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The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi KashiwaiDown a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason customers stop by . . . The father-daughter duo are 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person's treasured memories - dishes that may well hold the keys to their forgotten past and future happiness. The restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to vanished moments, creating a present full of possibility.
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A House With Good Bones by T. KingfisherWarned by her brother that their mother seems“off,” Sam visits and discovers a once-cozy home with sterile white walls, a her mom a jumpy, nervous wreck and a jar of teeth hidden in the rosebushes.
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Audition by Katie KitamuraTwo people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and young enough to be her son. Who is he to her and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.
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How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigleyA bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece's private confession to the reader — she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.
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Queen Macbeth by Val McDermidA thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions--a healer, a weaver, and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her--because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. As the net closes in, what unfurls is a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre, and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.
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The Vulnerables by Sigrid NunezThe Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka.
The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another's distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez's novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.
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Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories by Amanda PetersIn her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters describes the Indigenous experience from a wide spectrum in time and place--from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water.
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The Dogs of Venice by Steven RowleyAfter months of planning a romantic holiday getaway in Venice, Paul is blindsided when his five-year marriage suddenly unravels. Fueled by heartbreak, Paul endeavors to take the trip alone. Soon after arriving in Italy, he notices a small, scruffy, self-assured dog trotting alongside a canal with the confidence he so desperately wants for himself. When their paths cross again, Paul feels compelled to learn how his new four-legged friend thrives on his own. Amid the food, sights, and welcoming people of Venice, Paul's journey culminates in a magical encounter that leads him to feel real connection-to a dog, to a foreign city and, most importantly, to himself. Capturing Steven Rowley's signature wit, insight, and indelible characters, The Dogs of Venice offers another timeless story of love lost, and independence found - a holiday tonic for the soul.
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The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories by Salman RushdieInternationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life's final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work--India, England, and America--and feature an unforgettable cast of characters. In the South introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men--Junior and Senior--and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In The Musician of Kahani, a musical prodigy from the Mumbai neighborhood featured in Midnight's Children uses her magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In Late, the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. Oklahoma plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. And The Old Man in the Piazza is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech. Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? Do we spend our eleventh hour in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don't know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
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Vera, or Faith by Gary ShteyngartThe Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and above all, the young Vera: half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birthmother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
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Where There's Smoke by Kiki SwinsonVolunteer Virginia Beach firefighter Alayna Curry used to pride herself on saving lives. But now, determined to conceal her part in an arson-for-insurance scam gone bad, she's using her skills to have the scheme's leader, Tim--her ex-lover--shot dead, claiming it was a robbery. She's carefully set him up to be the ultimate fall guy. And she's ruthlessly aiming to silence more witnesses--which will also get her beloved brother Alonzo out of prison.
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