sent his seven-year-old son to live at Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi’s ashram in South Africa. This difficult decision would change the trajectory of his family history forever. From childhood, Velshi’s grandfather was imbued with an ethos of public service and social justice, and a belief in absolute equality among all people—ideals that his children carried forward as they escaped apartheid, emigrating to Kenya and ultimately Canada and the United States.

In Small Acts of Courage, Velshi taps into 125 years of family history to advocate for social justice as a living, breathing experience—a way of life more than an ideology. With rich detail and vivid prose, he relates the stories of regular people who made a lasting commitment to fight for change, even when success seemed impossible. This heartfelt exploration of how we can breathe new life into the principles of pluralistic democracy is an urgent call to action—for progress to be possible, we must all do whatever we can to make a difference.

View Details >>

A Man of Two Faces

Viet Thanh Nguyen

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD


 

The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide


 

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.


 

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San Joséeacute;. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the Sàagrave;iGòograve;n Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.


 

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

View Details >>

The Kitchen without Borders

The Eat Offbeat Chefs

Refugees by status, chefs by calling.

The Kitchen Without Borders is a special kind of cookbook. In it, chefs from around the world – all part of Eat Offbeat, a catering company staffed by immigrants and refugees who have found a new home and new hope through cooking- offer up to 70 authentic, surprising, nourishing recipes. The food has roots that run as deep as its flavors, celebrating the culinary traditions of Syria, Iran, Eritrea, Venezuela, and more. Discover Iraqi Biryani, a rice dish combining vegetables and plump dried fruits with warming spices. Chari Bari, hand formed meatballs simmered in Nepali- spiced tomato and cashew sauce. Iranian rice with garbanzos, Sri Lankan curry dhal, and Manchurian cauliflower straight from the Himalayas. More than a collection of delicious foods from around the world, this inspiring cookbook- with its intimate chef profiles and photographic portraits-offers a glimpse into the journey of displaced people and highlights the profound link between food and home.

*From March 1, 2021, to March 1, 2022, (including any preordered copies that ship during this period), Workman Publishing will donate 2% of the cover price for every copy of The Kitchen without Borders cookbook sold in the United States and its territories, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and European Union member states, to the IRC, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing humanitarian aid, relief and resettlement to refugees and other victims of oppression, conflict, or disaster with a minimum contribution of $25,000 USD. For more information, visit rescue.org/cookbook and https://www.workman.com/kwob. No portion of the purchase price is tax-deductible. For additional information about the IRC, see rescue.org.


 

View Details >>

Plant Grow Harvest Repeat

Meg McAndrews Cowden

“Wonderfully written, beautifully illustrated, and everything you need to know to get more productivity out of your food garden.” —Joe Lamp’l, creator and executive producer, Growing a Greener World

Discover how to get more out of your growing space with succession planting—carefully planned, continuous seed sowing—and provide a steady stream of fresh food from early spring through late fall.
 
Drawing inspiration from succession in natural landscapes, Meg McAndrews Cowden teaches you how to implement lessons from these dynamic systems in your home garden. You’ll learn how to layer succession across your perennial and annual crops; maximize the early growing season; determine the sequence to plant and replant in summer; and incorporate annual and perennial flowers to benefit wildlife and ensure efficient pollination. You’ll also find detailed, seasonal sowing charts to inform your garden planning, so you can grow more anywhere, regardless of your climate.
 
Plant Grow Harvest Repeat will inspire you to create an even more productive, beautiful, and enjoyable garden across the seasons—every vegetable gardener’s dream.

View Details >>

Tiny Space Gardening

Amy Pennington

“[A]n an incredibly handy manual full of information on how to grow plants in small spaces.” —GOOP

The beginner’s complete guide to urban, small space and container gardening from “our windowsill guru.” —Bon Appétit

This vibrant updated 2nd edition includes 30 earthy recipes for the vegetables from your edible garden and 50 gorgeous inspirational color photographs and illustrations.

No matter how small your space, you can grow an edible garden and enjoy home cooked meals from your harvest! With this stunning comprehensive guide, you’ll learn the basics of gardening in pots and containers, find small windowsill and countertop projects, and receive specific recommendations for plants that grow well in containers. Also included are 30 simple recipes you can make with your harvest, from Zucchini Fritters to Herby Pasta with Lettuce and Prosciutto, to Rosy Strawberry Buttermilk cake.

You’ll learn all about:
   • the best containers and pots 
   • DIY planter boxes
   • tools and supplies 
   • soil for containers
   • feeding and watering 
   • simple pruning 
   • cooking with your harvest
   • and much more

“With this guide, your garden can be as productive as you’d like, no matter the size." —Modern Farmer

View Details >>

Soil

Camille T Dungy

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

View Details >>

The Urban Garden

Kathy Jentz

In The Urban Garden you’ll find dozens of inspiring and creative ways to grow flowers, shrubs, vegetables, herbs, and other plants in small spaces and with a limited budget.
 
Whether you want to grow on a balcony, rooftop, front stoop, or a tiny urban patio, turn your growing dreams into reality and build a gorgeous and unique garden that showcases your personal style while still being functional and productive. With the ingenious ideas and resourceful tactics found here, you’ll be maximizing yields and beauty from every square inch of your space, while also making a lush outdoor living area you’ll crave spending time in.
 
Take inspiration from urban gardeners around the world and learn to:
 

  • Install planting pockets on fences and walls
  • Grow a rooftop garden in lightweight grow bags
  • Tips for designing small spaces that feel BIG
  • Build a salad table for growing lettuce and greens
  • Utilize garden structures and plants for decorative screening
  • Support pollinators by creating a small-scale habitat
  • Design a pet-friendly urban yard
  • Employ climbing plants and vines to add privacy and reduce noise
  • Plant in layers to maximize yields and add beauty


Whether you’re growing edible plants or beautiful flowers, the 101 amazing growing ideas found in The Urban Garden will turn your tiny urban yard into a treasure trove of green you’ll be proud to share with family and friends.

View Details >>

The Permaculture Garden

Huw Richards

Harvest year-round from your bountiful and sustainable fruit and vegetable garden.

Huw Richards' ultimate guide to permaculture gardening, outlining the regenerative methods that make gardening easier to do while being more productive. Huw shows you how to expand your growing beyond annual staples like tomatoes and cabbage to perennial fruits and vegetables, berry bushes, and fruit trees.

