List

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech—was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.

Another brilliant “constellation novel” in the mode of Tokarczuk’s International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

Knives Out meets Downton Abbey! Secrets, murder, and mayhem collide as this unlikely sleuthing duo--an under-butler and a foul-mouthed octogenarian--hunt a killer in a manor sealed against the end of the world, in this locked-room mystery by #1 New York Times bestselling author Ross Montgomery.

Cornwall, 1910. On a remote tidal island, the Viscount of Tithe Hall is absorbed in feverish preparations for the apocalypse that he believes will accompany the passing of Halley's Comet. The Hall must be sealed from top to bottom--every window, chimney, and keyhole closed off before night falls. But what the pompous, dishonest Viscount has failed to take into account is the danger that lies within... By morning, he will be dead in his sealed study, murdered by his own ancestral crossbow.

All eyes turn to Steven Pike, Tithe Hall's newest under-butler. Fresh out of Borstal for a crime he didn't commit, he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His unlikely ally? Miss Decima Stockingham, the foul-mouthed, sharp as a tack, eighty-year-old family matriarch. Fearless and unconventional, she relishes chaos and puzzles alike, and a murder is just the thrill she's been waiting for.

Together, this mismatched duo must navigate secret passages, buried grudges, and rising terror to unmask the killer before it's too late...

An irresistible modern fairy tale about a British princess who must decide between her duty to her family--or to her own heart.
It's New Year's Day in Australia and the life Lexi Villiers has carefully built is working out nicely: she's in the second year of her medical residency, she lives on a beautiful farm with her two best friends Finn and Jack, and she's about to finally become more-than-friendly with Jack--when a helicopter abruptly lands.
Out steps her grandmother's right-hand man, with the tragic news that her father and older brother have been killed in a skiing accident. Lexi's grandmother happens to be the Queen of England, and in addition to the shock and grief, Lexi must now accept the reality that she is suddenly next in line for the throne--a role she has publicly disavowed.
Returning to London as the heir apparent Princess Alexandrina, Lexi is greeted by a skeptical public not ready to forgive her defection, a grieving sister-in-law harboring an explosive secret, and a scheming uncle determined to claim the throne himself.
Her recent life--and Jack--grow ever more distant as she feels the tug of tradition, of love for her grandmother, and of obligation. When her grandmother grants her one year to decide, Lexi must choose her own destiny: will it be determined by an accident of birth--or by love?

When its librarian keeper mysteriously dies, two former classmates must race to locate a rare book from their college years that can foretell your future if you confess a secret from your past--but someone is intent on protecting what's hidden inside. It can write the story of your future... and hide the secrets of your past
The Library of Fates was designed to show you who you are--and who you could become. Its rarest book, The Book of Dark Nights, holds a secret: when you write an intimate confession on its pages, you'll receive a prediction for your future, penned in your own handwriting.
For Eleanor, whose childhood was defined by a senseless tragedy, the library offers a world where everything makes sense. She's spent most of her life there as an apprentice to the brilliant librarian, showing other people how to find the meaning of their lives in stories.
But when her mentor dies in a freak accident and The Book of Dark Nights goes missing--along with the secrets written inside--Eleanor is pulled out of the library and into a quest to locate it with the last person she expects: the librarian's estranged son, Daniel, who Eleanor once loved.
Together, as they hunt down clues from Harvard to Paris, Eleanor and Daniel grow closer again, regaining each other's trust. But little do they know that they're entangled in a much larger web. Someone else wants the book, and they'll go to dark lengths to get it...

A modern-day dark academia fantasy with a twist, perfect for fans of Babel and A Deadly Education.

Warren University has stood amongst the ivy elite for centuries, built on the bones-and forbidden magic-of its most prized BIPOC students...hiding the rot of a secret society that will do anything to keep their own powers burning bright. No matter who they must sacrifice along the way.

Ellory Morgan is determined to prove that she belongs at Warren University, an Ivy League school whose history is deeply linked to occult rumors and dark secrets. But as she settles into her Freshman year, something about the ornate buildings and shadowy paths feels strangely...familiar. And, with every passing day, that sense of deja vu grows increasingly sinister.

Despite all logic, despite all reason, despite all the rules of reality, Ellory knows one thing to be true- she has been here before. And if she can't convince brooding legacy student Hudson Graves to help her remember a past that seems determined to slip through her fingers as if by some insidious magic...this time, she may lose herself for good.

From the author of the international bestseller Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, a heartfelt invitation to reflect on your relationship with reading and celebrate the joys of books.

Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure?

How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.

Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encouraging book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Lifelong and new readers will take inspiration from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within.

In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season's ever-evolving community-based traditions

Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for winter: the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves, and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks.

In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood--of skating over frozen lakes and carving a "neep" (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square--McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions.

A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year's idle months from one of Scotland's best-loved writers.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino's darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success--and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams?

Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian -- and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track -- Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it's publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand).

A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners' lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged--but just when she thinks she's won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there's no boundary she won't cross to seize the dream life she's been chasing. The most unsettling part? You'll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.

Dark, biting, and laugh-out-loud funny, Best Offer Wins is a propulsive debut and a razor-sharp exploration of class, ambition, and the modern housing crisis.

