After her mother dies, novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. No one knows where they came from. As Alderman negotiates her grief, the mimmoths spread. They seem harmless, but intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes. Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a connection to the creatures. As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

A Pinch of Magic
by Emily Heil

 

Cam Parker likes being invisible. As a cookbook ghostwriter, she lives a quiet, orderly life behind the scenes. But when a storm smashes into her grandmother’s house, she’ll do anything to pay for the repairs, even taking on a nightmare celebrity client and returning to her coastal Virginia hometown and all its drama. Before she can say boo, Cam’s predictable world collapses like an underbaked souffle. For starters, she’s developing inconvenient feelings for carpenter Ian McCabe, who’s equal parts charm and complication. And then there’s the actual ghost Cam accidentally summons, who apparently needs her help to right a century-old wrong. But the chaos just might push her to question her cautious approach to life- and finally write her own recipe for happiness.

 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel examining the place of technology in American imagination. Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, bringing her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.

 

Genie’s heart is broken more often than it’s not, but that doesn’t stop her from diving in head-first when she meets Jacob Ford. Their connection is instantly consuming, and they agree to meet again in Paris. In a heady mix of sugared pastries and rumpled bedsheets, they begin plotting their future. In their dreamy apartment, they become intoxicated by each other. Until Jacob disappears. Genie knows Jacob would never leave her. When calls to hospitals turn up nothing, she grows convinced that someone must have taken him. Under the scrutiny of the French police, however, Genie’s story doesn’t hold up- and it sounds like Jacob might not be all he seems. She swears has no idea what happened to Jacob, so why doesn’t her story align with anyone else’s?

by Kevin Roose

 

As the San Francisco-based tech columnist for The New York Times, Kevin Roose has seen the AI revolution from a front-row seat, and even participated in it: his account of how Microsoft's Bing chatbot attempted to break up his marriage became worldwide news. Now, Roose delivers a behind-the-scenes account of the race to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that can outdo humans at almost any task. With unprecedented access to three companies racing to build AGI and hundreds of interviews with industry insiders, Roose reconstructs the rivalries, betrayals, and breakthroughs that have shaped the AI era. This is the story of technology that could save humanity or destroy it.

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

 

1851: in pursuit of four men who fled his plantation, an enslaver journeys to a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold. In a few hours, he'll be dead, and 27 men will be rounded up and put on trial. Not for murder, but for treason, because it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his 'property.' This is story of what happened that September morning, and in the ensuing 'trial of the century.' But it is also a much larger tale, following a startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now finds itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up to the ideals it was founded on and respect all people as equals. 

Food has always been the heartbeat of chef Mika Leon's big, boisterous Cuban family. Her grandfather opened one of the first Cuban family-run restaurants in Valencia, Spain, after fleeing political instability in the 1970s. He later brought the family to Miami, where they ran a backyard cantina- Mika's introduction to the family business. These early experiences shaped her simple, humble cooking style, which she carried into her catering company, then a food truck, and eventually her restaurant, Caja Caliente.

 

In the summer of 2015, Nadia Bowers's beloved older sister, Sasha was found in her car, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Plunged into grief, equipped with Sasha's phone, and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Nadia began to investigate her sister's shadow life: who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? Did they know each other well? Did the dealer have any idea who Sasha was, outside of addiction? Expanding on her viral 2018 essay of the same name, Bowers's memoir is a love letter, a diary, and a quest in search of the dealer's identity, as well as her own. Who is she without her sister? Who is she because of her sister? And what now? Bowers reflects on her shifting roles as sister and mother, examining how loss has reshaped her sense of self.