By mixing your planting, gardening with the seasons, and optimizing your garden design, you will create a more beautiful and more sustainable garden that is better for the soil, local wildlife, and your crops - without costing more of your time.

The book includes:
 

  • What to grow: a substantial and comprehensive reference of all the edible plants and flowers you can grow - when to sow, grow, and harvest.
  • Includes perennials that produce every year, maximizing yield for effort as well as introducing new plants to your garden.
  • A permaculture approach: streamline the way your garden operates with ideas on building resilience (for example, how to store water), using vertical space, generating healthy soil, and mixed "polyculture" planting.
  • Aesthetics and environment: how to make your kitchen garden look good year-round by planting ornamental edibles and flowering crops that attract pollinators.
  • Maximizing space: a chapter on spaces helps you grow in shade or a south-facing corner and use pots and climbing varieties up walls and fences to bolster beds and under-cover growing areas.
  • A roadmap for the year ahead guides you through the key moments throughout the four seasons.
View Details >>

Leaves, Roots & Fruit

Nicole Johnsey Burke

An Intuitive Gardening System Built for Success

Do you dream of walking through your own kitchen garden with baskets full of delicious food you grew yourself? But are you waiting to begin because you think you don’t have enough space, sun, time, or experience?

Then consider this: Plants want to grow. And when you match a plant’s needs to your own resources, you’re just one step away from success in the kitchen garden.

Nicole Johnsey Burke—founder of Gardenary, Inc., and author of Kitchen Garden Revival—is your expert guide for growing your own fresh, organic food every day of the year, no matter where you grow. More than just providing the how-to, she gives you the know-how for a practical and intuitive gardening system that includes:

- Leaves – quick satisfaction from abundant harvests, most available and simplest to grow; includes salad greens and herbs

- Roots – underground harvests that require more tending and are built for endurance, longevity, and longer shelf life; includes tubers, bulbs, and rhizomes

- Fruit – the most demanding and sweetest of all, requiring the most space, sunlight, and consistent watering to blossom; includes beans, squash, and tomatoes

Burke provides clear step-by-step instructions for setup, care, and harvest for each category of plants, complete with insightful tips for every level of gardener to grow with their plants.

There’s always a plant you can grow right where you are, right away—all you have to do is follow the steps.

View Details >>

The Elegant and Edible Garden

Linda Vater

Discover how to partner ornamental plants with edible ones for a garden that offers both storybook appeal and a plethora of culinary delights.

*Winner of the GardenComm 2023 Laurel Media Awards Silver Award in the Book Publisher/Producer General Readership Category*

Stylish and celebratory, The Elegant and Edible Garden takes food growing to a higher plane. Host of The Potager Blog (@potagerblog), author and garden stylist Linda Vater, shares her vision for creating a garden space where food and flowers grow side by side. Known as a potager, these gardens are formal in their framework yet flexible and personal in their edible yields. A potager garden is both lovely to look at and productive. Doubling as an outdoor living area, it is also the perfect place to entertain family and friends.

Inside you’ll learn:

 

  • How to grow flowers, fruits, veggies, and herbs together en masse
  • The function of symmetry in a potager garden
  • Ways to create visual harmony and match the style of the garden to its surroundings
  • Tips for blending your family’s needs and lifestyle into the garden
  • Advice on how to utilize focal points and garden ornaments in your garden’s layout
  • The importance of rhythm, repetition, and harmony in potager design
  • How to position garden structures with practicality and purpose in mind
  • Where to put your potager for not just convenience but also to create a destination
  • Best practices for growing your beautiful new garden organically


Create a garden that rejoices in seasonality while still allowing your style and personality to shine. The Elegant and Edible Garden is a vision of the very best things a garden can offer: food, beauty, connection, and a place to breathe.

View Details >>

The Creative Vegetable Gardener

Kelly Smith Trimble

For decades, gardeners have approached vegetable gardening the same way: planting in square or rectangular beds or in straight rows, keeping vegetables separate from flowers, and definitely not mixing perennial plants with annual ones. According to these old rules, every insect must be killed, the garden must be tidy, and nothing should ever be allowed to go to seed. It’s time to break the rules! Today’s gardeners are re-envisioning the vegetable garden as a creative, playful space where the beds may be circles or spirals, beneficial insects are invited to the party, flowers for cutting grow right next to annual vegetables (which might be chosen for their curb appeal as much as their flavor), and a bit of “untidiness” simply creates a garden that more closely mimics the natural world. With The Creative Vegetable Gardener, lifestyle editor and master gardener Kelly Smith Trimble encourages readers to widen their focus, be playful, and imagine a vegetable garden that reflects their own unique aesthetic and offers a meditative sanctuary as well as a source of fresh, homegrown food. From seed selection to garden layout and regenerative gardening practices, gardeners of all levels will find Timble's liberating advice a pathway to making the garden a place of nourishment for the soul and creative spirit, while also feeding the body.
 

View Details >>

The Vegetable Gardening Book

Joe Lamp'l

The award-winning television and podcast host Joe Lamp’l is here with insider tips and next-level insight for creating a lush, fruitful, and resilient vegetable garden.

*Winner of the GardenComm 2023 Laurel Media Awards Silver Award in the Book Publisher/Producer General Readership Category*

Just when you think you have a secure grip on what it takes to grow a vegetable garden, a pro like Joe comes along to surprise you with a wheelbarrow full of new-to-you information to knock your gardening socks right off. In The Vegetable Gardening Book, Joe distills insight from years interviewing highly experienced growers for public television’s Growing a Greener World and The joe gardener® Show Podcastalong with his own extensive, hands-on knowledge of the craft to present practical and useful info on everything from starting seeds and selecting varieties to building the perfect tomato cage, encouraging pollinators, and creating biodiversity-rich soil in a 100% organic food garden. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in growing the best edible garden their backyard (or balcony!) has ever seen.

