On the heels of Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada’s new and irresistible Suggested in the Stars carries on her band of friends’ astonishing and intrepid adventures

It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth―Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change―but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.

As Hiruko―whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue―and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko―and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)―they empower each other against despair.  Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor.  In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship―loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going―sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this “strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker) trip to end.

From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village” to raise a child.

A riveting story about the Black Panther Party and the high cost that can come with revolution

Raised in Haiti by a father deeply embedded in activism, Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968. She quickly becomes devoted to the cause and its dedication to helping people in a racially divided America—and gets swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. But when Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers—and her relationship with Melvin reveals its own fault lines—Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women. She must figure out what is left for her within the movement, what she stands for, and whom she can count on.

For fans of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, Fabienne Josaphat’s Kingdom of No Tomorrow takes readers inside the Black Panther movement in this timely story of self-determination and the importance of revolution amid injustice.

After reconnecting on a road trip, two friends must decide if love is the ultimate risk worth taking in this funny, emotional sapphic romance.

Nia and Jade had been inseparable ever since their best friend, Michal, introduced them at her tenth birthday party. But now it’s been three years since Michal died of cancer― since the brutal fight Nia and Jade had in the weeks after― and they're barely on speaking terms.

Until Nia reads a letter Michal wrote for her 29th birthday, asking her and Jade to go on the southern Jewish history road trip they'd planned before she died. To add to the complications, Michal's then-boyfriend and Jade's twin brother, Jonah, joins the trip. Despite the years apart and Jade and Jonah’s strained relationship, any awkwardness quickly disappears as it becomes clear how much Nia and Jade have missed each other.

Unfortunately, old issues soon arise. Nia has been in love with Jade since they were teenagers, and Jade has been so committed to their friendship that she never let herself consider something more. As the stops pass, tensions mount, running high until Nia and Jade are forced to confront what happened three years ago, their feelings for one another, and even their respective relationships with Jonah.

Rachel Runya Katz’s Whenever You’re Ready is about family, friendship, and the kind of first love that could last a lifetime―if only you are willing to take a chance.

"Poignant, tender, and swoony, Whenever You're Ready is an instant favorite from an auto-buy author." - Alison Cochrun, Lambda award-winning author of Kiss Her Once for Me and Here We Go Again

A classic and influential story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive.

A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.

Born in 1933, the oldest of twelve children in a family of sharecroppers in Oscar, Louisiana, Ernest J. Gaines wrote novels and stories, set on and around the former slave plantation he called home, that are modern classics—nuanced, compassionate portraits of women and men, both Black and white, caught in the vortex of race in America. He joins the Library of America with this volume gathering his four greatest novels.

* The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the story of an elderly woman born into slavery who witnesses Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. A living testament to the history, hopes, courage, and survival of her people, Miss Jane is one of the most indelible and unforgettable characters in American fiction.
* In My Father’s House(1978) finds an activist minister organizing a civil rights protest in his town when his estranged son suddenly appears on the scene, threatening to expose his family's secret past.
* A Gathering of Old Men (1983) sees a group of elderly Black men with nothing left to lose decide to make a last stand against the racism that has defined and delimited their lives.
* A Lesson Before Dying(1993, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an Oprah Book Club selection), in which a local schoolteacher attempts to help a young man falsely convicted of the murder of a white man face execution with dignity.

A fitting tribute to a still underappreciated American genius, this volume also includes a chronology of Gaines’s life and career written by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, and helpful notes.

Issa Rae’s Insecure with a magical realist spin: River Mumma is an exhilarating contemporary fantasy novel about a young Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a mythical quest through the streets of Toronto.

Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store.

Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.

Alicia doesn’t understand why River Mumma would choose her. She can’t remember all the legends her relatives told her, unlike her retail co-worker Heaven, who can reel off Jamaican folklore by heart. She doesn’t know if her childhood visions have returned, or why she feels a strange connection to her other co-worker Mars. But when the trio are chased down by malevolent spirits called duppies, they realize their tenuous bonds to each other may be their only lifelines. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time—to find herself and what the river carries.

Energetic and invigorating, River Mumma is a vibrant exploration of diasporic community and ancestral ties, and a homage to Jamaican storytelling by one of the most invigorating voices in today’s literature.

“This quirky, fizzy, charming debut surprises and amuses. Reid-Benta writes beautifully, drawing on Caribbean mythologies to create a fast paced and entertaining tale. It's rare to find a novel written with such humour and heart.” —T. L. Huchu, USA Today Bestselling author of The Library of the Dead

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The New York Times bestselling author of Wench returns to the Civil War era to explore the next chapter of history—the trauma of the War and the end of slavery—in this powerful story of love and healing about three people who struggle to overcome the pain of the past and define their own future.

