fiction / literary

"Detective Manon Bradshaw is 39, single, and miserable as sin. She has endured some of the worst dates in internet history. But she loves her job and performs it brilliantly; all she needs to rise up in the ranks is a big break. Edith Hind is a gorgeous, intrepid graduate student at Cambridge University who seems to have it all: a doting boyfriend, a devoted friend named Helena, a loving mother and a father who is a surgeon to the Royal Family. When Edith turns up missing from her apartment one evening, leaving only a single streak of blood along the front foyer wall, the case becomes a national media sensation. In the first frenzied 72 hours of being assigned to the case, Bradshaw will make a number of alarming discoveries: Edith's behavior had been erratic in the run-up to her disappearance, and her close friend Helena, the last person to see her, is clearly hiding something. A known sex offender appears in CCTV footage of Edith taken a short while before she goes missing. Then a body is discovered floating in a nearby river. Is Edith Hind alive or dead? Was her "complex love life" at the heart of her disappearance, as the tabloids are suggesting? Why is there reluctance, in the senior ranks, to press too hard on some elements of the story? Detective Bradshaw must use all her skill and resources to bring closure to the case for Edith's family, as she finds herself becoming ever more personally, and dangerously, invested"--.

"From the "hilarious, heartbreaking, and insightful" (The Miami Herald) bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a sweeping, modern day fairy tale about first romance and lasting love. When the love you love is the one who got away... Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to a doctor and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again. Rachel grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation. Over the next three decades, their paths cross in magical and ordinary ways. They make grand plans and dream big dreams as they grow together and apart in starts and stops. Through it all, Andy and Rachel never stop thinking about that night in the hospital waiting room all of those years ago, a chance encounter that changed the course of both of their lives. In this captivating, often witty tale about the bonds between women and men, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you'll never forget"--.

"In his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Jonathan Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards's young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards' wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale"--.

Tsukuru Tazaki has four best friends at school and all of their names contain a color, but his last name does not. Things only get worse for Tsukuru when his friends announce that they do not want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. Tsukuru cannot form intimate connections with anyone, until he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

""There are many ways to break someone's heart, but Rabih Alameddine is one rare writer who not only breaks our hearts but gives every broken piece a new life."-Yiyun Li Following the critical and commercial success of An Unnecessary Woman, Alameddine delivers a spectacular portrait of a man and an era of profound political and social upheaval. Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana'a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives us a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives. "Rabih Alameddine is one our most daring writers-daring not in the cheap sense of lurid or racy, but as a surgeon, a philosopher, an explorer, or a dancer."-Michael Chabon"--.

A novel in ten conversations that follows an English teacher teaching a course in creative writing during a hot summer in Athens, leading her students in storytelling exercises, meeting an elderly Greek bachelor, and confronting her own losses.

A collection of six short stories by American author Adam Johnson.

When Michael Whitley, otherwise known as Blue, takes three friends into the hinterlands of Canada to sell a house he's inherited, it at first seems to everyone like the perfect getaway from New York. But when Blue and the pregnant Elisa disappear into the forest, it's not clear if they were running from their problems, or toward something else. Left behind, the ethereal Gabe and Elisa's husband, Jason, are left to search for their loved ones, unravel the truth behind the land they're in, and, in the process, question everything they thought they knew about their relationships. Locals talk of UFOs, faeries, and the Other Kind lurking out in the wild. But when Elisa returns through the forest alone, nothing could be stranger than the new mystery she brings with her.

"Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels."--Provided by publisher.

"What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her "nest" of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora (Lee?) to a weekend away in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. Forty-eight hours later, she wakes up in a hospital bed injured but alive, with the knowledge that someone is dead. Wondering not "what happened?" but "what have I done?", Nora (Lee?) tries to piece together the events of the past weekend. Working to uncover secrets, reveal motives, and find answers, Nora (Lee?) must revisit parts of herself that she would much rather leave buried where they belong: in the past. In the tradition of Paula Hawkins's instant New York Times bestseller The Girl On the Train and S. J. Watson's riveting national sensation Before I Go To Sleep, this gripping literary debut from UK novelist Ruth Ware will leave you on the edge of your seat through the very last page"--.