Inside you’ll find:
 

  • Ideas for designing and laying out your garden for the greatest yields in the smallest amount of space
  • A sure-fire plan for reducing maintenance and trimming down the traditional workload of a garden
  • Detailed growing profiles of 40 of Joe’s favorite crops
  • A handy reference chart with an easy-to-follow crop rotation plan
  • Advice and tips for extending the growing season, building raised beds, setting up a potting station, and deciding which garden tools are worth your time and money
  • Strategies to grow anywhere and everywhere—from in-ground garden beds and containers to grow bags and raised-bed planters


Among the most trusted, recognizable, and sought-after voices in the gardening world, Joe Lamp’l is here to help you “Grow like a pro – no experience required!™”

View Details >>

The Garden Maker's Book of Wonder

Allison Vallin Kostovick

The joy and wonder of a garden-inspired lifestyle is captured in this colorfully photographed, through-the-seasons sourcebook filled with recipes, gardening wisdom, craft and wellness projects, and nature-based activities.



Each season in the garden brings new joy and fresh inspiration for connecting with the wonders of the natural world. In The Garden Maker's Book of Wonder, popular gardening lifestyle influencer Allison Vallin Kostovick (Finch + Folly) invites fans of cottagecore, gardening, and nature-based living to share her journey as she crafts, cooks, dreams, and creates. Drawing on decades of gardening experience, and illustrated with vibrant photography from her own home and garden, The Garden Maker's Book of Wonder offers sage advice on growing bountiful harvests of favorite vegetables, herbs, and flowers. All levels of gardeners, from dreamers to the experienced, will delight in the variety and creativity of Kostovick's projects, activities, and recipes for enjoying the magic and whimsy of the natural world--no matter what season. From planting a pollinator playground to building a rustic trellis from tree branches, cooking with freshly picked peas and mint to making a sweet viola tub soak, and growing a bird seed mix to crafting one-of-a-kind jewelry beads from the husks of the Job's Tears plant, the inventive ideas in this rich treasury are sure to make it a favorite to keep and to give to anyone who aspires to a more nature-connected lifestyle.

 

 

View Details >>

The Food Forward Garden

Christian Douglas

"Growing food doesn't have to mean sacrificing style. In his debut book, award-winning landscape designer Christian Douglas showcases the myriad ways to use edibles to elevate the design of your outdoor spaces. Visit chef Tyler Florence's property, whose hillside is transformed into a three-tiered terraced bed filled with an abundance of produce year-round. A family's suburban plot that is a forager's paradise, with hidden edible treasures woven into each space and along every path. Plus gardens in small city backyards, edible plots carved into forests and meadows, even a rooftop vegetable garden. But this is not merely a lookbook. By using his own lush garden in Marin County as a studio/classroom, Douglas introduces readers to the essential tools and techniques they need to successfully plant, grow, and harvest a bounty of vegetables, fruits, berries, and herbs. We learn how to evaluate the best lighting and soil conditions, choose plants that will thrive in our climate, and discover the designer's favorite edible swaps for common landscape plants (a persimmon instead of a dogwood, a fig instead of a maple, a hedge of rosemary instead of yew). The food-forward options are limitless"--

View Details >>

A Life in the Garden

Barbara Damrosch

"Drawing on a lifetime of organic gardening, Barbara Damrosch collects her lessons learned and wisdom gained into an easy-to-read-and-enjoy overview of kitchen gardening. For the new gardener, there is encouragement on top of nuts-and-bolts advice. For every gardener, there is inspiration to face the challenges inherent in a life deeply rooted in and fed from the garden." --American Gardener



In A Life in the Garden, horticultural icon Barbara Damrosch imparts a lifetime of wisdom on growing food for herself and her family. In writing that's accessible, engaging, and elegant, she welcomes us to garden alongside her. Personal, thoughtful, and often humorous, this book offers practical DIY insights that will delight gardeners, cooks, and small-scale farmers. With a personal and sometimes irreverent tone, Barbara expresses the pleasure she takes in gardening, the sense of empowerment she finds in it, and the importance of a partnership with the real expert: nature.

View Details >>

The 5-Minute Gardener

Nicole Johnsey Burke

Nurture a year-round gardening habit with just 5 minutes a day, from the author of Kitchen Garden Revival and Leaves, Roots & Fruit.

Do you find joy in seeing a plant grow from seed to flower? Has your main setback for maintaining a successful garden been finding enough time to tend it?

Whether you have a windowsill garden or a backyard full of flora, finding time to garden can seem impossible. But with just 5 minutes a day, you can be sure your plants have all they need to go from seed to delicious harvest. Nicole Johnsey Burke, author of Kitchen Garden Revival and Leaves, Roots & Fruit and founder of Gardenary, Inc., guides you through the different planting seasons and shares:

 

  • Quick, actionable tasks: minimal methods to keep your garden thriving
  • Seasonal gardening plans: detailed schedules broken down into days, weeks, and months
  • Habit-building techniques: proven ways to integrate gardening into your daily routine
  • Garden-to-table benefits: easy, delicious dishes you can quickly pull together with your fresh-picked produce


Nicole equips you with the knowledge you need to transform 5 minutes a day into a year-round gardening habit. Experience the joy and mindfulness that comes from being more connected to nature and the food you eat.

View Details >>

Gardening for Abundance

Brian Brigantti

Grow a Flourishing Vegetable Garden While Feeding Your Spirit

From planting your first seedlings to harvesting your crops and everything in between, gardener and homesteader Brian Brigantti helps you create a thriving vegetable garden right in your own backyard—all while giving you valuable insights into nourishing your soul through abundant living. Woven in with his own insights and experiences, Brian walks you through the process of starting an abundant garden from start to finish. A primer on soil health, composting, establishing biodiversity and more set you and your garden up for success. Then, learn methods for building out plots, choosing the best veggies for your climate and soil and tending to your garden throughout the seasons. Along the way, Brian shares his observations on the symbolism of gardening and the ways it can teach you about the joys of living a happier, more abundant life. Using only natural, chemical-free techniques that honor, respect and sustain the earth, Brian’s methods for cultivating a bountiful garden result in a cornucopia of homegrown vegetables and a deeper sense of connection with the earth your food and yourself.

View Details >>

The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control

Fern Marshall Bradley

An invaluable, easy-to-follow guide for growing and maintaining an organic garden with information on 200 popular plants, including flowers, vegetables, trees, shrubs, and fruits, as well as preventative measures and treatments for common ailments.

