The author of Britain at Bay--which The Wall Street Journal said may be "the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written"--picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting.

A transportive work of historical fiction chronicling the life, loves, and iconic successes of Rafael Guastavino, the influential yet largely forgotten Spanish architect of New York's Gilded Age.

In Art Cure, world-leading expert and award-winning scientist Professor Daisy Fancourt reveals the life-changing power of the arts, including how: Songs support the architectural development of children's brains. Creative hobbies help our brains to stay resilient against dementia. Visual art and music act just like drugs to reduce depression, stress, and pain. Dance build new neural pathways for people with brain injuries. Going to live music events, museums, exhibitions, and the theatre decreases our risk of future loneliness and frailty.

Maureen Meister distills key elements of Arts and Crafts architecture, and her broad national perspective reveals new insights, including the close relationships among the movement's leaders.

In 1934, a young Jose Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers' strike in Estacion Camaron, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents' journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas's life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

David Trent is an aspiring novelist hoping to make a name for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place where ambitious writers lurk around every corner. He lives in an apartment above a Very Famous Author named Silas Hale who, beneath his celebrated image, is . . . haughty and disdainful, definitely not of the mentor variety. Until young David wins a prestigious award for his new book. Silas is at last interested . . . and jealous. But soon the administrator of the award comes to David with alarming news, which forces the writer into a set of desperate choices. Then fate intervenes--and nothing can ever go back to normal

Mira's days are filled with duty and light on freedom. In a new country, living with a husband she barely knows--and who she fears she'll never love--Mira is desperate to discover all that her new life in England might offer. And then there's Tahliil. The quiet, beautiful man she sees at work each day.

Beyond Glass Cases represents the Library Company's ongoing commitment to boldly, honestly, and thoughtfully interpret challenging, and at times harmful, collection items. An independent research library founded in 1731 and specializing in American society and culture from the 17th through the early 20th centuries, the Library Company has collected books and graphics throughout its almost 300-year history. Today, the Library is faced with the task of finding new and better ways of advancing understanding and engaging public awareness of the complex histories of these challenging collection items, while still holding space for their historical significance.

From New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes a page-turning drama that explores the beauty of female friendship; the relationship between money, power, and sex; and the very human desire to protect the ones we love most.

This crime fiction novel follows Detective Brock Justice and his partner, Detective Chloe Wright, as they investigate the mysterious death of a woman on a remote backcountry road in Maine.

The first of Nicola Griffith's beloved sapphic crime series, the novel that introduced the fierce and beguiling Aud Torvingen.

Set in Oxford and London at the beginning of the 20th century, this novel follows Lilian Delaney, an apprentice bookbinder working in a traditionally male trade. While assisting with a private collection, she encounters a damaged book containing a concealed letter dating back fifty years that references a past relationship and a violent crime. As Lilian searches for additional books containing hidden documents, she uncovers a story of forbidden love and unresolved wrongdoing.

This anthology presents a selection of more than 100 words which show the influence of writing, reading and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins, and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!' That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation's urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames, the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts.

In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes, critically acclaimed author of The Age of Wonder, discovers in Young Tennyson an astonishingly magnetic and mercurial personality, a secretly expressive and highly emotional man haunted by the great intellectual and scientific issues of his time

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region--from New England to Florida to California--these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels.

In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China -- one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux.

Award-winning crime novelist Abir Mukherjee returns to his brilliant mystery series set in late-1920s Calcutta, as Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee must reunite to solve a high profile murder and disappearance. In The Burning Ghats of Calcutta, where the dead are laid to rest, a man is found murdered, his throat cut from ear to ear. The body is that of a popular philanthropist and patron of the arts. A man, who was, by all accounts, beloved by all. So what could possibly be the motive for murder?

First in the series: A Rising Man

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits. While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes--a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you're hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

A portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.

Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.

In this story of intense friendship and grit, two down-and-out teens escape the hopelessness of their lives and chase a different future through rock climbing.

