Books – Detail

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.

O. Henry, born William Sidney Porter, arrived in New York City fresh from the Ohio Penitentiary, where he had served three and a half years for embezzlement. It was the dawn of the twentieth century, a time of remarkable change when the city's physical presence was being altered by new skyscrapers and subways, and its character by waves of immigrants. The American magazine had just reached its pinnacle as an enterprise, and the short story was the most popular medium in entertainment. Porter was in the city to write. From his cell, he had already sold a number of stories to big magazines, and within five years of arriving in Manhattan, he would become the most successful fiction writer in the country. But he never--never--said anything about his prison experience, or, indeed, anything about his past life. Anything true, that is.--Provided by the publisher

Athenaeum Literary Award Winner

"An accessible and entertaining biography of our nation's greatest public servant and original political maverick John Quincy Adams, from the bassist of the Grammy-nominated band the Avett Brothers."--Amazon.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant.

This volume brings together sixteen short stories by Irish American writer Mary Lavin, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. The collection explores themes including family relationships, interactions between men and women, and the social customs of Irish society in the twentieth century. The stories are set in various locations in Ireland, including Dublin and County Meath.

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.

From one of our most distinguished literary voices, a defining essay collection blending personal reflection with urgent political writing and wide-ranging cultural criticism.

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.

If you haven't followed the money, chances are you don't know the real story of America and its revolution. Nothing gives a clearer insight into this history than the life of early America's dominant merchant trader, first bank president, and first central banker, Thomas Willing. In this book, Richard Vague shows how Willing bankrolled--and in the process helped save--the Revolution and then fundamentally shaped the financial architecture of the young Republic.

A young woman finds herself in and out of love in this intimate, intense novel from "a truly startling talent" (Kevin Barry).

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.

"Fourteen beloved authors celebrate the life-changing bond with their canine companions in this heartwarming essay collection..."--Provided by publisher.

As the United States marks its semiquincentennial in 2026, renowned historian Marc Stein looks back at the politics of another landmark celebration during a time of striking similarities and surprising differences: the US bicentennial in 1976.

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.

"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.

Athenaeum Literary Award Winner

A biography of Abraham Lincoln that examines his career-long political strategies and coalition-building skills.

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 Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age--and how we can free ourselves from it.

Ramsden, Yorkshire, 1916. The ambitious local Choral Society is depleted as men volunteer for the front and plans for their St Matthew Passion by German composer J. S. Bach are scuppered by patriotic fervour. Dr Guthrie, the mysterious, exacting new Chorus Master, finds a replacement in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and swells the choir’s numbers with teenage boys and girls. Together they discover the urgency of desire and the joy of singing as the new boys come to terms with their imminent conscription, and friendships and summer trysts are suffused with a melancholy sense of all that might soon be lost.

A snack-sized book by the author of The Uncommon Reader.

With Malcolm Gladwell-like clarity, Churn captures the most commonplace tensions of life in a multifaceted democracy and how to minimize their corrosive effects in everyday life.

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.

The British surrealist painter and writer Ithell Colquhoun recalls episodes from her travels in Ireland as a young woman turning her back on the modern world and setting out across the unruly Irish countryside.

Peers, foils, colleagues, and rivals—Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan’s impact on each other still expresses itself in architectural masterworks that anchor Chicago’s cityscape. Trygve Thoreson’s parallel biography places their lives and careers within a panoramic history of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Known for her "delightful blend of historical fiction and suspense" (People), New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict returns with a sweeping tale of a young woman who unearths the truth about a forgotten Pharaoh--rewriting both of their legacies forever.

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.

A swift, intense novel about a teen rebelling against forced religious conformity in a small Javanese town, The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks ponders that perpetual human question, can we ever really be free?

Drexel Park, founded in 1924, is a result of the city of Philadelphia bursting at its seams as it experienced an industrial boom fueled by advances in manufacturing, transportation, and technology.

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.

Arthur Fletch, one of the world's bestselling novelists, is a reclusive genius known for his iconic protagonists and fiendish twists. When six struggling authors are invited to spend a weekend on his private Scottish island, they arrive to discover a shocking secret. Arthur Fletch is dead...and his last book is unfinished. Desperate to publish the novel, Fletch's agent and editor have summoned these writers in the hope that one of them will imagine a worthy ending for this final book.

