Recommended Reads
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How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive
Max Maurey should be on top of the world. He's a famous horror director. But it's the 80s, and he's directing cheap slashers for audiences who only crave more blood, not real art. Max's slimy producer refuses to fund any of his new ideas. Sally Priest dreams of being the Final Girl. She knows she's got what it takes to score the lead role, even if she's only been cast in small parts so far. When Sally meets Max at his latest wrap party, she sets out to impress him and prove her scream queen prowess. But when Max discovers an old camera that filmed a very real Hollywood horror, he knows that he has to use this camera for his next movie. The only problem is that it came with a cryptic warning and sometimes wails. By the time Max discovers the true evil lying within, he's already dead set on finishing the scariest movie ever put to film. Like it or not, it's Sally's time to shine as the Final Girl.
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The Spice Gate
Relics of a mysterious god, the Spice Gates connect the eight far-flung kingdoms, each separated by a distinct spice and only accessible by those born with a special mark. This is not a caste of distinction, though, but one of subjugation: Spice Carriers suffer the lashes of their masters, the weight of the spices they bear on their backs, and the jolting pain of the Gates themselves. Amir is one such Spice Carrier, and he dreams of escaping his fate of being a mule for the rich who gorge themselves on spices like the addicted gluttons they are. More important than relieving his own pain, though, is saving his family, especially his brother, born like him with the unfortunate spice mark that designates him for a life of servitude. But while Amir makes his plans for freedom, something stirs in the inhospitable spaces between the kingdoms.
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Other Rivers
More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation,” now in their forties—while teaching current undergrads, Hessler gained a unique perspective on China’s incredible transformation.
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We Refuse
The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force--from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt--has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.
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Navola
In Navola, a bustling city-state dominated by a handful of influential families, the di Regulai family—merchant bankers with a vast empire—has nurtured tendrils that stretch to the farthest reaches of the known world. And though they claim not to be political, their staggering wealth has bought cities and toppled kingdoms. Soon, Davico di Regulai will be expected to take the reins of power from his father and demonstrate his mastery of the games of Navolese diplomacy: knowing who to trust and who to doubt, and how to read what lies hidden behind a smile. But in Navola, strange and ancient undercurrents lurk behind the gilt and grandeur—like the fossilized dragon eye in the family’s possession, a potent symbol of their raw power and a talisman that seems to be summoning Davico to act.
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The Spellshop
Kiela, a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.
When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home. Then Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.
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The God of the Woods
Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances.
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The Secret History of Sharks
John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks’ unparalleled reign for 500 million years. The Secret History of Sharks showcases the global search to discover sharks’ largely unknown evolution, led by Long and dozens of other extraordinary scientists. Long introduces an enormous range of astonishing organisms: a thirty-foot-long shark with a deadly saw blade of jagged teeth protruding from its lower jaws, a monster giant clams crusher, and bizarre sharks fossilized while in their mating ritual. The book also includes startling new facts about the mighty megalodon, with its sixty-six-foot-long body, massive jaws, and six-inch serrated teeth.
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Love & Whiskey
Embark on a captivating journey with Love & Whiskey. New York Times bestselling author Fawn Weaver unveils the hidden narrative behind one of America's most iconic whiskey brands. This book is a vibrant exploration set in the present day, delving into the life and legacy of Nearest Green, the African American distilling genius who played a pivotal role in the creation of the whiskey that bears Jack Daniel's name.
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Iron Star
From his youth as a revolutionist to his time as a Deputy U.S. Marshal, aging lawman Iron St. John has become a larger-than-life figure—and in the process, the man has disappeared behind the myth. During his brief, unsuccessful political career, St. John published his memoirs—a sanitized version of his adventures to appeal to the masses. A generation later, the clouded truth of this giant of the Old West has been all but lost. Now, Buck Jones, a pioneering film star, is vying for a cinematic story that will launch his career to incredible heights. He approaches Emmet Rawlings, a retired Pinkerton detective, to set the record of St. John’s life straight once and for all. Twenty years ago, Rawlings accompanied St. John on his final manhunt, and in desperate need for the funding a successful book promises, he dives deep into St. John’s past—and his own buried memories—to tell the truth about this part-time hero.
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Don't Let the Devil Ride
Addison McKellar isn't clueless--she knows she and her husband Dean don't have the perfect marriage--but she's still shocked when he completely vanishes from her life. At first Addison is annoyed, but as days stretch into a week and she's repeatedly stonewalled by Dean's friends and associates, her frustration turns into genuine alarm. When even the police seem dismissive of her concerns, Addison turns to her father's old friend, legendary Memphis PI Porter Hayes. Dean angered some very dangerous people before he disappeared--people who have already killed to get what they want--and they won't hesitate to come after his family to even the score.