One of the rewards of organic gardening is developing a balanced ecosystem, in which plants naturally defend themselves against pests and diseases and where you’ll seldom have to intervene. But if trouble does make its way into your garden, this comprehensive handbook will help you stop insect pests in their tracks and curb plant diseases at the first sign of outbreak.

Featuring science-based recommendations for keeping plants healthy and productive, The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control includes hundreds of organic techniques and products for dealing with garden problems. You’ll learn how to decide whether you need to treat an infestation or outbreak, how to make choices among the numerous safe, natural options available, and how to use these home remedies and nontoxic control products and methods. 

Discover information on:
Your Healthy Garden: Learn how to create a garden and landscape environment that helps plants stay healthy naturally.
Symptoms and Solutions: Use these troubleshooting tips for more than 200 types of plants, including annuals, bulbs, fruit trees and bushes, herbs, perennials, shrubs, trees, and vegetables.
Identifying Pests and Diseases: With hundreds of photos, you can figure out which garden pest, disease, or beneficial insect is in your garden.
Organic Pest and Disease Management: Discover the best and lowest-impact controls to keep pests and diseases from ruining your harvest and your plants.

By creating a healthy garden environment and keeping a watchful eye, you can rely on completely natural methods to manage a wide range of common insect and disease problems in your garden, yard, and landscape.

View Details >>

A Gardener at the End of the World

Margot Anne Kelley

A gardener's pandemic journal that combines memoir with an exploration of the natural world both inside and outside the garden.

In March 2020, Margot Anne Kelley was watching seeds germinate in her greenhouse. At high risk from illness, the planning, planting, and tending to seedlings took on extra significance. She set out to make her pandemic garden thrive but also to better understand the very nature of seeds and viruses.

As seeds became seedlings, became plants, became food, Kelley looks back over the last few millennia as successions of pandemics altered human beings and global culture. Seeds and viruses serve as springboards for wide-ranging reflections, such as their shared need for someone to transport them, the centrality of movement to being alive, and the domestication of plants as an act of becoming co-dependent.

Pandemic viruses only occurred through humankind's settling down, taking up agriculture, and giving up a nomadic life. And yet it's the garden that now provides a refuge and a source of life, inspiration, and hope. A Gardener at the End of the World explores questions of what we can preserve--of history, genetic biodiversity, culture, language--and what we cannot. It is for any reader curious about the overlap of nature, science, and history.

View Details >>

The Posy Book

Teresa H Sabankaya

“Like a favorite recipe, a posy is meant to be savored and shared. Try it yourself, and … welcome a bit of floral enchantment into your life.” —Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist 

Inspired by the Victorian-era language of flowers, a posy is a small, round bouquet of flowers, herbs, and plants meant to convey a message, such as dahlias for gratitude, sunflowers for adoration, or thyme for bravery. These floral poems have become Teresa Sabankaya’s signature. Brides want them for their weddings, but a posy is a lovely gift any time of year, and one that readers can easily put together from their garden or with blooms from their local florist.

In The Posy Book, Sabankaya shares step-by-step instructions, floral recipes for more than 20 posies, and ideas for seasonal variations. A modern floral dictionary, with 12 original paintings by celebrated illustrator Maryjo Koch, will help readers craft their own posies filled with personal meaning.

View Details >>

If They Come for Us

Fatimah Asghar

“A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.”—Booklist
“Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones.”—Elle
“[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker

NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD

an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one.
just in case, I hear her say, just in case.

From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

Praise for If They Come for Us

“In forms both traditional . . . and unorthodox . . . Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible. Most vivid and revelatory are pieces such as ‘Boy,’ whose perspicacious turns and irreverent idiom conjure the rich, jagged textures of a childhood shadowed by loss.”The New Yorker

“[Asghar’s] debut poetry collection cemented her status as one of the city’s greatest present-day poets. . . . A stunning work of art that tackles place, race, sexuality and violence. These poems—both personal and historical, both celebratory and aggrieved—are unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud.”Chicago Review of Books

 “Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.”Library Journal (starred review)

View Details >>

Trick Mirror

Jia Tolentino

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "From The New Yorker's beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television."--Esquire

"A whip-smart, challenging book."--Zadie Smith - "Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time."--Vulture

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - Time - The Washington Post - Esquire - Elle - Glamour - Good Housekeeping - The Dallas Morning News - BookPage

Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine's journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino's sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

Praise for Trick Mirror

"Jia Tolentino is the best young essayist at work in the United States, one I've consistently admired and learned from, and I was exhilarated to get a whole lot of her at once in Trick Mirror. In these nine essays, she rethinks troubling ingredients of modern life, from the internet to mind-altering drugs to wedding culture. All through the book, single sentences flash like lightning to show something familiar in a startling way, but she also builds extended arguments with her usual, unusual blend of lyricism and skepticism. In the end, we have a picture of America that was as missing as it was needed."--Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
 

View Details >>

Every Day Is a Gift

Tammy Duckworth

In this New York Times bestselling book, learn the incredible story of Illinois senator and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth and see what inspired her to follow the path that made her who she is today.​



In Every Day Is a Gift, Tammy Duckworth takes readers through the amazing--and amazingly true--stories from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew through the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth's U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her right arm, was a turning point in her life. But as Duckworth shows in Every Day Is a Gift, that moment was just one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns.



The biracial daughter of an American father and a Thai-Chinese mother, Duckworth faced discrimination, poverty, and the horrors of war--all before the age of 16. As a child, she dodged bullets as her family fled war-torn Phnom Penh. As a teenager, she sold roses by the side of the road to save her family from hunger and homelessness in Hawaii. Through these experiences, she developed a fierce resilience that would prove invaluable in the years to come.



Duckworth joined the Army, becoming one of a handful of female helicopter pilots at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She served eight months in Iraq before an insurgent's RPG shot down her helicopter, an attack that took her legs--and nearly took her life. She then spent thirteen months recovering at Walter Reed, learning to walk again on prosthetic legs and planning her return to the cockpit. But Duckworth found a new mission after meeting her state's senators, Barack Obama and Dick Durbin. After winning two terms as a U.S. Representative, she won election to the U.S. Senate in 2016. And she and her husband Bryan fulfilled another dream when she gave birth to two daughters, becoming the first sitting senator to give birth.