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.

This gripping tale of love, family, and identity will captivate fans of historical fiction. This touching story spans a century, following a family's secret across the American Deep South, World War II London, and modern Seattle.--Page 4 of cover

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.

The Feather Wars traces the early bird-protection movement in the United States, beginning with growing public concern after the extinction of the passenger pigeon. The book examines how hunting, fashion, and assumptions about limitless natural resources contributed to declining bird populations, and how a national conservation effort emerged in response.

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.

This collection of interconnected crime stories presents a series of high-stakes events involving a range of characters, including a legendary casino robber, a college-bound teenager involved in illicit activities, law enforcement officers facing ethical dilemmas, and individuals entangled in organized crime.

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

In For and Against a United Ireland, renowned journalists Fintan O'Toole and Sam McBride provide an accessible and measured approach to the polarized debate about Irish unification.

Documenting the 50 year friendship and collaborative efforts of noted architects and friends Frank Gehry and Robert Tannen. The book features essays, personal notes, and collaborative and individual work in a range of media, including architectural models, sculpture, painting, printmaking, urban planning, and product design.

While acknowledging our current reality, this book asks how we can improve it. By redeveloping land use within a three-mile bikeable radius of existing rail transit stations, we could realize immense improvements to safety, fitness, affordability, water and air quality, public health, and real estate markets.

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

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. Her main life hack, and the key to her own enviable happiness, is to desire only what you have. Everything else life throws at you? Don't just accept it; love it. Amor Fati. Adora believes it so deeply she has it tattooed on her wrist. But when Adora meets Digby, a handsome stranger at the ballet, she finds herself loving fate indeed.

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.

An electric debut from a rising-star screenwriter about a millennial antihero who seeks revenge on her ex-situationship with a drunken hex, only for him to actually die the next day.

Walter Nash, working under the alias of Dillon Hope, is on the road to revenge after becoming an informant for the FBI against a global criminal operation headed up by Victoria Steers. Steers has ripped everything Nash held dear away from him. He has nothing left to lose and with long, rigorous training under his belt the gentle and sensitive Nash has transformed into something he never thought he'd be: a physically imposing man with lethal skills.

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.

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.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a 'far more interesting' man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company's system has him listed as dead. And the company can't fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.

A sweeping history of Native Americans' fraught relationship with United States citizenship and their efforts to protect tribal sovereignty.

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.

In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

To those who appreciate her work and legacy, Audrey Hepburn was many things. She was a child survivor of the Second World War. She was a fashion icon who made the little black dress the symbol of elegance that it is today. She played a runaway princess, an eccentric socialite, and a nun struggling with her faith. But perhaps her greatest contribution to the world was as a selfless humanitarian in the final years of her life, proving that fear and trauma can be transmuted into kindness and art.

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.

A major new biography that reveals how politics profoundly shaped Joyce's life, thought and writings.

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

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris to find that little has changed except for him.

On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Arknakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she's dead in the river. In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn't simple. It comes wrapped in generations--old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two.

Cal Hooper Series

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

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.

New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor's secret past, laying bare the mounting tensions at play in a rapidly gentrifying, early 2000's Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

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.

In this delightful book - the perfect gift for all insomniacs - are collected a splendid variety of entertainments devised to help pass 'the wakeful hours'. Ranging from puzzles, rhymes and limericks to simple number problems, calming calculations and planning dreams, here is a feast of intriguing activities guaranteed to keep you entertained as you search for the elusive rabbit-hole of a good night's sleep.

As 92-year-old 'Flo' Green writes a long letter to Ruthie, the woman who, as a little girl, lived next door to Flo, she thinks, 'This is an autobiography in things.' And this letter will transform her--and those around her--in ways she couldn't even imagine.

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.

New narratives on the lived experience of the Revolutionary War through five case studies exploring the spectrum of loyalist experiences in Revolutionary Philadelphia.