The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie, and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life.

Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others’ suffering, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. To mend herself and help those in need, she must return to Tennessee to face the women healers who rejected her as a child.

Sadie can commune with the dead, but until she makes peace with her father, she, too, cannot fully engage her gift.

Searching for his missing family, Hemp arrives in this northern city that shimmers with possibility. But redemption cannot be possible until he is reunited with those taken from him.

In the bitter aftermath of a terrible, bloody war, as a divided nation tries to come together once again, Madge, Sadie, and Hemp will be caught up in a desperate, unexpected battle for survival in a community desperate to lay the pain of the past to rest.

Beautiful in its historical atmosphere and emotional depth, Balm is a stirring novel of love, loss, hope, and reconciliation set during one of the most critical periods in American history.

Home is not a place—it’s a feeling.

Casey Black needs an escape. When her picture-perfect vow renewal ceremony ends in her being left at the altar, the former model turned social media influencer has new fame—the kind she never wanted. An embarrassing viral video has cost her millions of followers, and her seven-year marriage is over. With her personal and business lives in shambles, Casey runs from New York City to South Carolina’s Lowcountry hoping to find long-lost family. Family who can give her more answers about her past than her controlling mom-slash-manager has ever been willing to share.

What Casey doesn’t expect is a postcard-worthy property on a three-hundred-acre farm, history, culture, and a love of sweet tea. She spends her days caring for the land and her nights cooking much needed Southern comfort foods. She also meets Nigel, the handsome farm manager whose friendship has become everything she’s never had. And then there are the secrets her mother can no longer hide.

Through the pages of her great-grandmother’s journals, Casey discovers her roots run deeper than the Lowcountry soil. She learns that she has people. A home. A legacy to uphold. And a great new love story—if only she is brave enough to leave her old life behind.

“. . . a beautifully written story about family, self-discovery, secrets, and forgiveness.” —Kimberla Lawson Roby, New York Times bestselling author

* Inspiring contemporary fiction
* Stand-alone novel
* Book length: approximately 100,000 words
* Includes discussion questions for book clubs

Old secrets are brought to light when a family matriarch returns to Brazil after years away in this “original and highly immersive” (Good Morning America) debut that explores the heartbreak and hope of what it means to be from two homes, two peoples, and two worlds.

Daniel Cunha has a lot on his mind.

He got dumped by his pregnant girlfriend, his grandfather just dropped dead, and on the anniversary of the raid that doomed his drug-dealing aunt and uncle, his mother makes her unwanted return, years after she fled to marry another American fool like his father.

Misfortune, however, is a Cunha family affair, and no generation is spared. Not Daniel’s grandfather João—poor João—born to a prostitute and forced to raise his siblings while still a child himself. Not João’s wife, Marta, branded as a bruxa, reviled by her mother, and dragged from her Ilha paradise by her scheming daughter, Maria. And certainly not Maria, so envious of her younger sister’s beauty and benevolence that she took her vicious revenge and fled to the States, abandoning her children: Daniel and Lucia, both tainted now by their half-Americanness and their mother’s greedy absence.

There’s poison in the Cunha blood. They are a family cursed, condemned to the pain of deprivation, betrayal, violence, and, worst of all, love. But now Maria has returned to grieve her father and finally make peace with Daniel and Lucia, or so she says. As New Year’s Eve nears, the Cunha family hurtles toward an irrevocable breaking point: a fire, a knife, and a death on the sands of Copacabana Beach.

Amid the cacophony of Rio’s tumult—rampant poverty, political unrest, the ever-present threat of violence—a fierce chorus of voices rises above the din to ask whether we can ever truly repair the damage we do to those we love in this “fiery debut novel” (The Washington Post).

Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the Post WWII South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal

Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.

A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.

As he moves around the south, from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, primarily, to his second home of Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters with a variety of colorful characters and mythical prototypes: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists, and bigots. The lead among these characters is, of course, The Unicorn Woman, who exists, but mostly lives in Bud’s private mythology.

Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.

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A stunning, heartwrenching new novel from Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl with the Louding Voice

When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother—terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades.

Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky fourteen-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia’s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she’s finally found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. It’s always been Adunni’s dream to get an education, and she’s bursting with excitement. 
 
Suddenly, there’s a horrible knocking at the front gate. . . .