In this lively and insightful book, Japonica Brown-Saracino traces how a concept originally intended to describe the brick-and-mortar transformation of neighborhoods has come to characterize transformations that have little to do with cities. She describes how journalists, artists, filmmakers, novelists, and academics use gentrification as a symbolic device to mourn how everyday pleasures and forms of self-expression--from music to marijuana, kale, and tattoos--entered the domain of the elite. She weighs the implications of turning to gentrification as a tool to tell stories, entertain audiences, and communicate political messages.

Detective Sergeant George Cross can be difficult to work with, but he doesn't miss a clue. So when the body of an elderly homeless man is discovered, he insists on scrutinizing the smallest details, even after his police colleagues dismiss the murder as an act of random violence. As Cross delves into the dead man's past, he discovers a connection to a case that has been cold for fifteen years. The same tragedy that led to his homelessness may have also led to his death.

The Athenaeum also has the second and third installments in the series: The Cyclist and The Patient.

Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story--or a story within the story--but not just yet." Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it.

The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation--the possibility of starting over--but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them ... In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality.

Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Her short stories have appeared in various journals and magazines, many of them in The New Yorker. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala's powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India's middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background.

A beginner-friendly guide to drawing. Filled with fun prompts and easy step-by-step techniques for sketching and shading, it will help you find calm and creativity as you capture everyday moments in its pages. Whether you're new to drawing or rediscovering your artistic side, this is the perfect place to start!

This lively, richly illustrated publication features works in a wide range of media by a diverse group of artists, including Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and many others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Art Museum, November 8, 2025

Containing chapters from classic writers on aeronautical history, such as R.M Ballantyne, Camille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle, and Benjamin Franklin, and with a generous helping of beautiful color illustrations and contextual notes, this is a fantastic read for ballooning aficionados and new-comers to the subject alike.

Stay tuned as the Athenaeum celebrates ballooning history in January 2026 as part of  52 Weeks of Firsts

From New York Times bestselling author Jamie Oliver comes a new cookbook to help you build a celebratory relationship with nourishing food that will make you feel healthier and happier.

Alone and adrift in Barcelona, an unnamed narrator is haunted by the death of her teenage brother, Diego. Diego, the little boy she helped raise in Mexico while their mother struggled to make a living in Spain.

Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time.

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father's death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.

Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician–turned–schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The assignment: to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that’s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were—and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island.

In this sly, darkly funny novel, a young woman becomes increasingly obsessed with tales of love and death, and begins subconsciously plotting to murder her abusive husband.

After a postgraduation drive from Iowa City to NYC, Teddy and Marin have both had enough of each other to last the rest of their lives. But that doesn't stop their paths from crossing over eight rocky years, punctuated by chance encounters and transatlantic visits, on a journey that eventually brings them right back to where it all started.

In this locked-room mystery set in 1960, a washed-up actor puts his on-camera detective skills to the test when a suspicious death shatters the quiet peace for a group of strangers staying at an isolated Greek island resort.

The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. When the Inter-Continental Hotel opened in central Kabul in 1969, it reflected the hopes of Afghanistan: a glistening white edifice that embodied the country's dreams of becoming an affluent, modern power. Five decades later, the Inter-Continental is a dilapidated, shrapnel-damaged shell. It has endured civil wars, terrorist attacks, the US occupation, and the rise, fall, and rise of the Taliban. But its decaying grandeur still hints at ordinary Afghans' hopes of stability and prosperity.

Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America's new age of disaster we are living through portends that--without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned--there is more yet, and worse, to come.

In this follow-up to Chang's Wild Swans, "Deng Xiaoping opened the door of Communist China, and Jung--twenty-six years old and unstoppably curious, despite years of brainwashing--seized the propitious moment and became one of the first Chinese to leave the tightly sealed country and come to the West. [This memoir] chronicles her journey and that of her family, along with that of China, as it rose from a decrepit and isolated state to a world power challenging American dominance

The life, works and legacy of a Philadelphia architect.

The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin's lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however--it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill.

Neil Shea blends natural history, anthropology, and travel writing to explore how the beauty, chaos, and power of change in the far north are reflected in the lives of people and animals.