Nur, a young Palestinian refugee from a camp near Ramallah, is often mistaken for an Ashkenazi Jew. When he discovers an Israeli ID card in the pocket of a secondhand coat, he assumes a false identity and is hired for an archaeological dig near Megiddo. Passing as an Israeli, he moves through a world previously off-limits, gaining insight into the lives and beliefs of those he's been taught to see as enemies. But as Nur's borrowed identity deepens, so does the rift within: between Nur, the Palestinian, and "Ur," the Israeli.

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.

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.

In August 1990, London is suffering through an unprecedented heatwave when baby Bella Carpenter is snatched through the open window of her hotel room. Detective Inspector Martha Allen is assigned the high-profile case and, knowing that it could make or break her career, is determined to find Bella. When a young woman named Nell Beatty walks into the police station with a baby who appears to be Bella, and whom Nell claims she found on a bench, it seems that the mystery is solved. Her family, the police, and the press are overjoyed at her return. But DI Allen isn't convinced, something about Nell's story doesn't ring true.

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.

When the body of a monk is found savagely beaten to death in a woodland near Bristol, Cross is eager to throw himself into the case. The problem is, no one in the Bristol station has any leads. Nothing is known about Brother Dominic's past. How can Cross unpick a crime when they don't know anything about the victim? And why would someone want to harm a monk?

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.

From the beloved author of New York Times bestseller Real Americans, a brilliant short story collection about love, life, and the anguish of becoming oneself in a time when it's so easy to be someone else.

The prescient feminist fable and international classic described as "The Handmaid's Tale for our age" (The Economist), from the Booker-shortlisted author of Stone Yard Devotional.

"... A brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America--about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love."--Provided by publisher.

Nightmare of the Embryos is a stunning collection of short fictional works by the Swiss writer Mariella Mehr (1947-2022), one of the most groundbreaking German-language writers of her time and simultaneously one of the most neglected. Mehr, a Yenish author, was subjected to the Swiss government-funded assimilationist campaign targeting nomadic or "Gypsy" populations. Her experiences drove her to use her writing to explore systems of violence, power, and abuse.

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.

As a girl, I ate like a king. So begins beloved author, journalist, and influencer Alicia Kennedy's captivating new book. On Eating is more than a memoir; in true Alicia Kennedy style, it is also on desire, on the roles of women "in the kitchen," on domesticity, on diaspora, on foodways and food sovereignty, on home and how we find home through food, on how food can help us bring us back to those we love.

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.

In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us.

The fourth installment of Balle’s expansive and highly ambitious septology teems with new faces, new people, and voices from every corner of the Western world.

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.

Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He's a magician, able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara goes from kindergarten thief to a high school genius, Silicon Valley celebrity, and, finally, animal rights activist turned terrorist. But to tell Clara's story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan and his rivalry and friendship with his head of school, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows.

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.

Lexi thought she knew everything about Mara Vannatta. Best friends since middle school, they drifted apart after a tragedy derailed their senior year. But when Mara shows up on Lexi's doorstep sixteen years later fleeing an abusive husband, Lexi takes her in without question. Lexi's own marriage has been strained by her desire to have a baby, and when Mara offers to become her surrogate, their friendship feels stronger than ever. But four days before the due date, Mara disappears. Lexi is shocked but certain there must be something wrong--Mara would never willingly leave with her unborn child. Or would she?

Award-winning journalist Beth Gardiner gives readers an up-close look at the plastic industry's relentless growth, its extraordinary profits, its toxic pollution and its hidden role in exacerbating climate change.

A ransacked room. A dead politician. A burglary gone wrong--or a staged murder? DS George Cross loves puzzles--he's good at them--and he immediately spots one when he begins investigating the death of former mayor Peggy Frampton. To most, the crime scene looks like a burglary that went horribly wrong. But George can see what others can't: This was murder.

A new biography of Stephen Girard.

"A debut novel inspired by the true story of the author's grandparents, tracing the slow-burn love story between a Catholic priest and a progressive theology teacher across Rome and England during the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.

Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich's magnificent story collection features a range of characters--a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics.

In The Quantity Theory of Morality, Will Self 's unconventional new novel, his pen remains dipped in vitriol and elegance as ever. In this dark yet hilariously satirical "state-of-an-era novel," Self 's target is a collective morality that is nothing more or less than pure sociability.

