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The Last Assignment
by Erika Robuck
The perilous true story of award-winning photojournalist Dickey Chapelle as she risks everything to show the American people the price of war through the lens of her camera.
Manhattan, 1954. Since her arrest for disobeying orders and going ashore at Iwo Jima almost a decade earlier, combat correspondent Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle has been unmoored. Her military accreditation revoked, her marriage failing, and her savings dwindling, Dickey jumps at the next opportunity. Dickey and her camera journey with American and international soldiers from frozen wastelands to raging seas to luscious jungles, revealing one woman’s extraordinary courage and tenacity in the face of discrimination and danger. And it’s along the way, in Dickey’s desire to save the world, she realizes she might also be saving herself.
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The Cover Girl
by Amy Rossi
Told in two timelines, this striking debut novel explores the dizzying fallout of being seen and not heard in a high-stakes industry.
Birdie Rhodes was only thirteen when legendary modeling agent Harriet Goldman discovered her in a department store and transformed her into one of Harriet’s Girls. What followed felt like the start of something incredible, a chance for shy Birdie to express herself in front of the camera. But two years later, she meets a thirty-one-year-old rock star, and her teenage heart falls hard despite Harriet’s warnings.
Decades later, Birdie lives a quiet life. Birdie tries hard to forget the past—starting over in Paris, in the dying embers of the LA punk scene, in Boston at the height of the AIDS crisis. Then a letter arrives, inviting Birdie to celebrate Harriet’s fifty-year career. Almost famous, almost destroyed, Birdie can only make her own future if she reckons with her past.
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Loved One
by Aisha Muharrar
A warm novel about a woman who goes looking for answers after her best friend dies unexpectedly.
When Julia’s first-love-turned-best-friend Gabe, a musician with a cultish following, dies unexpectedly at age twenty-nine, Julia launches herself into an intercontinental quest to recover the possessions he left with friends and acquaintances across the world. Along the way she encounters Elizabeth, Gabe’s effortlessly perfect and endlessly cool ex-girlfriend. Now Julia can’t stop talking to, thinking about, and googling Elizabeth. As the two women struggle to reconcile their respective claims on Gabe’s memory, can they find their way from rivalry to friendship?
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The Art of a Lie
by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
In 18th-century England, a widowed confectioner is drawn into a web of love, betrayal, and intrigue in this masterful historical novel.
Following the murder of her husband in what looks like a violent street robbery, Hannah Cole is struggling to keep her head above water. Her confectionary shop on Piccadilly is barely turning a profit and her suppliers are conspiring to put her out of business. Henry Fielding, the famous author-turned-magistrate, is threatening to confiscate the money in her husband’s bank account because he believes it might have been illicitly acquired. William Devereux, a friend of her late husband, helps Hannah unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his death. He also tells her about an Italian delicacy called iced cream, an innovation she is convinced will transform the fortunes of her shop.
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The Re-Write
by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn
In this lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers rom-com, two exes are faced with one deadline. Will they make it to the end?
Temi and Wale meet in London. They flirt, date, meet each other's friends…Then Wale dumps Temi to go on a TV show called Love Villa.
Instead of giving in to heartbreak, Temi throws herself into her writing. She's within touching distance of a book deal that would solve all her problems. But publishers keep passing on her novel and bills still have to be paid. So, when the opportunity to ghost-write a celebrity autobiography arises, Temi finds herself accepting. But, of course, the celebrity turns out to be Wale...
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Mississippi Blue 42
by Eli Cranor
An ambitious and well-researched series debut starring an FBI agent whose very first case lands her in a college football empire.
Compson, Mississippi, 2014: Newly-minted FBI Special Agent Rae Johnson knows a thing or two about the gridiron. She practically grew up on the football field, alongside her father, a legendary national-championship-winning college coach. Which is why she’s perfect for her first assignment: investigate illicit money flows in a booming football town in central Mississippi. To get to the bottom of the case, Rae must ingratiate herself with the people of Compson—the players, and gridiron girls, and coaches, and politicians, who comprise the complex social machinery of the small-town football empire.
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Destroy This House: A Memoir
by Amanda Uhle
A tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir chronicling the challenges of growing up with a desperately scheming father and a mother plagued by an acute hoarding disorder.
Amanda’s striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother’s hoarding disorder flourished and her father’s schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real. In Destroy This House, Amanda sets out to document her parents’ unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence.
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Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
by Susana M. Morris
A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world.
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Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
A blazing critique of how pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences.
When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer: an inflection point between the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. From the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria’s Secret ads to the explosion of internet porn, Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era in which excess and materialism collided with reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents.
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Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life
by Donna Leon
An engaging collection of stories and essays by the celebrated author of the internationally bestselling Guido Brunetti series.
In Backstage, Donna reveals her admiration for, and inspiration from, the great crime novelists Ruth Rendell and Ross Macdonald, examining their approach to storytelling as she dissects her favorite books of theirs. From interviewing a diamond dealer in Venice to learn about blood diamonds to meeting a courageous sex worker to depict accurately the trafficking of women in Italy, Leon chronicles the amount of research she undertakes to be able to present authentically–through Guido Brunetti and his colleagues–places and characters far from her own experience. Throughout, she is as good a storyteller about herself as she is a chronicler of Guido Brunetti’s crime adventures. Readers will be as caught up in her world as she is in his.
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Tell Me What You Like: An Honest Discussion of Sex and Intimacy After Sexual Assault
by Katie Simon
This hopeful, groundbreaking book from sexuality journalist and fellow sexual assault survivor Katie Simon delves into the challenges of moving from trauma to healing.
Over a decade ago, Katie Simon began seeking out stories of people who faced sexual challenges after sexual trauma—just as she did. Simon interviewed dozens of survivors, and her investigation yielded diverse responses from people of all backgrounds, ultimately confirming that there is no single path toward healing. Simon's research led her to life-changing findings that sexual assault survivors most want to know about: coping with trauma triggers and traumatic stress symptoms such as anxiety, depression, physical pain, and flashbacks. From embodied consent to self-pleasure, sexual regret, break-ups and beyond, you'll find answers to all your questions in stories told by survivors who've actually been there
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The Invention of Charlotte Bronte: A New Life
by Graham Watson
A profoundly moving biography that challenges established narratives to reveal the Brontë family as they’ve never been seen before.
Charlotte Brontë had a life as seemingly dramatic as her heroine Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, Charlotte reinvented herself as an acclaimed author, a mysterious celebrity, and a passionate lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and admirers with more questions than answers. Her friend, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, uncovered secrets and published a tell-all biography so scandalous it was banned and rewritten twice in six months. Watson’s The Invention of Charlotte Brontë presents a different, darker take on one of the most famous women writers of the nineteenth century, showing Charlotte to be a strong but flawed individual.
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