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The Invisible Life of Addie Larue
V. E. Schwab
December 2020Buy

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
USA TODAY BESTSELLER
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
THE WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, NPR, Slate, and Oprah Magazine
#1 Library Reads Pick--October 2020
#1 Indie Next Pick--October 2020
BOOK OF THE YEAR (2020) FINALIST--Book of The Month Club

A "Best Of" Book From: Oprah Mag * CNN * Amazon * Amazon Editors * NPR * Goodreads * Bustle * PopSugar * BuzzFeed * Barnes & Noble * Kirkus Reviews * Lambda Literary * Nerdette * The Nerd Daily * Polygon * Library Reads * io9 * Smart Bitches Trashy Books * LiteraryHub * Medium * BookBub * The Mary Sue * Chicago Tribune * NY Daily News * SyFy Wire * Powells.com * Bookish * Book Riot * Library Reads Voter Favorite *

In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's genre-defying tour de force.

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever--and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Also by V. E. Schwab

Shades of Magic
A Darker Shade of Magic
A Gathering of Shadows
A Conjuring of Light

Villains
Vicious
Vengeful

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue
V. E. Schwab
December 2020

November 2020

Collected Stories

Collected Stories
Shirley Hazzard
November 2020Buy

Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short-story collections--Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses--alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories

Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in The Picnic, It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek.

Hazzard once said, The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.

Collected Stories
Shirley Hazzard
November 2020

We Ride Upon Sticks: A Novel (Alex Award Winner)
Quan Barry
October 2020BuyIn the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals--even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers.

Against a background of irresistible 1980s iconography, Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.

Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond "Claw" sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry's glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves

We Ride Upon Sticks: A Novel (Alex Award Winner)
Quan Barry
October 2020

September 2020

The Lightness

The Lightness
Emily Temple
September 2020Buy

"A teen thriller in the vein of the '90s horror movie The Craft . . . A beautiful meditation on meditation . . . Frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout." --The New York Times Book Review

"The Lightness could be the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, but its savage, glittering magic is all Emily Temple's own." --Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

A Belletrist Book Club Pick!

A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly - USA Today - Marie Claire - Elle - WSJ. Magazine - Glamour - Vulture - Bustle - Buzzfeed - The Millions - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Minneapolis Star Tribune - The Daily Beast - Refinery 29 - Publishers Weekly - Literary Hub - Electric Literature - and more!

A stylish, stunningly precise, and suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing--an audacious, darkly observant, and mordantly funny literary debut for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill.

One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother--a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial--Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.

Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as "Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls". Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment--and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness.

But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body--and a girl--is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there's a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people--even though you don't, and can't, know them at all.

"A suspenseful debut." -People Pick

The Lightness
Emily Temple
September 2020

August 2020

Luster

Luster
Raven Leilani
August 2020Buy

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Time, Good Housekeeping, InStyle, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Self, The New York Public Library, Town & Country, Wired, Boston.com, Happy Mag, New Statesman, Vox, Shelf Awareness, Chatelaine, The Undefeated, Apartment Therapy, Brooklyn Based, The End of the World Review, Exile in Bookville, Lit Reactor, BookPage, i-D
A FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Barack Obama
A BEST BOOK FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS: AV Club, Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine/The Strategist, The Rumpus

WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER * LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER

"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani's first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or melt into a languorous drip; plot suddenly, wildly flying forward like a bike down a hill." --Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review

"An irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that's blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy." --Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

No one wants what no one wants.
And how do we even know what we want? How do we know we're ready to take it?

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties--sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage--with rules.

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric's home--though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Raven Leilani's Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life--her hunger, her anger--in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

Luster
Raven Leilani
August 2020

August 2020

Blue Ticket

Blue Ticket
Sophie Mackintosh
August 2020Buy

From the author of the Booker Prize longlisted novel The Water Cure comes another mesmerizing, refracted vision of our society: What if the life you're given is the wrong one?

"Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." --New York Times Book Review

Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you marriage and children. A blue ticket grants you a career and freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?

When Calla, a blue-ticket woman, begins to question her fate, she must go on the run. Pregnant and desperate, Calla must contend with whether or not the lottery knows her better than she knows herself--and what that might mean for her child. With Blue Ticket, Sophie Mackintosh has created another mesmerizing, refracted vision of our world that explores the impossible decisions women have to make when society restricts their choices.

Blue Ticket
Sophie Mackintosh
August 2020

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir
Wayétu Moore
July 2020Buy

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

An engrossing memoir of escaping the First Liberian Civil War and building a life in the United States

When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States.

Spanning this harrowing journey in Moore's early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore has a novelist's eye for suspense and emotional depth, and this unforgettable memoir is full of imaginative, lyrical flights and lush prose. In capturing both the hazy magic and the stark realities of what is becoming an increasingly pervasive experience, Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect many migrants around the world, and calls us all to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family.

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir
Wayétu Moore
July 2020

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (a Novel)
Brit Bennett
June 2020Buy

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR

2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST

"Bennett's tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it's especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye." --Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal

"A story of absolute, universal timelessness ...For any era, it's an accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to be...." - Entertainment Weekly

From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise

The Vanishing Half: A GMA Book Club Pick (a Novel)
Brit Bennett
June 2020

The Book of V.
Anna Solomon
May 2020Buy

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power, and desire finally converge in the present day.

Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment, she's grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016.

Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life--along with the lives of others.

Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle's tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all.

In Anna Solomon's The Book of V., these three characters' riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women's lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.

The Book of V.
Anna Solomon
May 2020

Writers & Lovers
Lily King
April 2020Buy

#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today
Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick
A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection

"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." --Curtis Sittenfeld

An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Writers & Lovers
Lily King
April 2020

These Ghosts Are Family
Maisy Card
March 2020BuyPEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist​ Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A "rich, ambitious debut novel" (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Stanford Solomon's shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead. These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel's decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley's actions. This "rich and layered story" (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a "beguiling...vividly drawn, and compelling" (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret

These Ghosts Are Family
Maisy Card
March 2020

February 2020

We Wish You Luck

We Wish You Luck
Caroline Zancan
February 2020BuyA Belletrist Book Club Selection
Named a Best Book of 2020 by goop, ELLE and Vanity Fair
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by The Millions, Lit Hub, Marie Claire

An exhilarating novel about a group of students who take revenge on a wunderkind professor after she destroys one of their own-- a story of collective drive to create, sabotage, and ultimately, to love.

It doesn't take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone - young, bestselling author and erstwhile model - shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.

Love. Death. Revenge. These age-old tropes come to life as the semesters unfold. The threesome came to study writing, to be writers, and this is the story they've woven together: of friendship and passion, of competition and envy, of creativity as life and death. Now, they submit this story, We Wish You Luck, for your reading pleasure

We Wish You Luck
Caroline Zancan
February 2020

January 2020

Creatures

Creatures
Crissy Van Meter
January 2020Buy

"[A] kaleidoscopic narrative . . . Tenacious, wildly original, and full of insight." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An alluring, atmospheric debut." --People

A Most Anticipated Book of the Year: Entertainment Weekly - The Millions - Bustle

A Best Book of the Year: NPR's Book Concierge

On the eve of Evangeline's wedding on Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, and Evie's mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing--a weed-dealing, charming but neglectful father, a wild-child best friend--in this lush land off the coast of Southern California.

With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of family and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief--and exerts a pull as strong as the tides.

Creatures
Crissy Van Meter
January 2020