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Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment
Susannah Breslin
December 2023BuyWhat if your parents turned you into a human lab rat on the day you were born? Would that change the story of your life? Would that change who you are?

When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life--or is something else? Already a successful journalist, whose published work has appeared in Forbes, The Atlantic, and Harper's Bazaar, she decides to make her own curious history the subject of her next investigation and embarks on a life-changing journey that will expose the dark secrets hidden behind the renowned longitudinal study of personality development that she grew up believing knew her better than she knew herself.

Fearlessly vulnerable, unflinchingly raw, and lyrically written, this groundbreaking book is a remarkable account of a woman's quest to reclaim her voice and an unblinking expose of why we turn out as we do. Data Baby's story is unlike any other, but its message is universal. Sometimes you have to give up everything you have to become the person you were truly meant to be

Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment
Susannah Breslin
December 2023

November 2023

The Premonition

The Premonition
Banana Yoshimoto
November 2023BuyThe internationally beloved author of Kitchen and Dead-End Memories returns with a beautiful and heartfelt story of a young woman haunted by her childhood and the inescapable bitterness that inevitably comes from knowing the truth

Yayoi, a nineteen-year-old woman from a seemingly loving middle-class family, has lately been haunted by the feeling that she has forgotten something important from her childhood. Her premonition grows stronger day by day and, as if led by it, she decides to move in with her mysterious aunt, Yukino.

No one understands her aunt's unusual lifestyle. For as long as Yayoi can remember, Yukino has lived alone in an old gloomy single-family home, quietly, almost as though asleep. When she is not working, Yukino spends all day in her pajamas, clipping her nails and trimming her split ends. She eats only when she feels like it, and she often falls asleep lying on her side in the hallway. She sometimes wakes Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, sometimes serves flan in a huge mixing bowl for dinner, and watches Friday the 13th over and over to comfort herself. A study desk, old stuffed animals--things Yukino wants to forget--are piled up in her backyard like a graveyard of her memories.

An instant bestseller in Japan when first published in 1988, The Premonition is finally available for the first time in English, translated by the celebrated Asa Yoneda

The Premonition
Banana Yoshimoto
November 2023

October 2023

Death Valley

Death Valley
Melissa Broder
October 2023BuyNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times ("incandescent...hilarious...a triumph"), Oprah Daily ("surreal, absurd, lucid, and wise"), Vanity Fair ("Broder [is] a genius and a sorceress"), and more!

From the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief and a "magical tale of survival" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In Melissa Broder's astonishingly profound new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow--for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike.

Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.

Death Valley is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest, and is "a journey unlike any you've read before" (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black).

Death Valley
Melissa Broder
October 2023

Happiness Falls (Good Morning America Book Club)
Angie Kim
September 2023BuyNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK - When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another in this thrilling page-turner, a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

OPRAH DAILY'S #1 NOVEL OF THE YEAR - ONE OF PEOPLE'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - A WASHINGTON POST, BOOKPAGE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, NEW YORK POST, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, BOOK RIOT, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, REAL SIMPLE, CRIMEREADS, AND SHE READS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Belletrist Book Club Pick -
Finalist for the New American Voices Award - "This is a story with so many twists and turns I was riveted through the last page."--Jodi Picoult

"A brilliant, satisfying, compassionate mystery that is as much about language and storytelling as it is about a missing father. I loved this book."--Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

"I fell in love with the fascinating, brilliant family at the center of this riveting book."--Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut, Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.

Happiness Falls (Good Morning America Book Club)
Angie Kim
September 2023

August 2023

My Husband

My Husband
Maud Ventura
August 2023Buy

In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obsessing over her perfect husband--but can their marriage survive her passionate love?

"One of the most daring, provocative, unnervingly intimate thrillers I've read in years. Few writers besides Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith can evoke domestic unease with such sangfroid; fewer still can make it such delirious fun." --A. J. Finn, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

At forty years old, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated.

Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him--setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.

Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .

The winner of France's First Novel Prize in 2021, My Husband builds on the premise of hits like Gone Girl and Fates and Furies--how well can you really know your spouse?--and adds the tension and creepy obsession of You. The result is an irresistible read--compelling, tense, and engaging, infused with sly subversive humor, and told in an utterly original voice that makes it unforgettable.

Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan

My Husband
Maud Ventura
August 2023

July 2023

The Guest

The Guest
Emma Cline
July 2023BuyNATIONAL BESTSELLER - A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this "spellbinding" (Vogue), "smoldering" (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

"Under Cline's command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force."--The New York Times

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Slate, Time Out, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit, Bookreporter

"Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another."

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.

The Guest
Emma Cline
July 2023

The Three of Us
Ore Agbaje-Williams
June 2023BuyBest Book of the Year
Time - Real Simple - Oprah Daily

A Belletrist Book Club Pick

"As short and sharp as a pairing knife . . . Moves along so briskly and with such sly wit . . . Deliciously wicked." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Long-standing tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a breaking point in this sharp domestic comedy of manners, told brilliantly over the course of one day.

What if your two favorite people hated each other with a passion?

The wife has it all. A big house in a nice neighborhood, a ride-or-die snarky best friend, Temi, with whom to laugh about facile men, and a devoted husband who loves her above all else--even his distaste for Temi.

On a seemingly normal day, Temi comes over to spend a lazy afternoon with the wife: drinking wine, eating snacks, and laughing caustically about the husband's shortcomings. But when the husband comes home and a series of confessions are made, the wife's two confidants are suddenly forced to jockey for their positions, throwing everyone's integrity into question--and their long-drawn-out territorial dance, carefully constructed over years, into utter chaos.