An inventive and romantic speculative novel about two women--a witch and an immortal demon--who make a Faustian bargain and are drawn into a cat-and-mouse chase across multiple lifetimes.

1592. Cybil Harding is a First Daughter. Cursed to bring disaster to those around her, she is trapped in a house with a mother paralyzed by grief and a father willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of magic.

Miriam Richter is a creature of shadow. Forged by the dark arts many years ago, she is doomed to exist for eternity and destined to be alone--killing mortals and consuming their souls for sustenance. Everything changes when she meets Cybil, whose soul shines with a light so bright, she must claim it for herself. She offers a bargain: she will grant Cybil reincarnation in exchange for her soul.

Thus begins a dance across centuries as Miriam seeks Cybil in every lifetime to claim her prize. Cybil isn't inclined to play by the rules, but when it becomes clear that Miriam holds the key to breaking her family curse, Cybil finds that--for the first time in her many lives--she might have the upper hand. As they circle each other, drawn together inescapably as light and dark, the bond forged between them grows stronger. In their battle for dominance, only one of them can win--but perhaps they can't survive without each other.

Natasha Siegel has written an unexpected love story that feels both epic and deeply personal. Ambitious, gothic, and magical, As Many Souls as Stars is about the lengths we go to protect ourselves, our legacy, and those we love.

A heartbreaking, empowering and often hilarious debut memoir about a mother's all-consuming love, a son's perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like him

Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were "stifling his creativity." Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.

Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.

At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son's battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother's insatiable love.

"Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances. With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim's first story collection views our broken world-and broken hearts-from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human-but without nature, we are nothing at all"

Audrey Lane is perfectly fine. Really. So what if she left her high-powered job as a Very Important Journalist--and her even higher-powered long-term girlfriend--to live a quiet life as a reporter for the second-biggest newspaper in Shropshire? And so what if she keeps hearing that same higher-powered long-term now-ex-girlfriend in her head night and day, constantly judging just how small Audrey's allowed her life to become?

She's fine. She's happy. She's perfectly within her groove. Do not-in-their-groove people get weekday drunk and impulsively apply for the UK's most beloved baking show?

All right, so maybe she's not completely fine, but being on Bake Expectations is opening her world again in ways she never anticipated. First through fellow contestant Doris, whose personal story of queer love during WW2 captures Audrey's heart, imagination and journalistic interest like nothing has in ages. Then through Jennifer Hallet, the most foul-tempered (and fouler-mouthed) producer, woman, and menace Audrey has ever met. Jennifer should be off-limits, but her fire lights something unexpected inside of Audrey, making her want to burn back a million times brighter. A million times hotter. A million times more herself than she's been in a long, long time.

At the darkly glamorous height of the Roaring 20s, an independent Black intellectual and her bi-racial foster child are immersed in the vibrant world of the Harlem Renaissance – and a shocking murder on Striver’s Row – in this thrilling Jazz Age mystery for reader of Nekesia Afia, Jacqueline Winspear, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street.

1926: Harriet Stone, a liberated, educated Black woman, and Lovey, the orphaned, biracial 12-year-old she is bound to protect, are Harlem-bound, embarking on a new, hopefully less traumatic chapter in their lives. They have been invited to move from Connecticut by Harriet’s cousin, Junetta Plum, who runs a boardinghouse for independent-minded single women.

It’s a bold move, since Harriet has never met Junetta, but the fatalities of the Spanish flu and other tragedies have already forced her and Lovey to face their worst fears. Alone but for each other, they have little left to lose—or so it seems as they arrive at sophisticated Junetta’s impressive brownstone.

Her cousin has a sharp edge, which makes Harriett slightly uncomfortable. Still, after retiring to her room for the night, she finally falls asleep—only to awaken to Junetta arguing with someone downstairs. In the morning, she makes a shocking discovery at the foot of the stairs.

What ensues will lead Harriet to question Junetta’s very identity—and to wonder if she and Lovey are in danger, as well. It will also tie Harriet to five strangers. Among them, Harriet is sure someone knows something. What she doesn’t yet know is that one will play a crucial role in helping her investigate her cousin’s murder . . . that she will be tied to the others in ways she could never imagine . . . and that her life will take off in a startling new direction. . . .

When a determined killer targets her brother, a grim reaper risks everything to save him in this delightful cozy mystery.

Nora Bird works for S.C.Y.T.H.E., which might seem odd for someone as terrified of death as she is. But ever since her parents died in an accident when she was six, she's been obsessed with avoiding risk, and what better place to learn how to cheat death than the company that employs the nation's grim reapers?

The work enables Nora to learn all about the myriad ways you can kick the bucket, which is comforting...until one day, a file crosses her desk with a name she recognizes. Her twin brother’s.

The twins haven’t spoken in six months, but Charlie is all Nora has left. Completely against her cautious nature, Nora steals the file and flees, racing to her brother’s house. She begs him to trust her that his death is imminent, and they hit the road (with his parrot, Jessica, who has plenty to say) in an attempt to evade both death and S.C.Y.T.H.E., whose sole mission of collecting souls has been disrupted by Charlie’s continued existence.

Alas, every time Nora saves him, a new cause of death appears in his file. Someone is determined to take Charlie out, and Nora will have to use everything she's ever learned about death to discover the culprit.