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I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the years pass, a young girl sits alone in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. This is a heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation.
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Kin
by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie grow up as motherless neighbors and close friends in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, but their lives diverge as they reach adulthood. Vernice, raised by a protective aunt, leaves for Spelman College, where she becomes part of an influential community of Black women and confronts new experiences shaped by privilege, ambition, and social inequality. Annie, driven by the desire to find the mother who abandoned her, embarks on a journey marked by instability, risk, and emotional discovery, ultimately facing life-threatening circumstances.
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The Tapestry of Fate
by Shannon Chakraborty
Amina al-Sirafi thinks she's struck gold. Tasked with hunting down arcane artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savor the occasional adventure on the high seas with her criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter, Marjana. But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council's wrath, Amina is charged with an impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a sorceress on an island no one can escape.
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Assorted Crisis Events
by Deniz Camp
Time is having a crisis. You can find actual cavemen, medieval knights, and cyborg soldiers on leave from World War IV. Victorian debutantes amble their way into cell phone stores, confused and bewildered. On their way to work, bleary-eyed commuters get trapped in time-loops, assaulted by alternate-reality versions of themselves. Assorted Crisis Events is an ongoing, zig-zagging anthology series about the compromised clicks of our clocks, full of one-shot stories both beautiful and ugly, tragic and redemptive, surreal and somehow all too familiar.
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Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi
Questions linger about Theo after his arrival in the southern city of Golden. Who is he, and why is he here? He arrives early one spring and by chance -- or is it? -- he visits a coffee shop where 92 framed pencil portraits are on display. Inspired, Theo sets out on a mission of purchasing all the portraits and quietly bestows them on their “rightful owners.” Stories are told; friendships are born; and lives are changed. This is a beautifully crafted story about the power of creative generosity and the far-reaching possibilities of anonymous kindness.
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The Last Mandarin
by Louise Penny
Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese-American, has always lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien, a Chinese dissident who escaped China after Tiananmen Square. When security alarms go off all around the world, the signal is traced back to China, and Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can decode the Chinese intentions. But there are forces within both the American and Chinese governments intent on stopping mother and daughter. The estranged pair must get past their differences and figure out how to work together.
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The Apothecary Diaries
by Natsu Hyuuga
Maomao, a young woman trained in the art of herbal medicine, is forced to work as a lowly servant in the inner palace. Though she yearns for life outside its perfumed halls, she isn't long for a life of drudgery! Using her wits to break a “curse” afflicting the imperial heirs, Maomao attracts the attentions of the handsome eunuch Jinshi and is promoted to attendant food taster. But Jinshi has other plans for the erstwhile apothecary, and soon Maomao is back to brewing potions and solving mysteries!
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Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief
by Benjamin Stevenson
When Ernest visits a bank in a small Australian town in search of a loan to finance his PI business, he's taken hostage by “a bank robber who doesn’t seem to care about money.” The robber locks the doors to the building but allows his captives to roam free as he attempts to fish out a single dollar from a locked vault. Unable to resist investigating, Ernest finds that many of his fellow hostages also planned to rob the bank. Then someone in the party dies, piling a locked-room murder mystery on top of the already curious case of overlapping heists.
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Taiwan Travelogue
by Shuang-Zi Yang
May 1938. A young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki and arrived in Taiwan. She was invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and taste as much of its authentic cuisine as possible. A Taiwanese woman is hired as her interpreter, and Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
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Soul Searching
by Lyla Sage
Collins Cartwright reluctantly goes home, though her family doesn't know she's lost her job and is out of money, or that the ghosts that have always been her companions have recently gone silent. Luckily, the new-to-town upholsterer has a room for rent above his store. Unluckily, it is absolutely crawling with more ghosts who are freezing her out. When Brady Cooper agrees to let Collins stay in his spare room, he doesn't know that she's absolutely bonkers, but as they begin to get closer, the lines between them start to blur.
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London Falling
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Surveillance footage shows Zac Brettler, 19, jumping from an apartment balcony into the Thames. A witness, Verinder Sharma, died a year later, stymieing Scotland Yard’s investigation. The only other witness, businessman Akbar Shamji, offered no help beyond dislcosing that Zac had fooled him and Verinder into thinking he was the son of a Russian oligarch. Patrick Radden Keefe peels back multiple layers of mystery and exposes the seedy truths beneath glamourous London, a world sustained and abetted by fundamental corruption.
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The Hollow Half
by Sarah Aziza
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love.
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Before Gender
by Eli Erlick
“Transgender people are nothing new,” according to this brilliant survey of “forgotten” trans lives. Historian Erlick makes a persuasive case that the anxiety surrounding trans identities today has not always been present, that trans people have “existed...everywhere from the largest cities to the most remote villages” and been generally accepted by their communities. The lives that Erlick uncovers show evidence of unhindered acceptance, concluding that there’s no such thing as a “trans first,” only instances of first official acceptance.
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Rez Life
by David Treuer
Treuer offers an ambitious, impressionistic study of life on Native American reservations. His blending in of the history of his Ojibwe tribe and his own family results in a nuanced view of personal and tribal identity. Whether he’s describing the central role of fishing walleye, the Ojibwe’s treaty right fights, or the timeless method for harvesting wild rice, Treuer paints a picture of a vital if economically strained tribal life, deftly supplying historical context to explain how the Mille Lacs, Red Lake, and White Earth reservations came to be and survive.
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Margaret Beaufort
by Lauren Johnson
Born into a century of conflict, Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of the Duke of Somerset and a descendant of Edward III, was married at the age of twelve. She was a mother, orphan, and widow by thirteen. She survived the Wars of the Roses and two further marriages to see her only son, Henry, ascend the throne of England as the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty. This biography delineates the decades of political upheaval that were the backdrop to her resilient career and highlights the shrewdness that kept her afloat amid a brutal civil war.
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