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Incidents Around the House
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?” When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the question over and over, Bela understands that unless she says yes, her family will soon pay. Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe, but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is about to unravel. But Other Mommy needs an answer.
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Code Dependent
On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.
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Stowaway
Rats are creatures which inspire fear and fascination in equal measure. Their lives are more closely entwined with humans than any other animal, but they remain the most misunderstood of all species. In Stowaway, Joe Shute, explores our complex and often contradictory relationship with the rat. He travels the world from sub-Saharan Africa to the Rocky Mountains and visits some of the most rodent-infested cities on earth to unpick the myths we tell ourselves about rats and investigate the unexplored secrets of their own extraordinary lives.
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Parade
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries. When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.
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Same As It Ever Was
Julia Ames, after a youth marked by upheaval and emotional turbulence, has found herself on the placid plateau of mid-life. Having nearly derailed herself several times, making desperate bids for the kind of connection that always felt inaccessible to her, she finally feels, at age fifty seven, that she has a firm handle on things. She's unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor's edge.
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The Great River
In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of the wild and unruly Mississippi, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.
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BoyMom
Ruth Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged.
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The Stars Too Fondly
Cleo and her friends really, truly didn't mean to steal this spaceship. They just wanted to know why, twenty years ago, the entire Providence crew vanished without a trace. But then the stupid dark matter engine started all on its own, and now these four twenty-somethings are en route to Proxima Centauri, being harangued by a snarky hologram that has the face and attitude of the ship's missing captain, Billie. As the ship gets deeper into space, the laws of physics start twisting, old mysteries come crawling back to life, and Cleo's initially combative relationship with Billie turns into something deeper and more desperate than either woman was prepared for.
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Service Model
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot discovers they can also do something else they never did before: They can run away. Fleeing the household they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose. Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming.
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The Borrowed Hills
In early 2001, a lethal disease breaks out on the hill farms of northern England, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke as they burn the carcasses. Two neighboring shepherds, Steve Elliman and William Herne, lose everything and set their sights on a wealthy farm in the south with its flock of prizewinning animals. Their sheep rustling leads to more and more difficult decisions. Steve’s only distraction is his growing fascination with William’s enigmatic and independent wife, Helen. When their mountain home comes under the sway of a lawless outsider, Colin Tinley, it is left to Steve to save himself and Helen in a savage conflict that threatens the ancient ways of the Lakeland fells.
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A Letter to the Luminous Deep
A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish. A year later, E.'s sister Sophy, and Henerey's brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery, piecing together the letters, sketches and field notes left behind--and learn what their siblings' disappearance might mean for life as they know it.
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A Walk in the Park
A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”
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The Asteroid Hunter
On September 11, 1999, humanity made a monumental discovery in the vastness of space. Scientists uncovered an asteroid of immense scientific importance they christened Bennu. Hurtling through space, it threatens to collide with our planet on September 24, 2182. Dr. Dante Lauretta, the Principal Investigator of NASA's audacious OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission, embarked with his team on a daring quest to retrieve a precious sample from the asteroid's surface -- one that held the potential to not only unlock the secrets of life's origins but also to avert an unprecedented catastrophe.
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Look on the Bright Side
Lark Smith has always had a plan for her life: find a fantastic guy, create a marriage as blissful as her parents’, pop out a couple of kids and build a rewarding career as an oncologist. Things aren’t going so well. A potential solution comes from the foul-tempered and renowned surgeon Lorenzo Santini (aka Dr. Satan). He needs a date this summer for his sister’s wedding. In exchange, he could make a few introductions and maybe get Lark back into the field of her choice. As a sucker for old people and fake relationships, Lark agrees. Meanwhile, Lark’s mom has moved in with Lark’s colorful landlady, Joy, and an unlikely friendship blossoms. The three women have a long summer and a big beautiful house on the ocean to figure out that the best things in life aren’t planned at all.
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You Are Here
Adrift after his wife's departure, Michael has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they've been looking for. Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future if they can survive the journey.
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Rabbit Heart
Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. In her mother’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding into her own fraught adolescence. She reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.