From childhood to motherhood and beyond, Every Day Is a Gift is the remarkable story of one of America's most dedicated public servants.

View Details >>

Aloha Rodeo

David Wolman

 

The lost story of the native Hawaiian cowboys who became rodeo champions, challenging the mythology of the American West

"An inspiring and impeccably crafted story of against-all-odds triumph. I loved this book, truly.” —SIMON WINCHESTER

“Wolman and Smith’s masterful Aloha Rodeo is like uncovering a beautiful fresco you never knew was there, each turned page revealing another vivid and colorful piece of a true American West story that had lain long buried until now.” —SALLY JENKINS

 

In August 1908, three unknown riders arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, their hats adorned with wildflowers, to compete in the world’s greatest rodeo. Steer-roping virtuoso Ikua Purdy and his cousins Jack Low and Archie Ka’au’a had travelled 4,200 miles from Hawaii, of all places, to test themselves against the toughest riders in the West. Dismissed by whites, who considered themselves the only true cowboys, the native Hawaiians would astonish the country, returning home champions—and American legends.

An unforgettable human drama set against the rough-knuckled frontier, David Wolman and Julian Smith’s Aloha Rodeo unspools the fascinating and little-known true story of the Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolo, whose 1908 adventure upended the conventional history of the American West.

What few understood when the three paniolo rode into Cheyenne is that the Hawaiians were no underdogs. They were the product of a deeply engrained cattle culture that was twice as old as that of the Great Plains, for Hawaiians had been chasing cattle over the islands’ rugged volcanic slopes and through thick tropical forests since the late 1700s.

Tracing the life story of Purdy and his cousins, Wolman and Smith delve into the dual histories of ranching and cowboys in the islands, and the meteoric rise and sudden fall of Cheyenne, “Holy City of the Cow.” At the turn of the twentieth century, larger-than-life personalities like “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt capitalized on a national obsession with the Wild West and helped transform Cheyenne’s annual Frontier Days celebration into an unparalleled rodeo spectacle, the “Daddy of ‘em All.”

The hopes of all Hawaii rode on the three riders’ shoulders during those dusty days in August 1908. The U.S. had forcibly annexed the islands just a decade earlier. The young Hawaiians brought the pride of a people struggling to preserve their cultural identity and anxious about their future under the rule of overlords an ocean away. In Cheyenne, they didn’t just astound the locals; they also overturned simplistic thinking about cattle country, the binary narrative of “cowboys versus Indians,” and the very concept of the Wild West. Blending sport and history, while exploring questions of identity, imperialism, and race, Aloha Rodeo spotlights an overlooked and riveting chapter in the saga of the American West.

 

View Details >>

Dac Biet

Nini Nguyen

A NPR BEST COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR • A STRATEGIST BEST COOKBOOK TO GIFT THIS YEAR • A SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE BEST BOOK ABOUT FOOD OF THE YEAR A collection of contemporary, extra-special Vietnamese recipes, from beloved classics like Hanoi-Style Vermicelli with Grilled Pork and three variations of phở, to dishes with a New Orleans twist, like Southeast Asian Jambalaya and Sticky Fried Shrimp Bánh Mì—from Top Chef contestant and acclaimed chef Nini Nguyen

In Vietnamese culture, to be dac biet is to be special and luxurious, or, as chef and cooking instructor Nini Nguyen puts it, it means adding something a little extra, like salty caviar on top of squid-stuffed pork, a surprise note of ginger and lime in a dipping sauce, or sautéing shaking beef in farm-fresh butter for a creamy, delectable experience. Born and raised in New Orleans by Vietnamese immigrants, here Nini gives us recipes that fuse the best of Vietnamese and New Orleans cooking and clear directions on how to prepare and arrange them, making for a flavorful, unforgettable experience that proves that being a little extra is easy and just right.

Dac Biet includes one hundred delicious and vibrant recipes that celebrate the essential flavors of Vietnam—salty, sour, bitter, spicy, and sweet—and the bright and perfectly balanced dishes they create. Here are recipes for:

*Charbroiled Oysters in Chili Butter * Viet-Cajun Seafood Boil * Phở with Everything * Crispy Fish Sauce–Caramel Chicken Wings * Broken Rice with Pork Chops and Eggs * Crispy Noodles Covered in a Saucy Stir-Fry * BBQ Pork Ribs Glazed with Roasted Nước Mắm Sauce *Coconut Crispy Rice Crepes * and many more

View Details >>

Where Rivers Part

Kao Kalia Yang

"In the 1960s when Kalia's mother, Chue, was born, the US was actively recruiting Hmong Laotians to assist with CIA efforts in Laos's Secret War. By the time Chue was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were perceived as traitorous for their involvement. Notably, from 1964-1973, Laos became victim to the heaviest bombardment by the United States against communist Pathet Lao, becoming the most heavily bombed country in history. Fearing vengeful soldiers looking to take their lives, Chue and her family quickly fled their village for the jungle, leaving all that they knew behind. Perpetually on the run, the family was often on the brink of starvation, and death loomed. During this tumultuous period, Chue met her husband, Bee, and unwittingly left her mother behind forever when she escaped to a refugee camp with his family, a mistake she would regret for the rest of her life. There, Chue, Bee, and their daughters lived in a state of constant fear and hunger until they finally made it to America. The determined couple enrolled in high school classes despite being in their late twenties and worked grueling factory jobs to provide for their family, yet most who meet Chue know nothing of her extraordinary resilience and traumatic past. In Where Rivers Part, told from her mother's point of view, Kao Kalia Yang unveils her mother's epic struggle towards safety and the important undocumented history of a time and place most US readers know nothing about, offering insight into America's Secret War in Laos with tenderness and unvarnished clarity. In doing so, she excavates the plight of many refugees, who suffer silently and are often overlooked as one of the essential foundations of this country. For readers of The Wild Swans by Jung Chang, The Spirit Catches You When You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, and those who flock to stories about survival during wartime, Where Rivers Part is not only a personal account of resilience and survival but also a powerful and transporting look into Laos's Secret War and the lived experiences of the Hmong people"--

View Details >>

I Was Their American Dream

Malaka Gharib

“A portrait of growing up in America, and a portrait of family, that pulls off the feat of being both intimately specific and deeply universal at the same time. I adored this book.”—Jonny Sun
 
“[A] high-spirited graphical memoir . . . Gharib’s wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws.”—NPR

WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews

I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.

Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream.

Praise for I Was Their American Dream

“In this time when immigration is such a hot topic, Malaka Gharib puts an engaging human face on the issue. . . . The push and pull first-generation kids feel is portrayed with humor and love, especially humor. . . . Gharib pokes fun at all of the cultures she lives in, able to see each of them with an outsider’s wry eye, while appreciating them with an insider’s close experience. . . . The question of ‘What are you?’ has never been answered with so much charm.”—Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books

“Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream.”Booklist

“Thoughtful and relatable, this touching account should be shared across generations.”– Library Journal

“This charming graphic memoir riffs on the joys and challenges of developing a unique ethnic identity.”– Publishers Weekly

View Details >>

Hula

Jasmin Iolani Hakes



 

Named a Best Book of the Summer by Harper's Bazaar and ELLE * Audiofile Magazine Earphones Award Winner * HONOLULU Magazine's Book of the Year About Hawai`i

"Stunning . . . An intricately built novel that spans decades, moving in and out of a collective voice, while also telling Hi'i's deeply personal and devastating story of trying to find her way." --Los Angeles Times

Set in Hilo, Hawai'i, a sweeping saga of tradition, culture, family, history, and connection that unfolds through the lives of three generations of women--a tale of mothers and daughters, dance and destiny.

"There's no running away on an island. Soon enough, you end up where you started."

Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there's a lot she doesn't understand. She's never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.

In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to live up to her name and solidify her place within her family legacy. But in order to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition, she will have to turn her back on everything she had ever been taught, and maybe even lose the very thing she was fighting for.

Told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival, Hula is a spellbinding debut that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten kingdom that still exists in the heart of its people.

"A full-throated chant for Hawai'i . . . It's impossible to come away unchanged." --Kawai Strong Washburn, author of the PEN/Hemingway award-winning Sharks in the Times of Saviors

View Details >>

Searching for Sylvie Lee

Jean Kwok

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2019 BY Marie Claire • Nylon •  Huffington Post • CrimeReads • Bookbub • Book Riot • Debutante Ball

“Like all most compelling mysteries, Jean Kwok’s Searching for Sylvie Lee has a powerful emotional drama at its heart. A twisting tale of love, loss and dark family secrets.”  — Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water

A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women—two sisters and their mother—in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation

It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes.

Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn’t rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love.

But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it’s Amy’s turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister’s movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy’s complicated family—and herself—than she ever could have imagined.

A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love.

View Details >>

Homeseeking

Karissa Chen

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

Homeseeking is about the love of home and family, even against unimaginable circumstances…[A] sweeping epic.” —Good Housekeeping

“Fans of historical fiction will want to pick up this exceptional novel immediately.” —Los Angeles Times

From WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.

View Details >>

The Emperor and the Endless Palace

Justinian Huang

Stonewall Book Award Winner, 2025



"A sweeping triumph in queer romance." -Booklist



"What if I told you that the feeling we call love is actually the feeling of metaphysical recognition, when your soul remembers someone from a previous life?"



In the year 4 BCE, an ambitious courtier is called upon to seduce the young emperor--but quickly discovers they are both ruled by blood, sex and intrigue.



In 1740, a lonely innkeeper agrees to help a mysterious visitor procure a rare medicine, only to unleash an otherworldly terror instead.



And in present-day Los Angeles, a college student meets a beautiful stranger and cannot shake the feeling they've met before.



Across these seemingly unrelated timelines woven together only by the twists and turns of fate, two men are reborn, lifetime after lifetime. Within the treacherous walls of an ancient palace and the boundless forests of the Asian wilderness to the heart-pounding cement floors of underground rave scenes, our lovers are inexplicably drawn to each other, constantly tested by the worlds around them.



As their many lives intertwine, they begin to realize the power of their undying love--a power that transcends time itself...but one that might consume them both.



An unpredictable roller coaster of a debut novel, The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a genre-bending spicy romantasy that challenges everything we think we know about true love.



AUTHOR'S NOTE: The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a heart-pounding romantasy, full of shocking twists, morally shifty characters, and erotic thrills. When it comes to the romance within this novel, you can expect equal parts mess and swoon, but its central thread is an epic tale of true love against all the odds.



 

View Details >>

Adam & Evie's Matchmaking Tour

Nora Nguyen

A rollicking, unforgettable romance about two strangers finding love despite their best efforts as they embark on a sweeping matchmaking tour through Việt Nam, perfect for readers of Carley Fortune and Abby Jimenez.

What's a few weeks to a lifetime of promise?

Evie Lang's life is in shambles. On the heels of losing her beloved aunt, she's unceremoniously fired from her poetry professorship by her secret boyfriend. Lacking income and inspiration, she's stuck in Ohio with no idea how to move forward--until hope arrives in a surprising letter.

Auntie Hảo left Evie the deed to her San Francisco row house, a place full of Evie's happiest memories. The catch? To inherit, she must go on a pre-arranged matchmaking tour in Việt Nam. The last thing Evie wants is to spend time with a group of strangers looking for love. But she can't resist the chance to finally visit her family's native home.

A world away, Adam Quyền has a chip on his shoulder. He's working around the clock as CMO for his sister's elite matchmaking business, a job complicated by her insistence that he knows nothing about love. He's desperate to prove himself, so when she challenges him to join the inaugural tour, he reluctantly agrees.

Adam thinks Evie is chaotic and unpredictable. Evie thinks Adam is grumpy and uptight. But from the bustling streets of Hồ Chí Minh City to the soaring waterfalls in Đà Lạt, they keep getting thrown together, their animosity charged with attraction...and they discover that true love may be out there, if they are willing to take a leap.

Two stubborn hearts, one whirlwind adventure, Adam & Evie's Matchmaking Tour is a story of how loving (and living) bravely can lead you to the most unexpected places--and the most imperfectly perfect loves.

View Details >>

"I"

Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey--a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. "I": New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.

This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.

View Details >>

How to Love a Country

Richard Blanco

A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more.

Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.

The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

View Details >>

Heating & Cooling

Beth Ann Fennelly

“A surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.” —New York Times Book Review 
 

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Alternatingly wistful and wry, ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to shape a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments.

