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Palaver
by Bryan Washington
A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love.
In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston. His mother’s preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep. Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.
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The Predicament (Gabriel Dax #2)
by William Boyd
A thrilling novel starring the travel writer-turned-reluctant spy Gabriel Dax, who finds himself implicated in a dangerous conspiracy with global consequences.
1963, Guatemala. The country is in turmoil, with a presidential election looming and a charismatic, left-wing ex-priest and trade union leader predicted to win. United Fruits, a giant American corporation responsible for a large percentage of the country’s GNP, meanwhile, is not pleased by this prospect. Neither is the CIA. Amid the uncertainty, Gabriel Dax arrives on orders from his MI6 handler Faith Green, who has tasked him with assessing the fallout from the election. But when Green compels him to investigate some shady characters in West Berlin, it becomes clear that an even greater danger is afoot as the magnetic young President Kennedy prepares to arrive for a state visit. A gripping novel of politics and spy craft with dramatic twists and turns, The Predicament shows Boyd to be one of our most masterful contemporary storytellers.
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The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories
by Salman Rushdie
If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighborhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can't rest until he avenges his former tormentor. Salman Rushdie's new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left. In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face: How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the eleventh hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?
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The Ex-boyfriend's Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee
by Saki Kawashiro
Based on the author’s true heartbreak story that went viral, this charming novel centers on a woman who gets over a breakup by cooking her ex’s favorite recipe, and encourages others to do the same.
Twenty-nine-year-old Momoko has been tragically dumped. She thought she and her boyfriend were soulmates. He even took her to a love hotel, where she believed he was going to propose. Instead, he left her after four years. So Momoko does what many broken-hearted people do—she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk that she passes out in an empty cafe. When she awakens, she pours her heart out to a curious manager and the sole other customer in the cafe, a monk training at a nearby temple. When she describes how her ex loved her cooking, the manager allows her to slip into the kitchen and cook up her ex’s favorite: a warm, delightful butter chicken curry. As Momoko finishes telling her story, she realizes this combination of cooking and sharing has healed her heart in a way nothing else can. Like an unconventional therapy group, the “Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee” is born, with Momoko leading the Friday night sessions, and the monk-in-training offering blessings.
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Days at the Torunka Café
by Satoshi Yagisawa
A charming and poignant story set in a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles.
Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time. While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting.
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What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
A fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroys his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
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Shot Ready
by Stephen Curry
A powerful distillation of Stephen Curry’s transformative philosophy of success—centered on preparation, constant improvement, creativity, connection, mindfulness, and joy.
Stephen Curry is a 11-time NBA All-Star, four-time NBA Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist of the USA Basketball Men’s National Team. This accessible and actionable survey of the Curry way is especially great for fans, but even fans who have been felled by Curry's jumper will find wisdom that speaks to them. Stunningly designed and illustrated with more than 100 gorgeous photographs, Shot Ready is an intimate narrative and a practical blueprint for any reader who wants to unlock their own potential.
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Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity
by Aimee Donnellan
The inside story of the race to develop Ozempic, and its potentially revolutionary impact on public health and culture.
A “cure” for obesity has long been the holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry, one that seemed unattainable until the development of Ozempic. The treatment is so effective that it is already disrupting many industries. But the impact of these drugs goes far beyond billion dollar profits; a long-term cure for obesity could save 40% of American adults from dangerous preventable illnesses. And as their success continues to grow, one question looms in the minds of investors, healthcare workers, and patients: and are they too good to be true? In Off the Scales, Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan illuminates the history of the latest medical breakthrough that is poised to change the world, while bringing difficult social questions about inequality and morality to the forefront.
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Vagabond: A Memoir
by Tim Curry
This memoir is a celebration of Tim Curry’s life’s work, and a testament to his profound impact on the entertainment industry as we know it today.
There are few stars in Hollywood today that can boast the kind of resume Tony award-nominated actor Tim Curry has built over the past five decades. From his breakout role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show to his iconic depiction as the sadistic clown Pennywise in It, Curry redefined what it meant to be a “character actor,” portraying heroes and villains alike with complexity, nuance, and a genuine understanding of human darkness. Now, in his memoir, Curry takes readers behind-the-scenes of his rise to fame from his early beginnings as a military brat to his formative years in boarding school and university, to the moment when he hit the stage for the first time. He also explores the voicework that defined his later career and provided him with a chance to pivot after surviving a catastrophic stroke in 2012 that nearly took his life. With the upcoming 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the 40th anniversary of Clue, there’s never been a better time for Tim to share his story with the world.
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It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin
by Marisa Meltzer
The first comprehensive biography of Jane Birkin—actress, singer, and legendary style icon—and her profound cultural impact.
Jane Birkin was synonymous with chic. Her effortless style and artistic legacy have been immortalized through her music and film career. And, of course, she was the inspiration behind one of the world’s most coveted bags, the Hermès Birkin. But who was the real woman behind the it girl? It Girl paints a vivid portrait of Birkin and her profound legacy, from her early years in 1960s London to her rise as a beloved celebrity in France, detailing personal challenges, her relationships with creative powerhouses, and the duality of her public and private selves. Based on interviews and deep archival research, Meltzer reveals the nuances of Birkin’s famously tempestuous romantic relationships, life with her three famous daughters, and the creative energy that drove her. Far from being just a muse, Birkin is at last given her well-deserved due.
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Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures
by Judd Apatow
An intimate, rollicking highly-visual memoir that offers a rare glimpse into the creative life and inner workings of a a legendary director producer Judd Apatow.
In the mid-eighties, a young, self-professed comedy nerd from Syosset, Long Island, named Judd Apatow took to the stage to perform his first standup routine—and survived. Over the coming decades, Apatow would translate his obsession for comedy into one of the most successful careers in Hollywood, through genre-defining films such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids, and This Is 40. In this revelatory scrapbook memoir, Apatow has pulled hundreds of personal photographs, letters, scripts, drafts, and paired them with never-before-told stories to create a unique-in-format, deeply-personal-in-tone account of a storied career. Spanning decades, Comedy Nerd takes us on Apatow’s lifelong journey of fandom, creativity, and the relentless work that goes into cracking people up.
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Mamba & Mambacita Forever
by Vanessa Bryant
A beautiful and moving testament to the enduring life of Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality.
When Kobe and Gianna Bryant died, tragically and unexpectedly, in 2020, the world mourned with a wholehearted ferocity. In perhaps the largest and most intense outpouring of public art the world has ever seen, murals went up on seemingly every available wall in Los Angeles and around the globe. The paintings were both professional and amateur, some public and some private, many of them colossal. All of them expressed love and respect for Kobe and Gianna Bryant as athletes, as a father and daughter, as heroes who will not be forgotten. In Mamba & Mambacita Forever, Vanessa Bryant brings together the images and stories of more than a hundred murals honoring her husband and daughter. Taken together, what emerges is the story of a man who became even more than he himself could have imagined, an avatar of determination, discipline, and competitiveness.
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