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A Fatal Inheritance
Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. Through meticulous research and riveting storytelling, Lawrence Ingrassia takes us from the 1960s—when Dr. Frederick Pei Li and Dr. Joseph Fraumeni Jr. first met, not yet knowing that they would help make a groundbreaking discovery that would affect cancer patients for decades to come—to present day, as Ingrassia and countless others continue to unpack and build upon Li and Fraumeni’s initial discoveries, and to understand what this means for their families.
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Escape Velocity
Space Habitat Altaire is the premier luxury resort in low Earth orbit, playground of the privileged and the perfect location to host reunions for the Rochford Institute. Aboard the Altaire for their 25th reunion, finance magnate Ava pursues the truth about her brother’s murder during their senior year, which cast a dark shadow over their time at Rochford. Laz, ambassador and political scion, hopes to finally win Ava’s heart. Sloane, collecting secrets to conceal his family’s decline, angles for a key client. And Henry, heir to a healthcare empire, creates an unorthodox opportunity to get to Mars in a last-ditch effort to outrun a childhood secret.While these erstwhile friends settle scores and rack up points, they fail to notice that their own futures aren’t the only ones at stake.
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The Last Murder at the End of the World
Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched. On the island: One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. Then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island--and everyone on it. But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer--and they don't even know it.
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Amphibious Soul
In this thrilling memoir of a life spent exploring the most incredible places on Earth--from the Great African Seaforest to the crocodile lairs of the Okavango Delta--Craig Foster reveals how we can attend to the earthly beauty around us and deepen our love for all living things, whether we make our homes in the country, the city, or anywhere in between. Foster explores his struggles to remain present to life when a disconnection from nature and the demands of his professional life begin to deaden his senses. And his own reliance on nature's rejuvenating spiritual power is put to the test when catastrophe strikes close to home.
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Chasing Hope
Reporting from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, while traveling far afield to India, Africa, and Europe, Nicholas Kristof witnessed and wrote about century-defining events: the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the Yemeni civil war, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, and the wave of addiction and despair that swept through his hometown and a broad swath of working-class America. Fully aware that coverage of atrocities generates considerably fewer page views than the coverage of politics, he nevertheless continued to weaponize his pen against regimes and groups violating basic human rights, raising the cost of oppression and torture. Some of the risks he took while doing so make for hair-raising reading.
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All Fours
A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom.
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This Strange Eventful History
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state--separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
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The Widow Spy
Kate Warne is many things: the country’s first female detective, a Pinkerton agent, and a union spy. It’s August 1861, and her latest assignment could finally end the bloody war and bring the fractured United States together again. All she has to do is win the trust of her captive: Confederate spy and socialite Rose Greenhow. But with Rose well aware of Kate’s working-class background and belief in abolitionism, it seems an impossible task. Worst, Kate has secrets that make her vulnerable, such as her forbidden love affair with a colleague. With time running out, Kate faces not only the moral and political divides between herself and Rose but also the ones she made in her own heart and life.
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Like a Mother
Sarah and Adam Granatt had the perfect suburban life: a beautiful house, an adorable daughter, a baby on the way, and a once-in-a-lifetime love. They were the couple everyone envied until Adam died and his secrets begin to emerge. The first: A woman named Candace introduces herself to Sarah as Adam’s mother when he had always said his mother was dead. Adam also lied about making sure Sarah, Ellie, and the new baby would be taken care of financially when there’s no money. Candace proves she is who she says but admits the relationship between her and Adam was strained. But she can offer emotional support and a place to stay until after the baby is born. Living in Adam’s childhood home, Sarah notices Candace’s strange obsession with her, and the house begins to feel less like salvation and more like a cage. Candace might not be the caring mother-in-law she seems. Maybe Adam had good reason to pretend that his mother was dead.
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Left for Dead
The true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812--a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation, and the desperate struggle for survival.
In Left for Dead, Eric Jay Dolin tells the true story of a wild and fateful encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal--an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.
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The Light Eaters
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.
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Paper Cage
Lorraine Henry is generally content to keep her head down and get on with her work as a records clerk at the Masterton police station. But when children start going missing in her small town, Lo can't help but pay attention. After all, she has Bradley, her young nephew, to worry about, and the cops don't seem to be putting much effort into finding the kids. And then the unthinkable happens: Bradley disappears. Distraught but determined, Lorraine vows to bring him home no matter what. And, together with a detective from Wellington, she embarks on a dangerous mission, one that will illuminate all the good and all the bad in Masterton.