In a gripping and hauntingly atmospheric novel set against the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, a disgraced police investigator discovers that his path to redemption is paved with ice-and blood.

A new novel about a search & rescue expert, a kidnapped woman, and the lost girls who haunt them both.

Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these seven stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life - ourselves. Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection - but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful.

Kate Hamilton and her husband, Detective Inspector Tom Mallory, have settled into married life in Long Barston. When archaeologists excavating the ruins of a nearby plague village discover the miraculously preserved body of a fourteenth-century woman, Kate and her colleague, Ivor Tweedy, are asked to appraise the grave goods, including a valuable pearl. When tests reveal the woman was pregnant and murdered, the owner of the estate on which the body was found, an amateur historian, asks Kate to identify her and, if possible, her killer.

First in the Kate Hamilton series: A Dream of Death

In Heirs and Graces Eleanor Doughty draws on her unparalleled access to a bewildering range of dukes, duchesses, earls and others to create a vivid picture of who they are and how they tick. En route she traces their progress from a post-war era when they and their like were described by one future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer as 'selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent' to their diverse current roles as farmers, financiers, guardians of vast ancestral mansions and much else besides. She looks at key rites of passage, from cradle, via boarding school to grave. And she tells stories of their ups and downs, and of the doings of the heroes and villains who fill their ranks.

As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with morality, all the while the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can't control, this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the day progresses. Ultimately, this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.

Senator John Kennedy offers his tongue-in-cheek guidebook through Washington, punctuated by his thoughts on various issues and humorous stories about life from Louisiana politics and inside the Senate.

The tense and emotional saga of a young woman's survival in the lawlessness of post-World War II France, by the New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc series.

In his final novel, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa returns to his native Peru.

A radiant, highly anticipated debut from the Well-Read Black Girl books series, delving into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

Thornwalk, a once-stately English manor, is on the brink of transformation. Its keys are being handed over to a luxury hotelier who will undertake a complete renovation, but in doing so, what will they erase? Through the keen eyes of an enigmatic neighbor, the listener is taken on a guided tour into rooms filled with secrets and memories, each revealing the story of the five Gilbert siblings.

A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archeological scholar Mike Pitts--a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island's collapse.

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.

Katharina went missing twenty-four years ago. Each year on the anniversary of her disappearance, Chief Inspector William Wisting rereads her files, searching for the answer he could never find; the code he could never solve. And he visits Katharina's husband, Martin Haugen, the brokenhearted man he could never help. Until now. This year is different. Another woman is missing under similar circumstances. But so is Katharina's husband. Wisting has to find him, but is he rescuing a dear old friend or playing a deadly game with a killer?

An unforgettable novel about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Most of us are poets, she said. It's just a question of how it comes out. When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague - the poet - it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn't; she has everything he wants.

Toni Morrison's lectures on the American canon, illuminating the relationship between race, the arts, and life beyond the page. From Herman Melville's Moby Dick to Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the works of Faulkner and Hemingway, Morrison interrogates major works of American literature as only she can.

This book recounts the Marquis de Lafayette's farewell tour of the United States in 1824-1825, exploring its historical significance and cultural impact. It describes Lafayette's journey across the states, the nationwide celebrations, and the political and social context of early 19th-century America. Drawing on Lafayette's perspective and contemporary eyewitness accounts, the narrative offers insight into a nation reflecting on its revolutionary past while facing a changing future.

Lafayette visited the Athenaeum during his tour.

Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. ... This is a book about being different and seeing the world differently.

Born a vagabond, Tibb Ingleby has never had a roof of her own. But her mother has taught her that if you're not too bound by the Big Man's rules, there are many ways a woman can find shelter in this world. Now her ma is dead in a trick gone wrong and young Tibb is orphaned and alone. As she wends her way across the fields and forests of medieval England, Tibb will discover there are people who will care for her, as well as those who mean her harm. And there are a great many others who are prepared to believe just about anything.