It’s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth behind the secret her mother has hidden from her. And Adunni will learn that her “louding voice,” as she calls it, is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village, Ikati. 
 
If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve—and shout their stories to the world.

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The son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.

After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

With Hannah and their two-year-old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breathtaking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

In this action-packed thriller from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, two parents facing catastrophe must find their lost children before the unthinkable can happen.
 

In London, the police storm Heathrow Airport to bring in a father for questioning about his missing daughter.
 
In Florida, a mother makes a connection between her son and the bomber, fearing he has been radicalized.
 
And in Oregon, an unknown organization’s conspiracy to bring America to its knees unfolds…
 
On the run from the authorities, the two parents are thrown together in a race against time to stop a catastrophe that will derail the country’s future forever.

But can they find their kids before it’s too late?

 
For fans of The Chain and I Am Pilgrim, this ground-breaking, blockbuster thriller is unlike any other thriller you will read this year.

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An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.

An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he’s a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man.

In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans.

Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life—whether willfully or forced—with piercing and brilliant clarity. A gifted new storyteller and trailblazing stylist, Reyes not only transports to other worlds but alerts us to the heartache and injustice of our own.

From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

“Having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me…” 

Shortly after flight MAS370 goes missing, scholarship student Girl boards her own mysterious flight from Australia to London to work on a dissertation on Sylvia Plath. Though she is ambivalent toward academia and harbors ideas about writing a post-colonial novel, if only she could work out just what that means, Girl relishes the freedom that has come with distance from the expectations and judgements of her very tight-knit Malaysian-Australian family. At last Girl has an opportunity to live on her own terms. 

Unfolding across Girl’s time at an artist residency in Scotland as she makes friends and enemies alike in a world far removed from any she’s ever known, But the Girl is a wry and playfully philosophical coming of age novel that reveals the joys, embarrassments, pleasures, and agonies of trying to discover and understand who you are. Girl grapples with the long shadow of colonialism, the pressure of expectations in immigrant families, and the sometimes difficult fact that those closest to us remain the most unknowable.

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A writing companion, inspirational guide to the craft, and anthology featuring interactive multi-genre work from the acclaimed organization on its twenty-fifth anniversary.

We all have stories to tell, but not everyone gets the mentoring and training or encouragement to become a great storyteller. Founded a quarter century ago, Girls Write Now has empowered young women and gender-expansive youth to harness their creative talents, gaining confidence, skills, and a community supporting them in sharing stories the world needs to hear.

This hands-on guide—conceived of and written and edited by the young people of Girls Write Now—draws from the organization’s dynamic curriculum and the writers’ own personal experiences spanning decades. It offers aspiring writers the tools they need to develop their craft—including tips, insight, and advice on the writing and publishing process as well as critical thinking about the future of storytelling.

With this handbook, readers everywhere can equip themselves to shape their life stories, and become the writers and leaders they dream of being.

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“A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previous

Akbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.

Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the room’s shadows is a besotted, grieving djinn, an invisible spirit who has haunted the mansion since her mysterious death. Obsessed with Meena’s story, and unaware of the creature that follows her, Sana digs into the past like fingers into a wound, dredging up old and terrible secrets that will change the lives of everyone living and dead at Akbar Manzil. Sublime, heart-wrenching, and lyrically stunning, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is a haunting, a love story, and a mystery, all twined beautifully into one young girl’s search for belonging.

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Tracy Brown crafts a tale about a master manipulator and serial survivor, who will scorch earth to get what she wants. The question isn’t who murdered her; the question is who wouldn’t? Brooklyn Melody James has finally gotten the punishment she deserves after leaving a web of lies, heartache, and betrayal behind her. As her life slips away, Brooklyn remembers the events that shaped her into the cold, calculating creature she became. Brooklyn learned the art of hustling from her parents who used the church to get money. Idolizing her father and despising her mother, Brooklyn’s determined to be the type of woman who makes her own rules. When her back’s up against the wall, she sacrifices her family, takes the burnt offering that remains, and runs away. In NYC, young Brooklyn charms her way into the inner circle of hustlers and stick-up kids, learning tricks along the way. She catches the eye of a major player in the drug game, Hassan, and they have a breathless love affair. Brooklyn becomes integrated into his operation, earning the trust of Hassan and his associates. But when she gets the keys to the kingdom, driven by unfettered ambition and a ruthless desire to survive, Brooklyn snatches the pot of gold, leaving bitter retribution promises behind her. From DC to Maryland, Brooklyn burns bridges and breaks hearts. What she doesn't realize is that someone is prepared to end her reign of terror. As she faces her killer and her fate, Brooklyn’s stunned that justice comes from the least likely place.