View Details >>

Life on Mars

Tracy K. Smith

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize

* Poet Laureate of the United States *
* A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice *
* A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year *

New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself 
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What 
Would your life say if it could talk? 
—from "No Fly Zone"


With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.

View Details >>

The Art of Losing

Kevin Young

Poetry serves a unique role in our lives, distilling human experience and emotion down to truths as potent as they are brief. There are two times most people turn to it: for love and loss. Although collections of love poetry abound, there are very few anthologies for the grieving. In The Art of Losing, editor Kevin Young Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal a gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss. Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W.H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

View Details >>

She Walks in Beauty

Caroline Kennedy

In She Walks in Beauty, Caroline Kennedy has once again marshaled the gifts of our greatest poets to pay a very personal tribute to the human experience, this time to the complex and fascinating subject of womanhood. Inspired by her own reflections on more than fifty years of life as a young girl, a woman, a wife, and a mother, She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry's eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman's life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life's journey.

The collection includes works by Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Sandra Cisneros, Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, Dorothy Parker, Queen Elizabeth I, Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shahib Nye, and W. B. Yeats. Whether it's falling in love, breaking up, friendship, marriage, motherhood, or growing old, She Walks in Beauty is a priceless resource for anyone, male or female, who wants a deeper understanding and appreciation of what it means to be a woman.

View Details >>

You Are Here

Ada Limón

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR "Books We Love" Selection

"Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection."
-Margaret Renkl, New York Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes-both literal and literary-are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape-be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop-offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

 

View Details >>

Poetry from Scratch

Jennifer McCartney

The newest entry in the feline literary canon is here… so pee on this, cat poet wannabes 
 

Hipster cats, stay-at-home-mom cats, windowsill cats, and outdoor cats—you’ll find them all here, immortalized in prose about, for, and sometimes by, cats. With a Brooklyn edge, author Jennifer McCartney ups the cool quotient on this burgeoning genre.

Of Mice and Men

There once was a cat who loved books

He liked bookshelves that had lots of nooks

He thought especially nice

The tomes about mice

One page and the kitty was hooked

 

From limericks to beat poems, haikus to sonnets, riffs on famous verse to original blank verse, there is something here for every cat lover to enjoy. 

View Details >>

The Hungry Ear

Kevin Young

Food and poetry: in so many ways, a natural pairing, from prayers over bread to street vendor songs. Poetry is said to feed the soul, each poem a delicious morsel. When read aloud, the best poems provide a particular joy for the mouth. Poems about food make these satisfactions explicit and complete.

Of course, pages can and have been filled about food's elemental pleasures. And we all know food is more than food: it's identity and culture. Our days are marked by meals; our seasons are marked by celebrations. We plant in spring; harvest in fall. We labor over hot stoves; we treat ourselves to special meals out. Food is nurture; it's comfort; it's reward. While some of the poems here are explicitly about the food itself: the blackberries, the butter, the barbecue--all are evocative of the experience of eating.

Many of the poems are also about the everything else that accompanies food: the memories, the company, even the politics. Kevin Young, distinguished poet, editor of this year's Best American Poetry, uses the lens of food - and his impeccable taste - to bring us some of the best poems, classic and current, period.

Poets include: 
Elizabeth Alexander, Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Seamus Heaney, Tony Hoagland, Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Matthew Rohrer, Charles Simic, Tracy K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand, Kevin Young

View Details >>

Home Body

Rupi Kaur

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey and the sun and her flowers comes her greatly anticipated third collection of poetry.

rupi kaur constantly embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself - reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.

i dive into the well of my body
and end up in another world
everything i need
already exists in me
there's no need
to look anywhere else

- home

View Details >>

Goldenrod

Maggie Smith

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time
“A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

View Details >>

Beautiful Chaos

Jessica Urlichs

Motherhood is messy and beautiful, and hard and humbling. We adore our children, and sometimes we miss ourselves. Beautiful Chaos is a collection of raw, honest poems about motherhood - capturing everything from pregnancy to school age.

Upon becoming a mother, poet Jessica Urlichs was reminded that the everyday ordinary is extraordinary. Beautiful Chaos is a collection that chronicles it all - the highs, the lows, the confusion, the loss of identity, the becoming, and the brutal but beautiful ways our children hold up a mirrors to ourselves. This collection inspires vulnerability and will be a cathartic, healing read for anyone who needs it.

These poems will remind you of a time gone by or ground you in the current moment. Either way, they will make you feel seen and comforted amid the beautiful chaos that is motherhood.
 

View Details >>

Burnout Immunity

Kandi Wiens

A USA Today Bestseller & Financial Times Best Business Book of the Month April 2024

"A marvelously readable and extremely practical guide to handling stress." --Daniel Goleman

An essential guide to protect yourself from burnout by learning to develop and master key emotional intelligence skills

Why do some people in the world's most stressful careers avoid burnout while countless others are overwhelmed by the demands of ordinary jobs? What can we learn from these resilient role models who seem to be naturally resistant to the psychological hazards of work?

After extreme stress caused a life-threatening health cri-sis in her own life, Dr. Kandi Wiens dedicated herself to understand why work was leaving millions of us sick, exhausted, unmoti-vated, and feeling stuck and ineffective. In her research, she discovered something remarkable: Despite dangerous levels of work-related stress, some people seemed to be naturally "immune" to burnout.

So what did these people have that Dr. Wiens and mil-lions of others did not? Regardless of their role, industry, or experience, all these professionals exhibited a high degree of emotional intelligence (EI). EI is the ability to clearly perceive, understand, and productively manage emo-tions, thoughts, and behaviors in service of one's overall well-being and performance. The people with burnout immunity were relying on specific EI skills to successfully cope with stressful work environments and experiences. The result is that they were more productive; had happier careers and lives; and were free from the physical and men-tal ravages of exhaustion, negativity, and inefficacy that characterize burnout.

