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Susie Yang, author of White Ivy

Raised outside of Boston, Ivy Lin’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen --- and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates. Years later, Ivy is back in Boston and bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister. Just as she is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from Ivy’s past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson’s Beetle

It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life. One day, she reaches her breaking point and sets out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may not exist --- the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for an assistant to accompany her, the woman she ends up with is the last person she had in mind. Fun-loving Enid Pretty seems to attract trouble wherever she goes. But together these two British women find themselves drawn into a cross-ocean adventure that exceeds all expectations and delivers something neither of them expected to find: the transformative power of friendship.

Editorial Content for The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street

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The Christmas spirit is overtaking Tradd Street with a vengeance in this festive fifth novel in the New York Times bestselling series by Karen White.

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The Christmas spirit is overtaking Tradd Street with a vengeance in this festive fifth novel in the New York Times bestselling series by Karen White.

About the Book

The Christmas spirit is overtaking Tradd Street with a vengeance in this festive fifth novel in the New York Times bestselling series by Karen White.

Melanie Trenholm should be anticipating Christmas with nothing but joy --- after all, it’s only the second Christmas she and her husband, Jack, will celebrate with their twin toddlers. But the ongoing excavation of the centuries-old cistern in the garden of her historic Tradd Street home has been a huge millstone, both financially and aesthetically. Local students are thrilled by the possibility of unearthing more Colonial-era artifacts at the cistern, but Melanie is concerned by the ghosts connected to it that have suddenly invaded her life and her house --- and at least one of them is definitely not filled with holiday cheer.

And these relics aren’t the only precious artifacts for which people are searching. A past adversary is convinced there is a long-lost Revolutionary War treasure buried somewhere on the property Melanie inherited --- untold riches rumored to have been brought over from France by the Marquis de Lafayette himself and intended to help the Colonial war effort. It’s a treasure literally fit for a king, and there have been whispers throughout history that many have already killed --- and died --- for it. And now someone will stop at nothing to possess it --- even if it means destroying everything Melanie and Jack hold dear.

Editorial Content for Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

Teaser

GROUP is the refreshingly original debut memoir of a guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers --- her psychotherapy group --- and in turn finds human connection, and herself.

Promo

GROUP is the refreshingly original debut memoir of a guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers --- her psychotherapy group --- and in turn finds human connection, and herself.

About the Book

GROUP is the refreshingly original debut memoir of a guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers --- her psychotherapy group --- and in turn finds human connection, and herself.

Christie Tate had just been named the top student in her law school class and finally had her eating disorder under control. Why then was she driving through Chicago fantasizing about her own death? Why was she envisioning putting an end to the isolation and sadness that still plagued her in spite of her achievements?

Enter Dr. Rosen, a therapist who calmly assures her that if she joins one of his psychotherapy groups, he can transform her life. All she has to do is show up and be honest. About everything --- her eating habits, childhood, sexual history, etc. Christie is skeptical, insisting that that she is defective, beyond cure. But Dr. Rosen issues a nine-word prescription that will change everything: “You don’t need a cure, you need a witness.”

So begins her entry into the strange, terrifying and ultimately life-changing world of group therapy. Christie is initially put off by Dr. Rosen’s outlandish directives, but as her defenses break down and she comes to trust Dr. Rosen and to depend on the sessions and the prescribed nightly phone calls with various group members, she begins to understand what it means to connect.

GROUP is a deliciously addictive read, and with Christie as our guide --- skeptical of her own capacity for connection and intimacy, but hopeful in spite of herself --- we are given a front row seat to the daring, exhilarating, painful and hilarious journey that is group therapy. It is an under-explored process that breaks you down, and then reassembles you so that all the pieces finally fit.

Editorial Content for Invisible Girl

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The #1 New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE returns with an intricate thriller about a young woman’s disappearance and a group of strangers whose lives intersect in its wake.

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The #1 New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE returns with an intricate thriller about a young woman’s disappearance and a group of strangers whose lives intersect in its wake.

About the Book

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of THEN SHE WAS GONE returns with an intricate thriller about a young woman’s disappearance and a group of strangers whose lives intersect in its wake.

Owen Pick’s life is falling apart. In his 30s and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct --- accusations he strongly denies. Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel forums, where he meets a charismatic and mysterious figure.

Across the street from Owen lives the Fours family, headed by mom Cate, a physiotherapist, and dad Roan, a child psychologist. But the Fours family have a bad feeling about their neighbor, Owen. He’s a bit creepy, and their teenaged daughter swears he followed her home from the train station one night.

Meanwhile, young Saffyre Maddox spent three years as a patient of Roan Fours. Feeling abandoned when their therapy ends, she searches for other ways to maintain her connection with him, following him in the shadows and learning more than she wanted to know about Roan and his family. Then, on Valentine’s night, Saffyre disappears --- and the last person to see her alive is Owen Pick.

With evocative, vivid and unputdownable prose and plenty of disturbing twists and turns, Jewell’s latest thriller is another “haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author).

Editorial Content for The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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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.

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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.

About the Book

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.

Editorial Content for We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

Teaser

For readers gripped by IN COLD BLOOD and I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK, WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is both a haunting true-crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at a prestigious institution and a lyrical memoir of obsession and love for a girl who dreamed of rising among men.

Promo

For readers gripped by IN COLD BLOOD and I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK, WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is both a haunting true-crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at a prestigious institution and a lyrical memoir of obsession and love for a girl who dreamed of rising among men.

About the Book

For readers gripped by IN COLD BLOOD and I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK, WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is both a haunting true-crime narrative of an unsolved 1969 murder at a prestigious institution and a lyrical memoir of obsession and love for a girl who dreamed of rising among men.

You have to remember, he reminded me, that Harvard is older than the U.S. government. You have to remember because Harvard doesn't let you forget.`

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious 23-year-old graduate student in Harvard's Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.

Forty years later, Becky Cooper, a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: A Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she'd threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for 10 years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a "cowboy culture" among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.

WE KEEP THE DEAD CLOSE is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman's past onto another's present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

Editorial Content for White Ivy

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Teaser

From prize-winning Chinese American author Susie Yang, this dazzling coming-of-age novel about a young woman’s dark obsession with her privileged classmate offers sharp insights into the immigrant experience.

Promo

From prize-winning Chinese American author Susie Yang, this dazzling coming-of-age novel about a young woman’s dark obsession with her privileged classmate offers sharp insights into the immigrant experience.

About the Book

From prize-winning Chinese American author Susie Yang, this dazzling coming-of-age novel about a young woman’s dark obsession with her privileged classmate offers sharp insights into the immigrant experience.

Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar --- but you’d never know it by looking at her.

Raised outside of Boston, Ivy’s immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy’s mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen --- and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy’s mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates.

Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon’s sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable --- it feels like fate.

Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners, and weekend getaways to the cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.

Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race, WHITE IVY is a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.

Katey Schultz, author of Still Come Home

When the odds are stacked against you, doing everything right still might not be enough to protect yourself and the ones you love. The three characters in Katey Schultz’s novel are each searching for the best way to live --- all the while fighting cultural, societal and political forces far beyond their control. As their paths intersect, STILL COME HOME explores how their decisions will forever alter each other’s lives.

Our Reader-Selected Best Books of 2020

Over the last two months, we asked you to share both your favorite book that you read with your book group and your favorite book that you read outside your group in 2020.

The results are in! Below are the top 10 selected titles in each category.