A searingly honest and resonant debut from a Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist, exploring what love and freedom cost in a society steeped in homophobia

The inaugural title from the most buzzed-about new imprint in years, And Then He Sang a Lullaby is a powerful, luminous debut that establishes its young author as a masterful talent.

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It’s his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends and doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There’s only one problem: he can’t stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé. Segun carries his own burdens and has been wounded in too many ways. When he meets August, their connection is undeniable, but Segun is reluctant to open himself up to August. He wants to love and be loved by a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who will see and hold and love Segun, exactly as he is.

Despite their differences, August and Segun forge a tender intimacy that defies the violence around them. But there is only so long Segun can stand being loved behind closed doors, while August lives a life beyond the world they’ve created together. 

And when a new, sweeping anti-gay law is passed, August and Segun must find a way for their love to survive in a Nigeria that was always determined to eradicate them. A tale of rare bravery and profound beauty, And Then He Sang a Lullaby is an extraordinary debut that marks Ani Kayode Somtochukwu as a voice to watch.

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"Master of craft and narrative" Walter Mosley returns with this crowning achievement in the Easy Rawlins saga, in which the iconic detective's loyalties are tested on the sun-soaked streets of Southern California (National Book Foundation) 

It is 1969, and flames can be seen on the horizon, protest wafts like smoke though the thick air, and Easy Rawlins, the Black private detective whose small agency finally has its own office, gets a visit from a white Vietnam veteran. The young man comes to Easy with a story that makes little sense. He and his lover, a beautiful young woman, were attacked in a citrus grove at the city’s outskirts. He may have killed a man, and the woman and his dog are now missing. Inclined to turn down what sounds like nothing but trouble, Easy takes the case when he realizes how damaged the young vet is from his war experiences—the bond between veterans superseding all other considerations.
 
The veteran is not Easy’s only unlooked-for trouble. Easy’s adopted daughter Feather’s white uncle shows up uninvited, raising questions and unsettling the life Easy has long forged for the now young woman. Where Feather sees a family reunion, Easy suspects something else, something that will break his heart.
 
Blood Grove is a crackling, moody, and thrilling race through a California of hippies and tycoons, radicals and sociopaths, cops and grifters, both men and women. Easy will need the help of his friends—from the genius Jackson Blue to the dangerous Mouse Alexander, Fearless Jones, and Christmas Black—to make sense of a case that reveals the darkest impulses humans harbor. 
 
Blood Grove is a novel of vast scope and intimate insight, and a soulful call for justice by any means necessary.

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From Printz honoree and National Book Award finalist Candice Iloh, a verse novel about Cerulean Gene, a nonbinary Black teenager searching for a new way to do more than survive in post-pandemic America.

Cerulean and their friends went into senior year—the first year of normal school after the pandemic—with a plan: keep their heads down in class, save money, and get the hell out of the Bronx once they graduate. If teachers are going to force them to read Huckleberry Finn, then they can't blame kids for "lighting out for the territory." Cerulean is convinced that there must be somewhere better than the Bronx and is focused on learning how to grow and make food so they can all be self-sufficient when they finally make their break.

Burned-out teachers and their father's badly timed workplace accident send Cerulean reeling off course, but Bronx babies are resiliant and resourceful, and Salt the Water is ultimately a radically hopeful vision of life beyond mere survival.

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In this “outstanding volume” (Boston Herald) that “ought to be at the top of everyone’s must-read list” (Essence), Black women and men evocatively explore what could make a smart woman ignore doctor’s orders; what could get a hardworking employee fired from her job; what could get a black woman in hot water with her white boyfriend? In a word: hair.

In a society where beauty standards can be difficult if not downright unobtainable for many Black women, the issue of hair is a major one. Now, in this evocative and fascinating collection of essays, poems, excerpts, and more, Tenderheaded speaks to the personal, political, and cultural meaning of Black hair.

From A’​Leila Perry Bundles, the great-granddaughter of hair care pioneer Madam C.J. Walker celebrating her ancestor’s legacy, to an art historian exploring the moving ways in which Black hair has been used to express Yoruba spirituality, to renowned activist Angela Davis questioning how her message of revolution got reduced to a hairstyle, Tenderheaded is as rich and diverse as the children of the African diaspora.

With works from authors including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and more, this “remarkable array of writings and images” (Publishers Weekly) will stay with you long after you turn the final page.

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The National Book Award-winning author of Felix Ever After delivers a beautifully tender story of two grumpy/sunshine, fake-dating actors navigating their love story both on and offscreen—perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Alexis Hall.