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The Demon of Unrest
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Fort Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
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The Unexpected
While The Unexpected is a book that Oster hopes no one needs, the reality is that 50 percent of pregnancies include complications, a fact we don’t talk about. Preeclampsia, miscarriage, hyperemesis gravidarum, preterm birth, postpartum depression: these are lonely experiences, and that isolation makes treatment harder to access—and crucial research and policy change less likely to happen. The Unexpected lays out the data on recurrence and treatments shown to lower or mitigate risk for these conditions in subsequent pregnancies, with insights from lauded maternal fetal medicine specialist Dr. Nathan Fox. By bridging the knowledge gap and making space for difficult conversations, The Unexpected promises to make the hardest parts of pregnancy a little bit less so.
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A Fate Inked in Blood
Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish but dreams of becoming a warrior. Freya’s dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. And it’s been foretold that such magic will unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate. Believing he’s destined to rule Skaland as king, the fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath and orders Bjorn to protect her from their enemies. Desperate to prove her strength, Freya must train to fight and learn to control her magic. The greatest test of all, however, may be resisting her forbidden attraction to Bjorn.
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Extinction
Erebus Resort, occupying a magnificent, hundred-thousand acre valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, offers guests the experience of viewing woolly mammoths, Irish Elk, and giant ground sloths in their native habitat, brought back from extinction through the magic of genetic manipulation. When a billionaire's son and his new wife are kidnapped and murdered in the Erebus back country by what is assumed to be a gang of eco-terrorists, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frances Cash partners with county sheriff James Colcord to track down the perpetrators. As killings mount and the valley is evacuated, Cash and Colcord must confront an ancient, intelligent, and malevolent presence at Erebus, bent not on resurrection—but extinction.
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The Lost Dresses of Italy
Verona, 1947. Textile historian Marianne Baxter comes to post-war Italy with one thing on her mind: three pristine Victorian dresses, once owned by the famous poet Christina Rossetti. Hidden away in a trunk for nearly a century, they were recently discovered at the Fondazione Museo Menigatti and Marianne’s expertise is needed before they go on exhibit. Verona, 1864. Christina Rossetti returns to her family’s homeland in hopes of leaving her unfulfilled personal life and poetry career in England and beginning a new chapter. After a chance encounter with an old family friend, she finds a gift her father once gave her: a small ornate box with the three Muses carved into the lid. When she stumbles across a secret compartment, Christina finds a letter from her father with an urgent and personal request. The letter, speaking of a pendant and stolen book that must be returned, connects Marianne and Christina—and leaves them both with more questions than answers.
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Why We Remember
A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.
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Our Kindred Creatures
Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, animals' suffering had rarely been discussed. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst. On the side of reform were such leaders as George Angell, the inspirational head of Massachusetts’s animal-welfare society and the American publisher of the novel Black Beauty; Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Caroline White of Philadelphia, who fought against medical experiments that used live animals; and many more, including some of the nation’s earliest veterinarians and conservationists. Caught in the movement’s crosshairs were transformational figures in their own right: animal impresarios such as P. T. Barnum, industrial meat barons such as Philip D. Armour, and the nation’s rising medical establishment, all of whom put forward their own, very different sets of modern norms about how animals should be treated.
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How to End a Love Story
Helen Zhang hasn't seen Grant Shepard once in the thirteen years since the tragic accident that bound their lives together forever. Now Helen's scored a coveted spot in the writers' room of the TV adaptation of her popular young adult novels in LA. Screenwriter Grant has done everything in his power to move on from the past. He knows he shouldn't have taken the job on Helen's show, but it will open doors to developing his own projects that he just can't pass up. Grant's exactly as Helen remembers him--charming, funny, popular, and lovable in ways that she's never been. And Helen's exactly as Grant remembers too--brilliant, beautiful, closed off. But working together is messy, and electrifying, and Helen's parents, who have never forgiven Grant, have no idea he's in the picture at all.
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The Wings Upon Her Back
Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai. But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.
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Soldiers and Kings
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
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Kingdom of Play
In Kingdom of Play, critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution?
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The British Booksellers
A tenant farmer's son had no business daring to dream of a future with an earl's daughter, but that couldn't keep Amos Darby from his secret friendship with Charlotte Terrington until the reality of the Great War sobered youthful dreams. Now decades later, his return home doesn't come with tender reunions, but with the hollow fulfillment of opening a bookshop on his own and retreating as a recluse within its walls. When the future Earl of Harcourt chose Charlotte to be his wife, she pledges her future even as her husband goes to war. Twenty-five years later, Charlotte remains a war widow who divides her days between her late husband's declining estate and operating Eden Books, lovingly named after her grown daughter. And Amos is nothing more than the rival bookseller across the lane. When an American solicitor arrives threatening a lawsuit that could destroy everything they've worked so hard to preserve, mother and daughter prepare to fight back. But with devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe's local blitz terrorizing the skies, battling bookshops--and lost loves, Amos and Charlotte--must put aside their differences and fight together to help Coventry survive.
