October 13
[A] subversive speculative thriller about a mother of two young children who, by confronting a masked intruder in her home, slips into an existential rabbit hole where she grapples with the dualities of motherhood–joy and dread, longing and suffocation–in blazing, arresting prose.
November 3
After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter, Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a lifelong quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.
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December 8
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a brutal juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, his only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
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January 12
In 1969, the four rambunctious Gold children–Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya–visit a psychic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who predicts the date each of them will die. The novel then follows how the siblings deal with news of their expiration dates….[T]heir story becomes a moving meditation on fate, faith, and the family ties that alternately hurt and heal.
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February 9
Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting–painfully, ferociously– for a way to live on their own terms.
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March 8
The Blithedale Romance, considered one of Hawthorne’s major novels, explores the limitations of human nature set against an experiment in communal living. From mesmerism to illicit love, The Blithedale Romance represents one of Hawthorne’s best and most sharply etched works, one that Henry James called his “brightest” and “liveliest” novel, and that Roy Male, acclaimed Americanist scholar, said is “one of the most underrated works in American fiction.”
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April 12
With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid to Kidane and his wife Aster. As the war begins in earnest, the Emperor goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope. Hirut helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms against the Italians.
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May 10
In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen–Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs–sit at night, none too patiently. They are expecting Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. Their conversations cause them to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles.
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June 14
A charmingly eccentric hotel maid discovers a guest murdered in his bed, turning her once orderly world upside down–and inspiring a motley crew of unexpected allies to band together to solve the mystery.
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