Elizabeth McCracken, author of bestselling novels, National Book Award long-listed story collections, and a highly praised memoir, has been teaching for more than thirty-five years, guiding her many students through their own answers. In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. "Writing is a long game," she notes. "What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-forgiveness: every life needs both."

Lost Lambs follows a suburban family of five unspooling at the seams, navigating a disastrous open marriage, teenage rebellion, and an unexpected human trafficking/body-hacking crime conspiracy.

Mattering examines the concept of "mattering," defined as the perception of being valued and having opportunities to contribute, and its relationship to individual and social well-being.

This two-volume publication examines in depth the work of Samuel Yellin (1884-1940), a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who became the single most important ironworker in America. Excellent new photographs bring to life many extraordinary objects. Thanks to unlimited access to the Samuel Yellin Metalworkers archives, a wealth of archival material--photographs, drawings, and business records--is published here for the first time.

2 volumes (xv, 528 pages; xv, 615 pages)

Actress Anna Vaughn is fearless--on screen, at least. She tends to play doomed brunettes with a badass streak, and has put in countless hours training for parts and learning how to fight, shoot, and drive like a pro. She likes to believe she is as tough as her characters, but off-camera she leads a far quieter life: trying to keep her acting career alive so she can take care of her younger sister. When her best friend Natalie, her rock, disappears after a night out with a mysterious new man, the signs point to foul play and a circle of spies operating in Manhattan. Anna must use all the tricks she's learned for her roles to hunt for her missing friend.

Wallace traces how, over the span of some forty years, this unspoken rivalry was reciprocal and mutually beneficial, with each learning from the other's brilliance, quietly seeking to best the other's work and secure his own legacy.

When one of her fares turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Yosha Gunasekera.

One night after a party, old grievances surface between married couple Aliya and Sam and the night ends badly with a heated argument. Sam goes for a run early the next morning to clear her head--and doesn't come back. Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay, Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can't escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her.

The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.

Catalogs a nationwide participatory public art and history exhibition seeking to elevate the next generation of monuments that reckon with and reimagine public memory.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they've become her closest friends and, along with the support of her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her private school students, her fraught relationship with mother, her struggles with IVF-Polly's book club friends have heard it all. But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. Despite it seeming clear that this match is a mistake, Polly cannot help combing through her own family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

A sweeping history of one of the nation's most important African American churches and a profound story of grace and perseverance amidst the fight for racial justice-from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kevin Sack.

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025

Raymond Ambler, crime-fiction curator at New York City’s prestigious 42nd Street Library, doesn’t consider it a big deal when he misses a call from visiting professor Robin Cartwright . . . until she turns up dead in a hotel room. Who killed the quiet academic, and why?

First in the series: Murder at the 42nd Street Library

The culmination of Robert A.M. Stern's monumental history of architecture in New York City and a comprehensive record of building over the last twenty-five years. A landmark in architectural publishing, New York 2020 explores the planning and politics of building in New York City during the first decades of the 21st century.

In his inventive manuscript, Anthony Fontenot reveals the affinities between Friedrich Hayek's libertarian conception of state power and the aesthetic deregulation sought by "non-design" architects and urbanists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Jane Jacobs.

Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it.

This is Morrison as you've never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre--her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry--with contextual guidance, archival discoveries, and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time, but also on how to read great works of literature in general.

One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future-an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human--not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

National Book Award Winner

Blunt, irreverent, and at times wittily subversive, Opera Wars spotlights opera's colorful and sometimes warring personalities, increasingly fierce controversies over content, and the battles being waged for its economic future.

A page-turning suspense debut that tells the story of a woman who rose to fame after escaping a cult as a teenager, but whose future is threatened when dangerous secrets come back to haunt her.

In The Philosopher in the Valley journalist Michael Steinberger explores the world of Alex Karp, Palantir, and the future that they are leading us toward. It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley's most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state.

This much-anticipated, definitive edition of Heaney's poetry encompasses all the pieces published in his lifetime--twelve standalone volumes, from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Human Chain (2010), as well as verse that appeared in pamphlets, journals, and magazines--along with the small number of poems that appeared after his death.