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The Stone Home
Inspired by real events, told through alternating timelines and two intimate perspectives, The Stone Home is a deeply affecting story of a mother and daughter's love and a pair of brothers whose bond is put to an unfathomably difficult test. Capturing a shameful period of history with breathtaking restraint and tenderness, Crystal Hana Kim weaves a lyrical exploration of the legacy of violence and the complicated psychology of power, while showcasing the extraordinary acts of devotion and friendship that can arise in the darkness.
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The Unclaimed
Sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will. The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.
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Space Oddities
In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe's most confounding puzzles. In a journey that spans continents, from telescopes perched high above the Atacama Desert to the subterranean caverns of state-of-the-art particle colliders to balloons hovering over the frozen icesheets of the South Pole, he meets the men and women hunting for answers--who have staked their careers and reputations on the uncertain promise of new physics. The result is a mind-expanding, of-the-moment look at the fields of physics and cosmology as they transform before us.
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. However, hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way. Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did.
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I Cheerfully Refuse
Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering
lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake. -
Everyone Is Watching
Five contestants have been chosen to compete for ten million dollars on the game show One Lucky Winner. The catch? None of them knows what (or who) to expect, and it will be live streamed all over the world. Completely secluded in an estate in Northern California, with strict instructions not to leave the property and zero contact with the outside world, the competitors start to feel a little too isolated. When long-kept secrets begin to rise to the surface, the contestants realize this is no longer just a reality show--someone is out for blood. And the game can't end until the world knows who the contestants really are.
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Secrets of the Octopus
This magical journey into the world of the octopus will reveal how the large and capable brain of these creatures occupies their whole body-not just their heads--and they can actually adjust their genetic makeup to respond to the demands of the environment. It will allow readers to watch them change shape and color in order to camouflage themselves more effectively than any other species. And it will divulge how octopus mothers give their all in order to bring forth a new generation.
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What Happened to Nina?
Nina and Simon are the perfect couple. Young, fun and deeply in love. Until they leave for a weekend at his family's cabin in Vermont, and only Simon comes home. WHAT HAPPENED TO NINA? Nobody knows. Simon's explanation about what happened in their last hours together doesn't add up. Nina's parents push the police for answers, and Simon's parents rush to protect him. They hire expensive lawyers and a PR firm that quickly ramps up a vicious, nothing-is-off-limits media campaign. Nina's family is under siege, but they never lose sight of the only thing that really matters -- finding their daughter. Out-gunned by Simon's wealthy, powerful family, Nina's parents recognize that if playing by the rules won't get them anywhere, it's time to break them.
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A Year of Last Things
From one of the most influential writers of his generation, a gorgeously surprising poetry collection about memory, history, and the act of looking back
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.
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The Purest Bond
Dogs have been considered people’s best friend for thousands of years, but never has the relationship between humans and their canine companions been as vitally important as it is today. With all of the seismic shifts in today’s world, rates of anxiety and depression have been skyrocketing, and people have been turning to their dogs for solace and stability. Amidst these dire realities, something wonderful has taken shape. In the United States alone, dog adoptions doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. As people have brought furry friends into their lives for the first time or seized this opportunity to deepen the connections they already have, they are looking to understand how owning a dog can change their lives.
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What the Bears Know
In the late 1990s, the town of Mammoth Lakes, California hired Steve Searles as a hunter to cull half its troublesome bear population. But as he began to prepare for the grim task, the bears soon won him over, and Searles realized there had to be a better way. He soon developed non-lethal tactics to control their behavior and overpopulation that heralded a landmark moment in the care and handling of the American black bear. As Searles shares his remarkable knowledge and we become immersed in the ursine world, you’ll never look at bears or nature the same way again.
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The Mars House
In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London's Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January's life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger-a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. Now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process that is always disabling and sometimes deadly. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January's future without naturalization and ensure Gale's political success. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. They're kind, compassionate, and much more difficult to hate than January would prefer. Then January discovers Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay-and January may be the only person standing in the way.