Told in three taut, mesmerizing parts--the wife, the husband, the best friend--over the course of one day, The Three of Us is a subversively comical, wildly astute, and painfully compulsive triptych of domestic life that explores cultural truths, what it means to defy them, and the fine line between compromise and betrayal when it comes to ourselves and the people we're meant to love.

The Three of Us
Ore Agbaje-Williams
June 2023

I Could Live Here Forever
Hanna Halperin
May 2023BuyBy the award-winning author of Something Wild, a gripping portrait of a tumultuous, consuming relationship between a young woman and a recovering addict

When Leah Kempler meets Charlie Nelson in line at the grocery store, their attraction is immediate and intense. Charlie, with his big feelings and grand proclamations of love, captivates her completely. But there are peculiarities of his life--he's older than her but lives with his parents; he meets up with a friend at odd hours of the night; he sleeps a lot and always seems to be coming down with something. He confesses that he's a recovering heroin addict, but he promises Leah that he's never going to use again.

Leah's friends and family are concerned. As she finds herself getting deeper into an isolated relationship, one of manipulation and denial, the truth about Charlie feels as blurry as their time together. Even when Charlie's behavior becomes increasingly erratic, when he starts to make Leah feel unsafe, she can't help but feel that what exists between them is destined. Charlie is wide open, boyish, and unbearably handsome. The bounds of Leah's own pain--and love--are so deep that she can't see him spiraling into self-destruction.

Hanna Halperin writes with aching vulnerability and intimacy, sharply attuned to Leah's desire for an all-consuming, compulsive connection. I Could Live Here Forever exposes the chasm between perception and truth to tell an intoxicating story of one woman's relationship with an addict, the accompanying swirl of compassion and codependence, and her enduring search for love and wholeness

I Could Live Here Forever
Hanna Halperin
May 2023

April 2023

A Likely Story

A Likely Story
Leigh McMullan Abramson
April 2023BuyCBS New York Book Club with Mary Calvi Pick

"A thoroughly modern story of family mistakes and redemption that I couldn't put down." --KJ Dell'Antonia, New York Times bestselling author

The only child of an iconic American novelist discovers a shocking tangle of family secrets that upends everything she thought she knew about her parents, her gilded childhood, and her own stalled writing career in this brilliantly observed standout debut.

Growing up in the nineties in New York City as the only child of famous parents was both a blessing and a curse for Isabelle Manning. Her beautiful society hostess mother, Claire, and New York Times bestselling author father, Ward, were the city's intellectual It couple. Ward's glamorous obligations often took him away from Isabelle, but Claire made sure her childhood was always filled with magic and love.

Now an adult, all Isabelle wants is to be a successful writer like her father but after many false starts and the unexpected death of her mother, she faces her upcoming thirty-fifth birthday alone and on the verge of a breakdown. Her anxiety only skyrockets when she uncovers some shocking truths about her parents and begins wondering if everything she knew about her family was all based on an elaborate lie.

Wry, wise, and propulsive, A Likely Story is punctuated with fragments of a compulsively readable book-within-a-book about a woman determined to steal back the spotlight from a man who has cheated his way to the top. The characters seem eerily familiar but is the plot based on fact? And more importantly, who is the author

A Likely Story
Leigh McMullan Abramson
April 2023

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
Claire Jimenez
March 2023Buy

A powerful debut novel that's "hilarious, heartbreaking, and ass-kicking" (Jamie Ford), of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long-missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and they set out to bring her home.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle - USA Today - Today.com - Ms. Magazine - Good Housekeeping - Bustle - The Week - Goodreads - Bookriot - Pop Culturely - SheReads - Litreactor - Electric Lit - The Mary Sue - People Español - Zibby Mag

The Ramirez women of Staten Island orbit around absence. When thirteen-year-old middle child Ruthy disappeared after track practice without a trace, it left the family scarred and scrambling. One night, twelve years later, oldest sister Jessica spots a woman on her TV screen in Catfight, a raunchy reality show. She rushes to tell her younger sister, Nina: This woman's hair is dyed red, and she calls herself Ruby, but the beauty mark under her left eye is instantly recognizable. Could it be Ruthy, after all this time?

The years since Ruthy's disappearance haven't been easy on the Ramirez family. It's 2008, and their mother, Dolores, still struggles with the loss, Jessica juggles a newborn baby with her hospital job, and Nina, after four successful years at college, has returned home to medical school rejections and is forced to work in the mall folding tiny bedazzled thongs at the lingerie store.

After seeing maybe-Ruthy on their screen, Jessica and Nina hatch a plan to drive to where the show is filmed in search of their long-lost sister. When Dolores catches wind of their scheme, she insists on joining, along with her pot-stirring holy roller best friend, Irene. What follows is a family road trip and reckoning that will force the Ramirez women to finally face the past and look toward a future--with or without Ruthy in it.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is a vivid family portrait, in all its shattered reality, exploring the familial bonds between women and cycles of generational violence, colonialism, race, and silence, replete with snark, resentment, tenderness, and, of course, love.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
Claire Jimenez
March 2023

February 2023

Brutes

Brutes
Dizz Tate
February 2023BuyThe Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut--a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent

We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.

In Falls Landing, Florida--a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers--something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever

Brutes
Dizz Tate
February 2023

All This Could Be Different
Sarah Thankam Mathews
January 2023Buy2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

ONE OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES' TOP 5 FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF TIME AND SLATE'S TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Harper's Bazaar, and more

"One of the buzziest, most human novels of the year...breathless, dizzying, and completely beautiful." --Vogue

"Dazzling and wholly original...[written] with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time." --Entertainment Weekly

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself--a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America

Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She's moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women--soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.

But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant's journey to make her home in the world

All This Could Be Different
Sarah Thankam Mathews
January 2023