Scharer, Whitney, author
2019
She went to Paris to start over, to make art instead of being made into it. "Sweeping from the glamour of 1930's Paris through the battlefields of World War II and into the war's long shadow, The Age of Light is a startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman's self-transformation from muse into artist."— Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere A captivating debut novel by Whitney Scharer, The Age of Light tells the story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as a muse. "I'd rather take a photograph than be one," she declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. But Man Ray turns out to be an egotistical, charismatic force, and as they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee's life forever. Lee's journey takes us from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from discovering radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it's possible to reconcile romantic desire with artistic ambition-and what she will have to sacrifice to do so. Told in interweaving timelines, this sensuous, richly detailed novel brings Lee Miller-a brilliant and pioneering artist-out of the shadows of a man's legacy and into the light.
Hendricks, Greer, author.
2019
"When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she'll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she's thinking...and what she's hiding."-- Provided by publisher.
Reid, Taylor Jenkins, author
2019
Daisy Jones is a beautiful, broken girl growing up in L.A. with rich parents who barely know she exists ... But when she sings in a crowded, smoky club, you can hear a pin drop. All she wants is to write her own songs, but the record studio has its own ideas. It's the early 1970s and free love and drugs are everywhere, and Daisy wants to experience it all. Billy Dunne and his brother have a band called The Six that won't be playing weddings for long. They are ambitious, hard-rocking, hard-partying. When they land a record deal, Billy's girlfriend follows them to the west coast and life begins. But she finds out she's pregnant on the eve of their first tour, and the pressure of fatherhood and incipient fame make Billy go a little crazy on the road. Daisy and Billy's paths cross when a manager realizes that the key to skyrocketing success is to put them together. But oil and water don't even begin to describe how they mix ... And what happens next will become the stuff of legend.
Phillips, Julia, author
2019
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls -- sisters, eight and eleven -- go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother.
Ramos, Joanne.
2019
-- "(Joanne) Ramos's debut novel couldn't be more relevant or timely." — -- The Farm -- New York Times "Ramos has written a firecracker of a novel, at once caustic and tender, page-turning and thought-provoking. This is a fierce indictment of the vampiric nature of modern capitalism, which never loses sight of the very human stories at its center. . . . Highly recommended." —Madeline Miller, Circe
Conklin, Tara.
2019
From the New York Timesand The NestThe Last Romantics is an unforgettable exploration of the responsibilities we bear both gracefully and unwillingly, and the all-important, ever-complex definition of love.
Jenoff, Pam, author
2019
1946, Manhattan. One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.
Ogawa, Yōko, 1962-
2019
A deft and dark Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, things are disappearing. First, animals and flowers. Then objects--ribbons, bells, photographs. Then, body parts. Most of the island's inhabitants fail to notice these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the mysterious 'memory police,' who are committed to ensuring that the disappeared remain forgotten. When a young novelist realizes that more than her career is in danger, she hides her editor beneath her floorboards, and together, as fear and loss close in around them, they cling to literature as the last way of preserving the past. Part allegory, part literary thriller, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
Arnett, Kristen N., author
2019
One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother's art escalates - picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose - and the Mortons reach a tipping point.
Weiner, Jennifer, author.
2019
"A smart, thoughtful, and timely exploration of two sisters' lives from the 1950s to the present as they struggle to find their places--and be true to themselves--in a rapidly evolving world. Mrs. Everything is an ambitious, richly textured journey through history--and herstory--as these two sisters navigate a changing America over the course of their lives"-- Provided by publisher.
Whitehead, Colson, 1969- author
2019
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Florida, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: he is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the American South in the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called The Nickel Academy, a grotesque chamber of horrors, where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back."
Choo, Yangsze, author.
2019
Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother's Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for. Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master's dying wish: that Ren find the man's finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master's soul will wander the earth forever. As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths racks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren's increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes.
Rooney, Sally.
2019
-- Normal People is a book that you will read in one sitting, and then immediately share with your friends.
Vuong, Ocean, 1988- author.
2019
"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity"-- Provided by publisher.
Thomas, Angie, author.
2018
As the daughter of an underground hip hop legend who died right before he hit big, Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time-- and has massive shoes to fill. She's been labeled a hoodlum at school, and the fridge at home is empty after her mom loses her job. So Bri pours her anger and frustration into her first song, which goes viral-- for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed by the media as a menace, Bri makes a choice-- and becomes the very thing the public has made her out to be. The odds are stacked against her, and freedom of speech isn't always free.
Barton, Fiona, author
2019
When two British teenage girls go missing in Bangkok following a hostel fire, journalist Kate Waters is sent to follow the story. Despite the circumstances, she's thrilled to go, as her estranged son, Jake, is volunteering at a conservancy project a few hours away and she is desperate for a reunion. When she arrives, she's just one of dozens of journalists vying for interviews with grieving families, and to her shock, the main suspect in the investigation is Jake.
Mackintosh, Sophie.
2019
-- -- Do not enter When their father, the only man they have ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two strange men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blisteringly hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men? A haunting, riveting debut about our capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, author
2019
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.