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The Mystery Writer
When Theodosia Benton abandons her career path as an attorney and shows up on her brother's doorstep with two suitcases and an unfinished novel, she expects to face a few challenges. What Theo never expects is to be drawn into a hidden literary world in which identity is something that can be lost and remade for the sake of an audience. When her mentor, a highly successful author, is brutally murdered, Theo wants the killer to be found and justice to be served. Then the police begin looking at her brother, Gus, as their prime suspect, and Theo does the unthinkable in order to protect him. But the writer has left a trail, a thread out of the labyrinth in the form of a story. Gus finds that thread and follows it, and in his attempt to save his sister he inadvertently threatens the foundations of the labyrinth itself. To protect the carefully constructed narrative, Theo Benton, and everyone looking for her, will have to die.
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Those Beyond the Wall
Scales is the best at what she does: keeping everyone and everything in line in Ashtown. As a skilled mechanic—and an even more skilled fighter, when she needs to be—Scales is a respected member of the Emperor’s crew, who’s able to keep things running smoothly. But the fragile peace Scales helps to maintain is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed before her eyes. When more bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it by any means necessary. To protect the people she loves, she teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner from Ashtown and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist from the City, delving into both worlds to track down an invisible killer.
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Lore of the Wilds
In a land ruled by ruthless Fae, twenty-one-year-old Lore Alemeyu's village is trapped in a forested prison. Lore knows that any escape attempt is futile--her scars are a testament to her past failures. But when her village is threatened, Lore makes a desperate deal with a Fae lord. She will leave her home to catalog/organize an enchanted library that hasn't been touched in a thousand years. No Fae may enter the library, but there is a chance a human might be able to breach the cursed doors.
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The Life of the Qur'an
Building on his intimate portrait of the Qur`an’s prophet in Muhammad the World-Changer, Mohamad Jebara returns with a vivid profile of the book itself. While viewed in retrospect as the grand scripture of triumphant empires, Jebara reveals how the Qur`an unfolded over 22 years amidst intense persecution, suffering, and loneliness. The Life of the Qur`an recounts this vivid drama as a biography examining the book’s obscured heritage, complex revelation, and contested legacy.
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Clay and Bones
Lisa Bailey never considered a career working in death until she saw the FBI job posting for a forensic artist. The idea of using her artistic skill to help victims of crime was too compelling to pass up. Soon she was documenting crime scenes, photographing charred corpses, and digitally retouching the disembodied heads of suicide bombers. But it was facial approximation--sculpting a face from the remnants of an unidentified victim's skull--that intrigued her the most. Bailey knew that if she could capture that person's likeness in clay, she just might help them be identified, and that might help law enforcement track down their killer.
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What Grows in the Dark
Sixteen years ago, Brigit Weylan's older sister, Emma, walked into the woods in their small hometown of Ellis Creek. She never walked out. Now Brigit travels around the country investigating paranormal activity (and faking the results) with her cameraman, Ian. But when she receives a call from Ellis Creek, she's thrust into the middle of a search for two missing teenagers. As Brigit and Ian are drawn further into the case, the parallels to Emma's death become undeniable. And worse, Brigit can't explain what's happening to her: trees appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, something with a very familiar laugh watching her out in the darkness, and Emma's voice on her phone, reminding Brigit to finish what they started.
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Parasol Against the Axe
For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it’s being read and who’s doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie’s past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends’ different accounts of the past reach a new level.
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Birding to Change the World
In Birding to Change the World, O'Kane details the astonishing science of bird life, from migration and parenting to the territorial defense strategies that influenced her own activism. A warm and compelling weave of science and social engagement, this is the story of an improbably band of bird lovers who saved their park. And it is a blueprint for muscular citizenship, powered by joy.
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If You See Them
If You See Them is a powerful and moving exploration of the issue of youth homelessness, told through the perspective and experience of one woman who has been at the forefront of an effort to not only bring the issue to light but to change laws in order to emancipate these young people and give them agency. It tells her own inspiring story of advocacy--or coming to recognize a problem and then founding a non-profit, Starting Right, Now, that provides housing stability, academic support, food, and life-skill classes for kids, helping them become independent. But it also allows the youth to speak in their own voices and tell their own stories.
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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.
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A Fire So Wild
As a wildfire threatens Berkeley, the city's inhabitants are forced to reckon with the cracks in the lives they've built. Abigail, a wealthy homeowner, decides to throw a lavish birthday in a hillside mansion to raise money for the city's newest affordable housing project--and prove to her family that she's made something worthwhile of her life. Sunny, a construction worker who sleeps in a van along the bay's shore, is in the running for an apartment--but only if enough funds are raised at the party. As the heat and smoke from the approaching blaze descend upon the town, tensions rise and residents confront the inequities laid bare, and the fragility of building a life in a world on fire.
