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February 29, 2024

I love to see how clever people are with the refreshments that are served at book groups. For our last meeting, where we discussed THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters, Julia, who feels like our book group’s honorary baker, made a berry torte, which was terrific. I brought out blue and white striped plates to go with it. For humor, we often use plates that are left over from the birthday party of someone’s child in the group. They always make me smile and remember the themed parties that I did with my boys.

Chantha Nguon, author of Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

In SLOW NOODLES, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone --- her home, her family, her country --- all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse and weaving silk.

Kate Quinn, author of The Phoenix Crown

San Francisco, 1906. Two very different women hope to change their fortunes: Gemma, a golden-haired, silver-voiced soprano, and Suling, a petite and resolute Chinatown embroideress. Their paths cross when they are drawn into the orbit of Henry Thornton, a charming railroad magnate whose extraordinary collection of Chinese antiques includes the fabled Phoenix Crown, a legendary relic of Beijing’s fallen Summer Palace. His patronage offers Gemma and Suling the chance of a lifetime, but their lives are thrown into turmoil when a devastating earthquake rips San Francisco apart and Thornton disappears, leaving behind a mystery reaching further than anyone could have imagined…until the Phoenix Crown reappears five years later at a sumptuous Paris costume ball, drawing Gemma and Suling together in one last desperate quest for justice.

Lara Love Hardin, author of The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Lara is convicted of 32 felonies. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and LORD OF THE FLIES. But Lara brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller.” When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her.

Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Anna Quindlen, author of After Annie

When Annie Brown dies suddenly, her husband, children and closest friend are left to find a way forward without the woman who has been the lynchpin of all their lives. Bill is overwhelmed without his beloved wife, and Annemarie wrestles with the bad habits her best friend had helped her overcome. And Ali, the eldest of Annie’s children, has to grow up overnight, to care for her younger brothers and even her father and to puzzle out for herself many of the mysteries of adult life. Over the course of the next year, what saves them all is Annie --- ever-present in their minds, loving but not sentimental, caring but nobody’s fool, a voice in their heads that is funny, sharp and remarkably clear. The power she has given to those who loved her is the power to go on without her. The lesson they learn is that no one beloved is ever truly gone.

Editorial Content for Belonging

Book

Teaser

Appealing to readers of Delia Owens’ WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, Kristin Hannah’s FIREFLY LANE and Ann Packer’s THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, BELONGING is a heartbreaking and hopeful coming-of-age story that traverses lifelong friendship, first love and a young woman’s fierce desire to transcend her traumatic childhood.

Promo

Appealing to readers of Delia Owens’ WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, Kristin Hannah’s FIREFLY LANE and Ann Packer’s THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, BELONGING is a heartbreaking and hopeful coming-of-age story that traverses lifelong friendship, first love and a young woman’s fierce desire to transcend her traumatic childhood.

About the Book

Appealing to readers of Delia Owens’ WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, Kristin Hannah’s FIREFLY LANE and Ann Packer’s THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, BELONGING is a heartbreaking and hopeful coming-of-age story that traverses lifelong friendship, first love and a young woman’s fierce desire to transcend her traumatic childhood.

Jenny is 13 when an epic dust storm rolls into her central California town in December 1977. Bedridden after contracting a life-threatening illness in the storm and suffering a shocking loss, Jenny realizes she will never be cared for by the mother who both neglects and terrifies her or the father who allows it. She relies on her cousin, Heather, who has the loving home Jenny longs for; her beloved great-uncle, Gino, the last link between generations; her best friend, Henry, a free spirit with whom she shares an inexplicable bond; and earnest baseball star, Billy, who becomes her first love.

After a stunning turn of events in both their lives, Jenny and Henry leave for college in LA together in the summer of 1982 --- Jenny fleeing a broken heart, and Henry running from something he can’t reveal, even to his best friend. When she returns home years later, the life Jenny so carefully created collides with the one she left behind.

Spanning three decades, BELONGING is about first love and heartbreak, friendship and secrets, family and forgiveness, hometowns and coming of age, and memory and music. The heart of the story is Jenny’s struggle to undo the binds of a childhood that have deeply affected her life, the painful path to love endured by children raised in alcoholic families, and the grim reality of believing you must hide a part of yourself in order to belong.

Editorial Content for Come and Get It

Teaser

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of SUCH A FUN AGE comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

Promo

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of SUCH A FUN AGE comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

About the Book

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of SUCH A FUN AGE comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, COME AND GET IT is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion and bad behavior --- and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.

Editorial Content for Good Material

Teaser

From the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS and EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE comes a story of heartbreak and friendship and how to survive both.

Promo

From the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS and EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE comes a story of heartbreak and friendship and how to survive both.

About the Book

From the New York Times bestselling author of GHOSTS and EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE: a story of heartbreak and friendship and how to survive both.

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is without a home, waiting for his stand-up career to take off, and wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking.

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story.

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.

Editorial Content for A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

Teaser

In this enchanting love story from the New York Times bestselling author of SEVEN DAYS IN JUNE, a free-spirited florist and an enigmatic musician are irreversibly linked through the history, art and magic of Harlem.

Promo

In this enchanting love story from the New York Times bestselling author of SEVEN DAYS IN JUNE, a free-spirited florist and an enigmatic musician are irreversibly linked through the history, art and magic of Harlem.

About the Book

In this enchanting love story from the New York Times bestselling author of SEVEN DAYS IN JUNE, a free-spirited florist and an enigmatic musician are irreversibly linked through the history, art and magic of Harlem.

Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian Ms. Della invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A LOVE SONG FOR RICKI WILDE is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.