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Jennifer Wizbowski, author of Poinsettia Girl: The Story of Agata della Pietà

Ten-year-old Agata’s world is shaken at the sudden death of her mother. Left only with her egregious father, a working musician in Venice, her ailing grandmother sends her to the Ospedale della Pietà, a well-known orphanage. Agata auditions for the conservatory-style music school where music is both salvation and spectacle. Hidden behind ornate metal grates, adorned with poinsettias in their hair, the singers are veiled in mystery, their ethereal music drawing noble audiences. Just as Agata reaches the height of her musical journey, a marriage proposal from someone outside the audience tempts her with the promise of a new life --- a return to the old neighborhood she’s longed for and a home she barely remembers. Is her purpose rooted in the music that shaped her, or in the love that might free her?

Naima Coster, author of Take What You Can

Val and Milly fell in love with France at the same time they fell in love with each other and became immediate best friends. Then they bonded as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip. Now they are in their 30s, each married and with a baby girl on the way. When Milly suggests Val move to New York so they can raise their daughters together, it’s a resounding yes. Despite their excitement, the pair secretly wonders if their friendship has always worked best as a trio. On that first trip to France, these two motherless daughters were taken under the wing of an older woman named Helene. She showered them with money, love and attention and showed them the possibilities of an independent and abundant future. But now, without Helene and her guidance, who are Milly and Val?

Kelly Anderson, author of The Wild Beneath

Annie MacLeod always knew she was different, growing up on a sailboat in the Pacific Northwest, navigating by stars and swimming with sea creatures alongside her parents and best friend, Evan. But when a tsunami shatters her world, Annie is stranded on land and forced to confront how eccentric she is. In the wreckage, she rescues a wordless man named Walker, who emits a hum only she can hear. His touch gives her visions of the ocean’s hidden world. Yet, even as she is pulled toward him, Evan remains on dry land, offering the stability she may have to leave behind. But then Walker vanishes, along with the answers she needs about who she really is. Six years later, Annie has left the sea and buried the past --- until Walker’s otherworldly sound returns, pulling her back toward the ocean and the life she abandoned.

Laura Moriarty, author of Sunlight Finds You

It’s 1949, early in the Cold War, but St. Petersburg, Florida is warm, lush, and booming with newcomers seeking sunshine and opportunity. For 17-year-old Nora, St. Pete feels like paradise, especially after she meets and wins over Leonard, the shy, brilliant son of transplanted New Yorkers. Nora and Leonard are soon spending balmy days and evenings together, and in her adoring, encouraging company, he grows more confident. His sophisticated mother welcomes Nora into their lives, but his father distrusts her motives. When his suspicions are seemingly confirmed, Nora is forced to cut contact. In her longing and fear, she takes a chance that changes her life, exiling her from the family she loves and setting off a chain of secrets and betrayals that will follow her into adulthood.

Paul Yoon, author of Etna

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home --- to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

Chris Bohjalian, author of The Amateur

1978: Temperatures are flirting with 90 on an August day when 18-year-old Mira Winston drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams into the temple of high school junior Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives. In the wake of this terrible accident, Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman.

Editorial Content for The Amateur

Teaser

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddie with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men and a teenager on trial.

Promo

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddie with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men and a teenager on trial.

About the Book

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of MIDWIVES and THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT: When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddie with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men and a teenager on trial.

1978: It is the first Thursday in August, and temperatures are flirting with 90 when 18-year-old Mira Winston drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.

In the wake of this terrible accident --- and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident --- Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddie’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman.

A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, THE AMATEUR asks: What happens when one small moment --- a swing, a ball, a piece of string --- changes the course of an entire life?

Editorial Content for Beginning Middle End

Teaser

From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

Promo

From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

About the Book

From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo --- cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up --- her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

BEGINNING MIDDLE END evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made, and what happens when they disappear?

Warm, funny and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

Editorial Content for City of Widows

Teaser

An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.

Promo

An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.

About the Book

From bestselling novelist Nadia Hashimi comes a gripping, occasionally terrifying, yet ultimately hopeful novel focusing on the women of Afghanistan in the years since the Taliban regained power.

In February 2020, the US began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of occupation. A whole generation of Afghan women had been born during that time --- women who had grown up in relative peace, gone to school, entered the professions, even served in the army and Parliament. The women of Afghanistan watched as the Taliban filled the streets again. They knew everything was about to change.

In the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Kabul, women are TV newscasters, shop owners, doctors, teachers, lawyers, even soldiers. They include Marjan, who fought with the Afghan army and will risk everything to keep her daughter, Hawa, safe. In her earlier days Marjan was called Rahima and had lived the life of a bacha posh --- a girl raised as a boy until she came of age. Forced into an early marriage, Rahima took the name Marjan when she fled her warlord husband. She’s created a whole new life for herself, one she will not give up easily.

So has Soraya, who defiantly wore red lipstick as she led the army’s all-female combat force over the objections of her upper-class family. Soraya is now a wanted woman whose brother may choose not to shelter her from the Taliban. What will become of her? Or Mina, a journalist and broadcaster whose beautiful face is known to everyone in Kabul --- including the new regime?

Fight or flight? Or find a third way? One thing is for certain: none of these women will meekly accept her fate.

An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.

Editorial Content for Etna

Book

Teaser

Beloved author Paul Yoon, winner of The Story Prize, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Promo

Beloved author Paul Yoon, winner of The Story Prize, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

About the Book

Beloved author Paul Yoon, winner of The Story Prize, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.

Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home --- to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.

Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?

This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.