A new biography of one of history's most disturbing, dubious masterminds, showing how a Siberian peasant, through his seduction of the imperial household, contributed to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.

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.

On the morning of the most important booking in the long history of the celebrated restaurant, Aunt Orsa's erupts into chaos with the discovery that twenty-two rib eye steaks have been stolen. Hers is the most august of fine-dining establishments in this Midwestern college town, and tonight Orsa is set to host a large party honoring a very special guest--a bestselling author of national renown. And what's up with the recent spate of online reviews, from insulting to frankly terrible? Is Orsa, who wants only to be loved, being sabotaged on several fronts?

The author examines three generations of his family, who emigrated from Germany to the South, and embraces the Jewish traditions that they eschewed as they sought acceptance by New Orleans society.

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.

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.

Jeannine Cook always thought she'd open a bookshop in her old age. Raised by a blind librarian, books were integral to her life, and she expected she would eventually write one as well. On February 1, 2020, Jeannine fulfilled her dream and opened a bookstore in Philadelphia which she named after her hero and inspiration, Harriet Tubman. Harriet's Bookshop would be a place to celebrate women authors, artists, and activists. But in only six weeks, Jeanne would be forced to shut the shop's doors when Covid turned the world upside down--not knowing whether her dream would survive. Five years later, this small independent bookshop is thriving, with satellite stores in unconventional places, from movie theaters to horse trailers.

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.

Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

Appalachia--a distinctly American landscape, dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings--has been the great setting for Jayne Anne Phillips's work. She grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia and has always kept it close, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled. In these essays, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother.

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.

From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.

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.

Michael Morpurgo has lived on a farm deep in rural Devon for more than forty years. In Spring, he observes the season unfold around him, as fragile new shoots emerge, buds turn to blossom and grey skies give way to blue.

The Spy in the Archive tells the remarkable story of how Vasili Mitrokhin - an introverted archivist who loved nothing more than dusty files - ended up changing the world. As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy, a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today.

Nancy F. Castaldo shines new light on this familiar backyard mammal, exploring their staggering global diversity and the many surprising ways they shape our world, our communities, and our cultures. She urges us not to take for granted these small mammals that enrich our world in ways both trifling and profound.

An astonishing account of the human capacity for survival amidst a great city's descent into utter annihilation.

A fierce and gorgeous debut novel about a teenager who runs away from her abusive home to live in a boarding house for single women as a global financial crash threatens the people of Seoul.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who, after coming out late in life, has never found love. Teddy is the caustic, unspoken leader of "The Golden Gays"--the foursome's monthly drag tribute to The Golden Girls.

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.

he narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail 'from the future and the past simultaneously' and who 'reenchants the air' when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world.

An irresistibly wry, culturally rich exploration of color and how it shapes our world-from the leading lexicographer of our time"-- Provided by publisher.

Horace Manning, scientist, recluse, and "closed book" even to his friends, is found dead in his study at 4 a.m., following a dinner in honour of his daughter's engagement. An ivory-handled carving knife rests between his shoulder blades as the houseguests gather round to witness the awful crime. The telephone line has been sabotaged--a calculated murder has been committed.

British Library Crime Classics series

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.

A coffin is dug up by builders in the grounds of an historic convent - inside is the body of a young nun. In a city as old as London, the discovery is hardly surprising. But when scratch marks are found on the inside of the coffin lid, Detective Jane Tennison believes she has unearthed a mystery far darker than any she's investigated before.

The Athenaeum Mystery Book Group will be discussing this title in May 2026.

Interlocking narratives about the clients of an adult day care center for the disabled community in Los Angeles.

This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer: why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean?

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?"

We the Women presents a new and extraordinary retelling of American history through the eyes of women, introducing us to inspiring patriots who demanded that the country live up to the promises made 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Publishing for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation's founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.

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.

A fun, smart and surprising dive into the past, present and future of accents - and the enduring power of sounding different. Why We Talk Funny will change the way you think about your own accent - and transform the way you listen to the sounds of others.

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 A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives -- scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic -- to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

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.

What is art? Many of us think of the arts as entertainment--a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.