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2020
At the heart of 2020 are seven vivid profiles of ordinary New Yorkers—including an elementary school principal, a bar manager, a subway custodian, and a local political aide—whose experiences illuminate how Americans, and people across the globe, reckoned with 2020. Through these poignant stories, we revisit our own moments of hope and fear, the profound tragedies and losses in our communities, the mutual aid networks that brought us together, and the social movements that hinted at the possibilities of a better world.
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A Map of Future Ruins
In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime. Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth.
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Sons of Darkness
The Mathuran Republic simmers on the brink of oblivion. Senator Krishna and his third wife Satyabhama have put their plans in motion, both within and beyond the Republic's blood-soaked borders, to protect it from total annihilation.Mati, Pirate-Princess of Kalinga, has decided to mend her ways and become a good wife. Brooding and beautiful Karna hopes to bury his brutal past, but finds that destiny is a miser when it comes to granting second chances. Hero-turned-torturer Shakuni limps through a path of daggers. Their lives are about to become yet more difficult, as a cast of sinister queens, naive kings, pious assassins and ravenous priests are converging where the Son of Darkness is prophesied to rise... even as forgotten Gods prepare to play their hand.
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Sun of Blood and Ruin
In sixteenth-century New Spain, witchcraft is punishable by death, indigenous temples have been destroyed, and tales of mythical creatures that once roamed the land have become whispers in the night. Hidden behind a mask, Pantera uses her magic and legendary swordplay skills to fight the tyranny of Spanish rule. To all who know her, Leonora de las Casas Tlazohtzin never leaves the palace, faints at the sight of blood, and would rather be caught dead than meddle in court affairs. No one suspects that Leonora and Pantera are the same person. When an ancient prophecy of destruction threatens to come true, Leonora--and therefore Pantera--is forced to decide: surrender the mask or fight to the end.
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Fangirl Down
Wells Whitaker was once golf's hottest rising star, but lately, all he has to show for his "promising" career is a killer hangover, a collection of broken clubs, and one remaining supporter. No matter how bad he plays, the beautiful, sunny redhead is always on the sidelines. Then a determined Wells shows up at her door with a wild proposal: be his new caddy, help him turn his game around, and split the prize money. And considering Josephine's professional and personal life is in shambles, she could really use the cash. Before long, they're inseparable, Wells starts winning again, and Josephine is surprised to find a sweet, thoughtful guy underneath his gruff, growly exterior. But Wells is technically her boss and an athlete falling for his fangirl would be ridiculous... right?
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The Catch
In a last-ditch effort to rescue her brand from the brink of irrelevance, Boston fashion influencer Melanie Karlsen finds herself in a rural fishing village on the east coast of Canada. The burly and bearded bed-and-breakfast owner and fisherman, Evan Whaler single-handedly disproves the theory that Canadians are “nice.” After a boating accident lands Evan unconscious in the hospital, Mel is mistaken for his fiancée by his welcoming yet quirky family, who are embroiled in a long-standing feud over the B&B. In a bold attempt to mend family fences, Mel agrees to fake their engagement for one week in exchange for Evan’s help with her social media content. But reeling in their budding feelings for each other proves more difficult by the day. Is Mel willing to sacrifice her picture-perfect life in the city for a chance at a true, unfiltered love in the wild?
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A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
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. 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.
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Dear Mom and Dad
Eager to retell the narrative of her own family and her coming-of-age, Patti Davis casts aside misperceptions that defined her in the past. Far from being the enfant terrible, Dear Mom and Dad reveals young Patti as a sensitive child, who was not able to be the public person her family demanded. Just as she re-examines her own role in an increasingly dysfunctional family drama, Davis casts an empathetic yet honest eye on her parents--on her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved seventy-seven people, yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and her mother, who never escaped her own tortured youth.
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Dixon, Descending
Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner. But he missed the team by two-tenths of a second, and ever since that pain decades ago, he hasn’t allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests that they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can’t refuse. The brothers are determined to prove something—to themselves and to each other. In one devastating moment, Dixon’s world is upended. Ultimately, Dixon must confront the truth of what happened on the mountain and come to terms with who can and cannot be saved.