The good news is that everyone can build and boost emotional intelligence and use EI-based skills to manage workplace stress before it leads to breaking down or burn-ing out. Burnout Immunity shows readers how to:

Build self-awareness to identify what makes you vulnerable to burnoutManage your stress triggers and response, and tap into moments of good stressRegulate your thoughts and emotions to remain effective in the midst of stressDevelop healing connections to keep burnout at bayRecover from moments of burnout, reconnect to things that bring you joy, and reimagine a new way forward

Bolstered with research, exercises, self-assessments, and real-life stories from people with natural burnout immu-nity and those who've cultivated it, Burnout Immunity teaches workers how to positively cope with stress and to enjoy healthier and happier relationships with work.

View Details >>

Five Talents That Really Matter

Barry Conchie

"Anyone can be a leader. A leader's strengths can be their greatest weaknesses. Those statements touted in many business books. But, according to Barry Conchie and his business partner Sarah Dalton, they are complete BS. The Five Talents That Really Matter explains how high-performing leaders are talented in five essential ways. The Five Talents That Really Matter strips away the fluff in leadership and unveils and describes the traits and characteristics that actually determine high-performance leadership. These talents provide a template against which career-driven managers and leaders can assess and develop their own capabilities. The five evidence-based talent dimensions are: Direction: High-performing leaders describe a compelling, intrinsically good destination and help others understand that getting there will be worth the effort. Drive: This dimension hardly needs a description. We all know it when we see it: strong work ethic, tenacity, goal-orientation... being a self-starter. Influence: The ability to motivate, persuade, challenge, and change the minds of others. Relationships: People matter to outstanding leaders. They can build commitment and trust among the people they work with. Execution: Excellent leaders are obsessed with getting work done and how work gets done. Through questioning, assessment, scientific predictions, and testing, Conchie and Dalton have built a database that reveals the talents and behaviors of the most successful leaders. In this book they present for the first the first time a model that demystifies the aura and complexity surrounding high performing leaders"--

View Details >>

Lean Marketing

Allan Dib

Bigger Results with Less Marketing

You keep being told to do more marketing—more complex, more aggressive, and more expensive marketing. Chasing the latest bright, shiny object is exhausting. Increased efforts keep leading to disappointment. The overwhelm for entrepreneurs, marketers, and business leaders is real. There’s a better way.

The lean movement has transformed manufacturing and is now revolutionizing marketing. Small, medium, and large businesses are getting bigger and better results with less marketing.

In this book, you’ll discover:

● Why many existing marketing techniques have stopped working and what to do instead.
● The exact tools and tactics you need to build a devastatingly effective marketing system.
● How to win with a simple, structured, and systemized approach rather than failing with random acts of marketing.
● How to pivot from bloated, ineffective, and wasteful marketing activities to ones that compel prospects to take action.
● How to create a strong product-market fit so that your target market intensely desires what you have to offer.
● How to do marketing you’ll be proud of that works without hype, scams, or pressure.
● How to build a strong brand that creates goodwill and attracts ideal customers.

Lean Marketing is a follow-up to the international bestselling phenomenon, The 1-Page Marketing Plan.

Stop trying to outshout the other guy. Stop blunt-force conventional marketing tactics that annoy, interrupt, and repel. Stop wasting time with theoretical claptrap that doesn’t work in the real world. Get immediate traction by implementing lean marketing.

View Details >>

The Art of Small Business Social Media

Peg Fitzpatrick

 

An essential guide for small business owners that Booklist calls "appealing and supremely useful" in a starred review and Guy Kawasaki points out in the foreword, "if you're an entrepreneur or small business owner and want to master digital marketing, you need this book."

In The Art of Small Business Social Media, social media expert Peg Fitzpatrick offers a comprehensive guide tailored specifically for small business owners. Recognizing that social media isn't a one-size-fits-all tool, Fitzpatrick provides a roadmap for entrepreneurs to navigate the digital landscape effectively. Drawing from her extensive experience working with brands big and small, she demystifies choosing the right platforms, crafting a robust social media plan, and engaging with communities online. Real-world examples from various industries serve as case studies, offering actionable insights that can be applied to any small business setting.

Whether you're a solo entrepreneur or part of a small team, The Art of Small Business Social Media is your key to unlocking the full potential of social media marketing. It's not just about being online; it's about being online effectively. This book equips you with the skills to participate in the digital world and thrive in it, giving your business a competitive edge in today's marketplace.

View Details >>

Never Not Working

Malissa Clark

The always-on, hustle culture creates an unhealthy, counterproductive relationship with work.

Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent, they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and a constant connection to work. Businesses and society endorse busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers. Sometimes that endorsement is explicit, as when Elon Musk told X/Twitter employees to work "long hours at high intensity" or get fired. More often it's an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that make it easy to tether people to work.

Either way, this workaholic behavior is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It's time to fight back. Malissa Clark--a preeminent researcher on the culture of overwork--shows you how in Never Not Working. Clark examines overwork and burnout, not just from the individual's perspective but from an organizational perspective too. She delivers a comprehensive, nuanced definition of workaholism, busting myths along the way--working long hours, it turns out, doesn't automatically make you a workaholic. She also helps you assess whether you're falling prey to the phenomenon and whether you're creating workaholics in your organization.

Clark shows you how to escape the trap of putting work at the center of everything and thus losing your well-being--or your company's performance--in the process. Deeply researched and written for everyone from leaders to individual contributors, Never Not Working is the essential guide to identifying workaholism in yourself and others and starting on the road to recovery.

View Details >>

99% Perspiration

Adam Chandler

An enlightening and entertaining interrogation of the myth of American self-reliance and the idea of hard work as destiny

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison’s most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities. In this model, those who come out on top are there because they earned it, and everyone else needs to buckle down, glove up, and, maybe one day, they’ll get there too.

As the wealth gap widens, communities crumble, and Americans work more for less, Adam Chandler raises the question: What happens when perspiration isn’t enough? To answer it, he crisscrosses the country interviewing mayors, teachers, generals, pastors, construction workers, and entrepreneurs, to reveal just how untenable relying on “perspiration” as a strategy has truly become. He also delves into America’s past to reveal how our government, education system, and culture at large have woven the idea of meritocracy deep into the fabric of American society and how some of history’s most famous so-called bootstrappers really built their wealth. From George Washington to Seattle,Washington, Jay Gatsby to Bill Gates, 99% Perspiration unpacks the misguided obsession with hard work that has come to define both the American dream and nightmare, offering insight into how we got here and hope for where we may go.

View Details >>