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Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos. But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Diane Marie Brown, author of Black Candle Women

Generations of Montrose women have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when 17-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it’s even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies. Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, the family is set on a collision course dating back to a Voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans’s French Quarter.

Emilia Hart, author of Weyward

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from her great-aunt. The cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she begins to suspect that her great-aunt had a secret. 1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer. Her mother taught her their magic, which is rooted in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But as the evidence for witchcraft is set out against Altha, she knows it will take all of her powers to maintain her freedom. 1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family's grand, crumbling estate. Her mother was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom.

Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street

PINEAPPLE STREET follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan. Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process. Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t have and must decide what kind of person she wants to be.

Julia Kelly, author of The Lost English Girl

Raised in a strict Catholic family, Viv Byrne finds herself pregnant after a fling with Joshua Levinson, a Jewish man. When Joshua makes a life-changing choice on their wedding day, Viv is forced into the arms of her disapproving family. Five years later and on the eve of World War II, Viv is faced with the impossible choice to evacuate her young daughter to the countryside estate of the affluent Thompson family. In New York City, Joshua gives up his failing musical career to serve in the Royal Air Force. However, tragedy strikes when Viv learns that the countryside safe haven she sent her daughter to wasn’t immune from the horrors of war. It is only years later, with Joshua’s help, that Viv learns the secrets of their shared past and what it will take to put a family back together again.

William Kent Krueger, author of The Levee: An Audio Novella

It’s 1927, and the most devastating flood in American history has swelled the Mississippi River to a width of 80 miles. In an attempt to save a family trapped by the rising water, four men in a tiny rowboat battle the treacherous flow. Three are convicts, on loan from the local prison and pressed into service. The fourth, the leader of the team, is driven by his own hidden motives. But to their surprise upon arrival at Ballymore, an ancestral home protected by a high, circular levee, not everyone in the family feels the need to be saved. As the threat from the flood increases and time ticks away, the crew and the family must decide on a course of action, and a desperate plan is hatched to save the weakening levee and all it was built to protect.

Editorial Content for Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole

Teaser

Sadness is your superpower. In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon QUIET explores the power of the bittersweet personality, revealing a misunderstood side of mental health and creativity while offering a roadmap to facing grief in order to live life to the fullest.

Promo

Sadness is your superpower. In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon QUIET explores the power of the bittersweet personality, revealing a misunderstood side of mental health and creativity while offering a roadmap to facing grief in order to live life to the fullest.

About the Book

Sadness is your superpower. In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon QUIET explores the power of the bittersweet personality, revealing a misunderstood side of mental health and creativity while offering a roadmap to facing grief in order to live life to the fullest.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of long­ing, poignancy and sorrow; an acute aware­ness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death --- bitter and sweet --- are forever paired.
 
If you’ve ever wondered why you like sad music...
If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day...
If you react intensely to music, art, nature and beauty...
 
Then you probably identify with the bitter­sweet state of mind.
 
With QUIET, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an un­tapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she em­ploys the same mix of research, storytelling and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, con­nection and transcendence.
 
Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain, whether from a death or breakup, addiction or illness. If we don’t acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others via abuse, domination or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know --- or will know --- loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another.
 
At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, BITTERSWEET brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.

Editorial Content for I Have Some Questions for You

Teaser

Award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart.

Promo

Award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart.

About the Book

The riveting new novel --- "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age" (San Francisco Chronicle) --- from the author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist THE GREAT BELIEVERS.

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past --- the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers --- needs --- to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought --- if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Editorial Content for A Spell of Good Things

Teaser

A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS is a dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption, from the celebrated author of STAY WITH ME.

Promo

A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS is a dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption, from the celebrated author of STAY WITH ME.

About the Book

A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption from the celebrated author of STAY WITH ME, "in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" (The New York Times).

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. Because his father has lost his job, Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers, begging when he must and dreaming of a big future.

Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of an ascendant politician.

When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola's and Eniola’s lives become intertwined.

In her breathtaking second novel, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ shines her light on Nigeria, the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots, and the shared humanity that lives in between.

Editorial Content for The Woman with the Cure

Teaser

She gave up everything --- and changed the world. From the bestselling author of MRS. POE comes a riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic.

Promo

She gave up everything --- and changed the world. From the bestselling author of MRS. POE comes a riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic.

About the Book

She gave up everything --- and changed the world.

A riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic, from the bestselling author of MRS. POE.

In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities in lockdown. Some of the world’s best minds are engaged in the race to find a vaccine. The man who succeeds will be a god.

But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants, to becoming a doctor --- often the only woman in the room --- she hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood.

This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine --- and to decide what is forgivable, and how much should be sacrificed, in pursuit of the cure.