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New! Adult Fiction Staff Picks |
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Beckomberga
by Sara Stridsberg
A haunting novel of a woman's lifelong witness to her father's illness, the long shadow cast on her family, and Stockholm's mythic mental hospital.
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The Cheerleader
by Marina Evans
Everyone wants to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader, but fame can have a deadly price... The Dallas Lonestars Cheerleaders are untouchable. They are the epitome of glitz and glamour, reeking of hairspray and perfection. But everything changes when America's Angel and cheerleading captain Jentry Rae Randall is found murdered in the squad's locker room. Filmmaker Nikki Keegan has the opportunity of a lifetime. Brought in to document the Lonestars' potential comeback after four disastrous seasons, Nikki is now perfectly placed to investigate the murder of the team's iconic frontwoman. Nikki turns to cheerleader Shaunette Simmons, the deceased's best friend, for help. As Nikki becomes closer to Shaunette, the more she suspects that Shaunette is hiding something. But when Shaunette is run off the road and left to die, it's clear that nobody on this cheer squad is safe. Because some people would kill to be a Dallas Lonestars Cheerleader...
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Discipline
by Larissa Pham
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.
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The Jaguar's Roar
by Micheliny Verunschk
In 1817, two German scientists traveled across Brazil and into the Amazon gathering flora and fauna to study and display in Europe. Among the collection they brought to the Bavarian court were two Indigenous children. The children's images became widespread, satisfying European curiosity about the distant land they came from. But little was known about the children themselves. Despite the scientists' detailed records about many of the plant and animal specimens, they only noted the children's tribes: the girl was a Miranha, and the boy, a Juri. After a few months, the children died in Germany, far from anyone who knew their names.The Jaguar's Roar, a spellbinding poetic novel told in many voices, imagines the children's journey and a modern Brazilian woman's effort to counter their disappearance from history. In her award-winning fifth novel, Micheliny Verunschk inhabits the fictional perspective of the Miranha girl, of the jaguar she conjures for protection, of the German scientists who determine her fate, and of the two rivers that frame her life. Intertwined in this narrative is a story of Brazil's suppression of its Indigenous history, and of a young woman named Josefa, a newcomer unmoored in the megacity of São Paulo, who identifies with the girl after seeing her image in an exhibit and tries to recover the child's voice and story. In Juliana Barbassa's vivid translation, Verunshuk's lyrical sentences carry the reader through a powerful exploration of memory, colonialism, and belonging, and make a lasting contribution to world literature.
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Python's Kiss: Stories
by Louise Erdrich
Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich's magnificent story collection features a range of characters--a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father. Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe--an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter--these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.
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Steppe
by Oksana Vasyakina
A decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of Steppe, now a literature student, goes on the road with him as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She's both drawn to and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to understand the person who made her. But the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father's small role in Russia's violent patriarchal structure and the chaos and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship--both natural and forced, intimate and alienated. Oksana Vasyakina's second novel pierces the surface of human relations and reaches into the depths of shame, longing, and grief that lie beneath. In simple, precise prose, she paints a vivid portrait of estrangement and situates it in the broader context of her country's attempts to reckon with its troubled history.
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The Edge of Water
by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.
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Extinction Capital of the World: Stories
by Mariah Rigg
In ten stories, Mariah Rigg immerses readers in contemporary Hawaii. By turns heartbreaking and hopeful, these stories of love, longing, and grief are fierce dispatches from a state haunted by the specter of colonization--a precious biome under constant threat. An older man grapples with the American-weapons research conducted on a neighboring island that reverberates through his entire life. A pregnant woman seeks belonging while poaching flowers in the rainforest with her partner's mother. Two teenage girls find love during a summer spent on Midway Atoll. A young woman returns home to Oahu following a breakup and reconnects with her estranged father and the island itself. Linked by both place and character, Rigg's stories illuminate the exotification and commodification of Hawaii in the American mythos.
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Kate & Frida: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Books
by Kim Fay
...a love letter to bookshops and booksellers, to the way stories shape how we perceive ourselves, to the passion we bring to life in our twenties, and to the last precious years before the internet changed everything. Twenty-something Frida Rodriguez comes to Paris in 1991, relishing the city's butter-soaked cuisine and seeking her future as a war correspondent. But when she writes to a bookshop in Seattle, she receives more than just the book she requests. A friendship begins that will redefine the person she thought she wanted to become. Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida's free spirit, spurred to kiss her handsome coworker, to believe in herself as a writer, and to find beauty even in loss. Through the most tumultuous years of their young lives-personally and globally-Kate and Frida's friendship sustains and nourishes them as they show each other how to overcome self-doubt and the necessity of embracing joy even through our darkest hours.
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On Sundays She Picked Flowers
by Yah Yah Scholfield
When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she'd severed her abusive mother's hold on her. She didn't have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own. Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer. But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.
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Heart the Lover
by Lily King
...a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love. You knew I'd write a book about you someday. Our narrator understands good love stories--their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules. In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
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Fallen Star
by Lee Goldberg
A fifty-five-gallon drum washes up in the Malibu Lagoon stuffed with the corpse of Gene Dent, the key player in a bribery scandal that ensnared several local politicians. LASD detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone know the case--and all the likely suspects--well. Just as they begin their investigation, the sheriff publicly reveals evidence linking the crime to LA's mayor. But Eve and Duncan realize the bombshell allegation, true or not, arises from corruption within the sheriff's own office...because they helped cover it up years ago. If the sheriff goes down, so will they. Eve is agonizing over her moral dilemma when a helicopter crashes in the hillside below her Calabasas home. It's not a coincidence. Eve soon discovers among the twisted wreckage and dead passengers shocking connections to her own past...and they lead straight to a fight for her life.
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