Queer people have always existed. In an era when this basic truth faces undue scrutiny, here is a dazzling work of restorative history that reveals the hard-won lives of those who dared to break the mold in the 'long eighteenth-century.' At once an illuminating romp through the historical archive and an evocative new chapter in our shared history, Dr. Anthony Delaney's Queer Enlightenments uncovers the remarkable queer people of that complex, sometimes paradoxical time.

A woman is found murdered in her Reykjavík home, her apartment ransacked. On her desk lies a note with retired detective Konrad's phone number. Days earlier, she had begged him to find the child she gave up nearly fifty years ago. But Konrad, reluctant to reopen old wounds, turned her away. Now, haunted by guilt, he vows to uncover the truth--for her and for himself.

First in the Detective Konrad series: The Darkness Knows

California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. She checks the papers. She's not headline news. Not yet. But she's made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing "Emerald Triangle" town-- and its corrupt residents--in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing, and when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it's clear a serial killer is living among them.

How do you mend a broken heart? Write a letter to the woman who left you - and post it to an imaginary address? Buy a new watch, to reset your life? Or walk the streets of Paris, mapping the landmarks of a love affair? Combining the wry musings of a rejected lover with soulful drawings in red, black and white, bestselling author Antoine Laurain and renowned street artist Le Sonneur have created a striking addition to the literature of unrequited love.

During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the "historic shrines" in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote one novel about detective Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon, the most famous private eye story ever told. But the case was never really solved - the priceless golden, bejeweled bird that men and women had been dying to possess turned out to be a fake. Now, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Max Allan Collins (author of Road to Perdition) brings closure to this crime classic.

The year is 1963. Raped by a supposedly respectable older man, graduate student Mabel Gorne flees New England for Manhattan. She's unaware that the perpetrator died in a murder-suicide. If she reveals the truth, will she be blamed for the crime? Mabel carries another dark secret. She's pregnant. Her rapist is the father. With abortion confined to shady doctors, back alleys, and coat-hangers, how will she endure her unwanted pregnancy? In this sequel to They Believed They Were Safe, Mabel vacillates between hope and fear, struggling to find equilibrium in the midst of a huge, uncaring city

For fans of Colm Tóibín and Claire Keegan, Saoirse is a propulsive story set in the US and Ireland about one woman and the lies she has told in order to survive.

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success--and how far we are willing to fall.

Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the protagonist's fraught attempts to write his novel and such scenes of service work as wrapping children's books for Silver Lake moms and being 'pilloried by dunces' on Yelp. As his writing process stalls in a 'stale ceremony' of indolence and self-doubt, these unfamiliar humiliations become a toxic wellspring for his irascible observations.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel, now available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'

The Short Story of Queer Art offers a fuller picture of the history of art--from the barriers broken and breakthroughs that queer artists have made, to the important contributions to key artistic movements, and the forgotten and obscured artists who are now being rediscovered and reassessed.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His Edwardian country houses, surrounded by rhapsodic gardens, beguiled clients with their romance and wit. After 1918, the war memorials that he created symbolised a grieving nation's sense of loss.

1664. Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpãetriáere asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. 1939. Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

Six Friends. Five Parties. Twenty Years... How did we get So Old, So Young? From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a novel of impending millennial middleage that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of two decades bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we can run from and cling to our friends in love, life,and death.

Explore how the design of our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods impacts our health, happiness, and relationships. With practical approaches, scientific insights, and real-world examples, this book will inspire you to create spaces that help you feel and live better.

This book proposes a return of American government to the philosophical roots as articulated by the U.S. Constitution and its Framers. Grounded in realism, the Founders successfully balanced the needs and rights of the individual with those of the collective, creating a system that prioritized both personal liberty and societal order. Author and former Congressman Chris Gibson argues that abandoning the "spirit of Philadelphia" (essentially the national spirit of cooperation, compromise and teamwork) enabled dysfunction in government and disillusionment in the constituency.

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins is back with a thrilling new gothic suspense set in a Gulf Coast beach motel where hurricane season can be murder.

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whiskey sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her.

