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Editorial Content for Fencing with the King

Teaser

With sharp insight into modern politics and family dynamics, taboos around mental illness, and our inescapable relationship to the past, FENCING WITH THE KING asks how we contend with inheritance: familial and cultural, hidden and openly contested.

Promo

With sharp insight into modern politics and family dynamics, taboos around mental illness, and our inescapable relationship to the past, FENCING WITH THE KING asks how we contend with inheritance: familial and cultural, hidden and openly contested.

About the Book

A mesmerizing breakthrough novel of family myths and inheritances by the award-winning author of CRESCENT.

The King of Jordan is turning 60! How better to celebrate the occasion than with his favorite pastime --- fencing --- and with his favorite sparring partner, Gabriel Hamdan, who must be enticed back from America, where he lives with his wife and his daughter, Amani.

Amani, a divorced poet, jumps at the chance to accompany her father to his homeland for the King’s birthday. Her father’s past is a mystery to her --- even more so since she found a poem on blue airmail paper slipped into one of his old Arabic books, written by his mother, a Palestinian refugee who arrived in Jordan during World War I. Her words hint at a long-kept family secret, carefully guarded by Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King, who has quite personal reasons for inviting his brother to the birthday party. In a sibling rivalry that carries ancient echoes, the Hamdan brothers must face a reckoning, with themselves and with each other --- one that almost costs Amani her life.

With sharp insight into modern politics and family dynamics, taboos around mental illness, and our inescapable relationship to the past, FENCING WITH THE KING asks how we contend with inheritance: familial and cultural, hidden and openly contested. Shot through with warmth and vitality, intelligence and spirit, it is absorbing and satisfying on every level, a wise and rare literary treat.

Editorial Content for The Husbands

Teaser

The New York Times and Reese Witherspoon Book Club bestselling author of WHISPER NETWORK returns in a novel that asks: To what lengths will a woman go for a little more help from her husband?

Promo

The New York Times and Reese Witherspoon Book Club bestselling author of WHISPER NETWORK returns in a novel that asks: To what lengths will a woman go for a little more help from her husband?

About the Book

The New York Times and Reese Witherspoon Book Club bestselling author of WHISPER NETWORK returns in a novel that asks: To what lengths will a woman go for a little more help from her husband?

Nora Spangler is a successful attorney but when it comes to domestic life, she finds she’s always the one doing more. She packs the lunches, schedules the doctor appointments, knows where the extra paper towel rolls are, and designs and orders the holiday cards. Her husband works hard, too…but why does it seem like she is always working so much harder?

The Spanglers go house hunting in Dynasty Ranch, a nice suburban neighborhood where Nora meets a group of high-powered women --- a tech CEO, a neurosurgeon, an award-winning therapist, a bestselling author --- with enviably supportive husbands. When she agrees to help with a resident’s gruesome wrongful death case, she delves into the lives of the women there. She finds the air is different in Dynasty Ranch. The women aren’t hanging on by a thread.

They swear by an unorthodox method of couples’ therapy that has transformed their relationships. Even as she fears digging up the secrets at the heart of her own marriage, Nora is tantalized by the possibility of a life that’s under control. The men seem strange. But maybe they’re just evolved. Soon Nora is relishing that her husband now shoulders half the load at home. But something is deeply wrong in Dynasty Ranch. As the case unravels, Nora uncovers a plot that may explain the secret to having it all. One that’s worth killing for.

Smart, sharp and timely, this novel imagines a world where the burden of the “second shift” is equally shared --- and what it might take to get there.

Editorial Content for Lessons in Chemistry

Teaser

Meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the star of a beloved TV cooking show.

Promo

Meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the star of a beloved TV cooking show.

About the Book

A must-read debut novel! Meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the star of a beloved TV cooking show.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s, and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel Prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with --- of all things --- her mind. True chemistry results. 

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show, "Supper at Six." Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo. 

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Editorial Content for Memphis

Book

Teaser

MEMPHIS is a spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

Promo

MEMPHIS is a spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

About the Book

A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.

Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass --- only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.

As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger --- that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.

Unfolding over 70 years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, MEMPHIS paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.

Editorial Content for The Paper Palace

Teaser

In the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades.

Promo

In the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades.

About the Book

A story of summer, secrets, love and lies: in the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades.

It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” --- the family summer place that she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next 24 hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn’t forever changed the course of their lives. As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity.

Tender yet devastating, THE PAPER PALACE considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.

Editorial Content for Sea of Tranquility

Teaser

The award-winning, bestselling author of STATION ELEVEN and THE GLASS HOTEL returns with a novel of art, time, love and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon 500 years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Promo

The award-winning, bestselling author of STATION ELEVEN and THE GLASS HOTEL returns with a novel of art, time, love and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon 500 years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

About the Book

The award-winning, bestselling author of STATION ELEVEN and THE GLASS HOTEL returns with a novel of art, time, love and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon 500 years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is 18 years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal --- an experience that shocks him to his core. 

Two centuries later, a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, SEA OF TRANQUILITY is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Editorial Content for True Biz

Book

Teaser

From the acclaimed author of GIRL AT WAR comes TRUE BIZ, which follows a year of seismic romantic, political and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf.

Promo

From the acclaimed author of GIRL AT WAR comes TRUE BIZ, which follows a year of seismic romantic, political and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf.

About the Book

An “electrifying” (Celeste Ng) novel that follows a year of seismic romantic, political and familial shifts for a teacher and her students at a boarding school for the deaf, from the acclaimed author of GIRL AT WAR.

True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the headmistress, who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin and February find their lives inextricable from one another --- and changed forever.

This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.

Miranda Cowley Heller Event Art

Janet Skeslien Charles Event

April 18, 2022

We appreciate all of you who shared your thoughts on how your group organizes in our recent survey.

64% of you email each other, while 30.5% of you just decide what you are reading, and when you are getting together next, while you are in your meeting. 10% have a Facebook page for organizing, while 8% have a library coordinating for them. 7% just call each other. A number of you mentioned what I am calling an “Annual Selection,” where you select all the books in advance, as well as your meeting times, and then there are no logistics to figure out. Bravo on that!