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Kin
by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother's death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life. A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
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Life: A Love Story
by Elizabeth Berg
As ninety-two-year-old Florence Flo Greene nears the end of her life, she writes a letter to Ruthie, the woman who grew up next door to her, describing the items Flo is leaving Ruthie in her will. But as it goes on, telling surprising stories about those little things Flo will leave behind, an unforgettable portrait of the life she has lived emerges. The letter starts off as an autobiography in things, but it turns out to do much more than that: ultimately, it will transform Flo and those around her. In the time she has left, Flo decides to take herself up on tiny dares. She encourages Ruthie to reconsider her impending divorce by sharing a startling, long-buried secret about her own perfect-seeming marriage. Flo has never had a pedicure before now, and as long as she's going to a beauty parlor, she arranges to have a blue streak put in her hair, too. And as these adventures lead her to make new friends, Flo helps them, too, find the fulfillment that living a full life has led her to understand.
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The Crossroads
by C. J. Box
Marybeth Pickett gets the call she has always dreaded: her husband Joe is in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head. Joe was found in his pickup at Antler Creek Junction, a crossroads connecting three ranches. Each road leading to a dangerous family. Each family with a different bone to pick with Joe, the local game warden. Marybeth and the new sheriff assume that Joe was ambushed by one of the families, but they have no idea which one since Joe didn't say where he was going or why. With Joe unconscious and fighting for his life with Marybeth at his side, Sheridan, April, and Lucy split up and investigate each of families to uncover the truth of what happened to their father, before it's too late.
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Served Him Right
by Lisa Unger
Ana Blacksmith has gathered her closest friends and sister Vera for a brunch to celebrate her recent breakup from her boyfriend Paul. But when shocking news about Paul arrives, all eyes are on Ana, the angry ex with a bad reputation. Suspicions only intensify when Ana's best friend falls deathly ill after the brunch. But Ana is not the only one who had a score to settle with Paul. As the investigation unfolds, rumors of a secret network that uses ancient methods to obtain justice begin to emerge. Vengeance is sweet, but it can also be deadly. Ana and Vera are determined to find the truth before Ana takes the fall and their own long-buried history comes to light.
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Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect
by Valerie Bertinelli
Getting Naked isn't just a story of survival. It's a reckoning with her past, her family history, and the generational pain that shaped her. It's about the myths we believe when we're young, about beauty, love, success, and how we carry them until they break us open. It's about unlearning the script that says women must please, endure, and stay silent. The result is a deeply personal, unexpectedly funny, and profoundly uplifting look at the inner journey we all share. Getting Naked isn't about vulnerability for vulnerability's sake. It's about finally letting go of the need to be perfect, quieting the harsh inner critic, and choosing compassion over judgment. After all, it's never too late to make peace with yourself and to fall madly in love with the perfectly imperfect person you already are.
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This Is Not about Us
by Allegra Goodman
Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubenstein family, it could go either way. When their beloved older sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into decades of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives-divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals-their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters. It’s a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.
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A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness
by Michael Pollan
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
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Lady Tremaine
by Rachel Hochhauser
Twice-widowed, Lady Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband's title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters' future through marriage. When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters—only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the wellbeing of the stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn. Lady Tremaine reimagines the myth of the evil stepmother at the heart of the world's most famous fairy tale. It is a battle cry for a mother's love for her daughters, and a celebration of women everywhere who make their own fortunes.
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Cliffs, Clues, & Conspiracies
by Tonya Kappes
Mae West is just hoping for a peaceful weekend at Happy Trails Campground during the Climb the Cliffs Festival in the heart of Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest. But when the festival's star climber is found dead at the base of the Cascades, Mae's plans for a quiet weekend crumble faster than a buttermilk biscuit. What looks like a tragic accident turns out to be murder, and Mae armed with her sleuthing notebook and the unwavering support of the Laundry Club Ladies, is on the case. Mae follows clues from cryptic coordinates to suspicious boot prints, she soon discovers that secrets run deep in the close-knit town of Normal, Kentucky. But with a killer determined to keep those secrets buried, Mae's about to find out that some cliffs are more dangerous than they seem. One thing is for sure, this mystery is about to take a deadly turn.
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Evelyn in Transit
by David Guterson
Evelyn has always been a misfit. She's easily bored, unsuited to life at school, asks odd questions about faith and time, and sees through conventions others take for granted. In distant Tibet, another life unfolds as remote from Evelyn's as can be: the life of a boy named Tsering, raised as a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Tibet, who eventually becomes a high lama. And yet, their lives are strangely linked, as Evelyn discovers when a trio of Buddhist lamas show up at her door to announce that her five-year-old son Cliff is the seventh reincarnation of the recently deceased illustrious Norbu Rinpoche. The lamas' visit sets off a family crisis and a media firestorm over Cliff's future. Written in a precise style of extraordinary beauty, full of surprising humor and luminosity, Evelyn in Transit delivers much-needed insight and compassion about humanity's strivings for transcendence, and what it might mean to "live the right way."A crystalline short novel about defying expectations, hitting the road, and seeking the right way to live.
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Keeper of Lost Children
by Sadeqa Johnson
Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American Officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI's, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes. Philadelphia born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948, eager to make his mark in the world. While serving in Manheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever. In 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity. Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman's vision will change the course of countless lives.
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Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was, gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love.
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Cleopatra
by Saara El-Arifi
Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall. Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves. Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children. How willfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule. Death will silence me no longer. This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived. Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic novel.
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Brawler: Stories
by Lauren Groff
Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff's electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region, from New England to Florida to California, these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels. In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death, one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples' good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can. Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.
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