When Jessica Holby, darling of UK morning TV, dies live on screen in front of millions of viewers, the nation is devastated. More devastated still when it becomes clear that her death was not an accident. The evidence points to one culprit: celebrity chef Sebastian Brooks. But junior barrister Adam Green is about to discover that the case is not as open-and-shut as it first seemed.

Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar--it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina's sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive.

One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from ... or why ... His name is Theo. Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.

Following a number of moves from one shabby rental to another, they--the mother and daughter of this elusive, strangely riveting novel set in 1980s Denmark--now reside in an apartment over the hairdresser shop in the same island town where they've always lived. It's only the two of them, and they are so enmeshed that it can be hard to tell them apart: they share the same manners, habits, and opinions to an almost comic degree.

Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved older sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into decades of stubborn silence.

Seven strangers receive a mysterious note that billionaire Logan Quick is leaving them his vast fortune. All they need to do is accept the enclosed Token and wait for his death. None of them know why they've been chosen, but all seven desperately need the money and the chance of a fresh start. When the group are forced to embark on a dangerous sea crossing, they discover they are connected by a dark secret from their past. As confusion turns to fear and trust to betrayal, the question is no longer who will claim the money - it's who will make it off the boat alive...

The most unusual tennis tournament in history is about to start. Einstein's seeded fourth. Chaplin, Freud and van Gogh are also in the top rankings. World number one is Tony Chekhov. In all, 128 of the world's most creative players--everyone from Louis Armstrong to George Orwell, Gertrude Stein to Coco Chanel--are going to fight it out until the exhilarating final on centre court. First published in 2002, John Clarke's The Tournament is a brilliant, bizarre comic novel.

Readers embark on a visual journey through the world's bustling subway systems, where each station tells a story of its city's soul.

When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence--savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together--not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else.

A clarion call for taking back the American Revolution from the far right, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Who gets to claim the legacy of the American Revolution and the mantle of patriotism that goes along with it? In a sharp, irreverent, deeply informed account of the nation's founding moment and its enduring legacies, historian Thomas Richards Jr. invites us to see the Revolution not just as a one-time fight for political freedom from Britain but as an ongoing struggle for equality, justice, and social and political independence for all Americans.

Not for the first time, Jill 'Doll' Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this one, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it?"

In an Italian monastery, a sculptor named Mimo lays on his deathbed. For decades, he has lived among the monks who watch over his masterpiece, an arresting statue that haunts all who see it. During his final hours, he reveals his life story: his impoverished childhood, brutal apprenticeship, and, most important, his meeting with Viola Orsini, the only daughter of a powerful and dangerous aristocratic family.

From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin's Kastanienallee, the meeting sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that have made a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations.

A grounded and intimate portrait of life by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Where We Keep the Light is the story of public service and personal faith.

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together-of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease.

Michael Loughran’s Windower is a memoir of grief, an account of the years before and after losing his wife to suicide, a document of love’s impossible forms. It is a report back—tender and uncompromising—from a place we could call hell, the place where we outlive those we love.

In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season's ever-evolving community-based traditions. In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa.  A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year's idle months from one of Scotland's best-loved writers.

First published in 1999, Annie Leibovitz's landmark collection of portraits of women is back in print, together with a new book of photographs. The broad array of subjects reflects what women look like now: dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, soldiers, musicians, athletes, socialites, scientists.

Finding the time to appreciate the bounty of our world can be tricky amid the demands of work, family and scrolling our phones. Happily, E. Foley and B. Coates have curated A Year of Living Curiously, a book of daily shots of knowledge that will lift your spirits and expand your mind in a flash. In 365 joyfully random, utterly fascinating entries, you'll learn what the Japanese mean by 'kuchisabishii' and how the Victorians communicate through flowers; you'll start to get quantum computing and discover the secret history of the bobble hat.

A warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two disparate yet connected families.

From California Governor Gavin Newsom, an intimate and reflective memoir laying bare the defining moments of his liminal childhood splintered by his parents' divorce that shaped Newsom's visionary and relentless commitment to the state and nation.