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The Bishop and the Butterfly
Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks filled with hundreds of names--businessmen, socialites, gangsters, and bootleggers. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes; many suspected that Vivian Gordon had been executed to bury her secrets. As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury doggedly pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham's powerful political machine--the infamous Tammany Hall. A final dramatic showdown between Seabury and playboy mayor Jimmy Walker precipitated Tammany's downfall and cleared the way for FDR's presidency.
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The Expectant Detectives
For Alice and her partner Joe, moving to the sleepy village of Penton is a chance to embrace country life and prepare for the birth of their first child. But the rural idyll they’d hoped for doesn’t quite pan out when a dead body is discovered at their local prenatal class, and they find themselves suspects in a murder investigation. With a cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of the whole group, Alice and her new-found pregnant friends set out to solve the mystery and clear their names, with the help of her troublesome dog, Helen. Between the discovery of a shady commune up in the woods, the unearthing of a mysterious death years earlier, and the near-tragic poisoning of Helen, Alice is soon in way over her head.
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The Secret History of Bigfoot
Journalist and self-diagnosed skeptic John O'Connor is fascinated by Sasquatch. Curious to learn more, he embarks on a quest through the North American wilds in search of Bigfoot, its myth and meaning. Alongside an eccentric cast of characters, he explores the zany and secretive world of "cryptozoology," tracking Bigfoot through ancient folklore to Harry and the Hendersons, while examining the forces behind our ever-widening belief in the supernatural. As O'Connor treks through the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest, listens to firsthand accounts, and attends Bigfoot conventions, he's left wondering--what happens when the lines between myth and reality blur?
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One Nation Under Guns
Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns: As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court reinvented the Second Amendment in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, an opinion that Erdozain convincingly eviscerates, many Americans had already acceded to the fiction: the unfreedom of an armed society. To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the founders’ true idea of what it means to be free.
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Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
When the Australian Mystery Writers' Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn't pan out. The program is a who's who of crime writing royalty: the debut writer (me!); the forensic science writer; the blockbuster writer; the legal thriller writer; the literary writer; the psychological suspense writer. But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime. Of course, we should also know how to commit one.
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Blood
Most women, transgender, and non-binary people who menstruate can expect to have hundreds of periods in a lifetime. Not knowing how your body works makes it challenging to advocate for yourself. Consequently, many suffer in silence thinking their bodies are uniquely broken, or they turn to disreputable sources. Blood is a practical, empowering guide to what's typical, what's concerning, and when to seek care--recounted with expertise and frank, fearless wit that have made Dr. Jen today's most trusted voice in gynecology.
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Legacy
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. Dr. Uché Blackstock and her sister followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from Harvard Medical School. But neither understood the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.
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Martyr!
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
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People Collide
When Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli's search across Europe to America for his missing wife--and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience. Is this transformation the very thing Eli and Elizabeth need for their marriage to thrive?
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The Last Fire Season
In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire’s role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live.
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Material World
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.
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Say You'll Be Mine
Meghna Raman defied her parents’ wishes and followed her life’s passion, becoming a theater teacher and aspiring playwright. When she discovers that her best friend and secret crush, Seth, is engaged, she realizes he’s about to become the one-that-got-away. Determined to try and move on, Meghna agrees to let her parents introduce her to a potential match. Grumpy engineer Karthik Murthy has agreed to his mother’s matchmaking attempts to make her happy, never dreaming he would meet someone as vibrant as Meghna. Though he can’t offer her something real, a fake engagement could help Meghna soothe the sting of Seth’s wedding festivities and Karthik avoid the absurd number of set-ups his mother has planned for him. But soon, their expectations and insecurities threaten something that’s become a lot more real than they’d planned.
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The Fury
Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex–movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island. We found ourselves trapped there overnight. What followed was a game of cat and mouse ― a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered. But who am I? My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.
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Dolls of Our Lives
Combining history, travelogue, and memoir, Dolls of Our Lives follows Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney on an unforgettable journey to the past as they delve into the origins of this iconic brand. Continuing the conversations that began on their podcast, they set out to answer the lingering questions that keep them up at night. What did American Girl inventor Pleasant Rowland hope to say to children with these dolls? Was girl power something that could be ordered from a catalogue, described by a magazine, or modeled in the plot lines of books? And how - and why - did this brand shape an entire generation?
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Not the End of the World
Packed with the latest research, practical guidance, and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment. Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn't, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.
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My Friends
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. As the Arab Spring erupts, their friendship forces him to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
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River East, River West
Shanghai, 2007: Raised by her American expat mother, fourteen-year old Alva never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. 1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young, married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. When China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang's world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life, and how much will ever be enough.