Logan Gray is Hollywood's bad boy—a talented but troubled actor who the public loves to hate. Mattie Cole is an up‑and‑coming golden boy, adored by all but plagued by insecurities.

When Logan and Mattie are cast as leads in a new romantic film, Logan claims that Matt has “zero talent,” sending the film’s publicity into a nosedive. To create positive buzz, the two are persuaded into a fake‑dating scheme—but as the two actors get to know their new characters, real feelings start to develop. 

As public scrutiny intensifies and old wounds resurface, the two must fight for their relationship and their love.
 

The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul. Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.

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“A significant new voice in fiction, Norris has written what may be one of the defining novels of the era at the intersection between Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.” —BuzzFeed

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Novels of the Summer ∙ One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of June ∙ One of ALTA's Recommended Reads for June ∙ One of BuzzFeed's Amazing Small Press Books To Add To Your Summer Reading List

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive…
He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates—the highly-rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Copeland’s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of history.

Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and contemporary voice, one whose take on coming of age in America becomes a startling reflection of our present moment.

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A multigenerational novel and an epic debut that explores the origins of a south Georgia family’s tradition and how its modern-day sons and daughters struggle the legacies of America’s Civil Rights Movement and the far-reaching impacts of the 1800s slave trade from Senegal to Charleston, S.C.

On a routine day, Fletcher Dukes drives his older sister, Olga, who is losing her sight, to do weekly grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly. On the liquor aisle, they pass a tall woman, head bowed reading a wine label. Fletcher smells her perfume first, then sees a strawberry birthmark on the nape of a woman’s neck and knows at once that this is his lost love, Altovise Benson. Fletcher and Altovise risked their lives together in sit-ins and marches, but their plan to marry was interrupted when the police turned a peaceful protest violent. The two were jailed in different towns leading to a separation that would ultimately span 52 years. Before Altovise’s departure, Fletcher carves her a peach seed monkey with diamond eyes. As we learn via harrowing flashbacks to 1800’s Senegal, an undiscovered Dukes ancestor who was sold into slavery carved the first monkey—the Peach Seed Monkey that forms the talismanic tradition, the rite of passage, that each generation of Dukes man gifts to his son on his 13th birthday—along with the tools and knowledge to carve them himself. By giving one to Altovise Fletcher initiates a physical and spiritual break in a tradition that like the Civil Rights Movement irrevocably shapes the lives of future generations including a Fletcher’s daughters, his grandson, Bo-D and a constellation of Dukes in the present.

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In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.

Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she’s keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost?

Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path toward confronting her present. As Eleanor’s avoidance of her feelings results in a series of outrageous—often hilarious—choices, her actions begin to threaten all she holds most dear. Meanwhile, glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood and family history in Taiwan unfurl, revealing long-held secrets, and Eleanor starts to realize that she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she’s hurtling toward?

At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.

A gritty, intense novel set on Detroit’s mean streets, featuring a much-feared deaf killer known as “The Silent Assassin,” who’s fresh out of prison and on a mission to avenge the murder of the man who taught him to survive. Perfect for readers of K’wan and Ashley & JaQuavis.

The man called Silence never let being deaf stop him from becoming Detroit’s most feared thug. Now he’s tearing up the city’s meanest hood to avenge the murder of his mentor. But there’s a brutal truth even he won't see coming . . .

Deaf since childhood, Silence can read body language like a book. His mentor, Doc, who acted as his voice, taught him to navigate the streets. Silence put those skills together to become the Motor City’s most lethal killer. But now he’s home after twelve years in lockdown—and primed for revenge. His city is crumbling, and Doc has been shot dead, his empire divvied up between Silence’s former friends—and no one is talking. . . Until Silence starts rattling cages, from the town’s hottest strip joints to its icy centers of political power.

Under pressure from a ruthless cop, Silence soon finds that the loyalty and friendship he valued, the truths he lived by—even the man he looked up to—might just be deadly illusions. And when someone goes after his adopted family, Silence is on the clock to unravel a lethal conspiracy—and stake his life on one last impossible play . . .

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity. These two generations of men are haunted by the Mother-Spirit who did not survive enslavement’s post-traumatic stress violence. Trinity is the riveting story of the daughter-spirit born to stitch love back into the scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine spirited daughter born to set everything back up right again, in this daringly original novel.

In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie’s own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, all must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.

As Alice Walker unfolds the experiences of these astonishing characters, she weaves a new mythology from old fables and history, creating a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African American experience.