Adult

In this standalone and companion novel to the The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the ages, legendary book woman, Cussy Lovett, returns home. A powerful testament of strength, survival, and the magic of the printed word, THE MOUNTAINS WE CALL HOME is wrapped into a vivid portrait of Kentucky life: examining incarceration and criminalization, exploring the effects on the poor and powerless, and tracing the societal consequences of fractured family bonds, along with nostalgic glimpses of a bustling, multifaceted Louisville, and heartwarming portraits of reading efforts in every facet of life. Meticulously researched and richly detailed with a new cast of absorbing and complex characters, this beautifully rendered, authentic Kentucky tale is gritty and heartbreaking and infused with hope, spirit, and courage known only to those with no way out.

As a new resident of Golden Grove, an independent living community for active seniors, Sally wants to do everything in her power to start off on the right foot. But between navigating unspoken social rules of the community and leaving two struggling adult children back at home, fitting in becomes harder than she expected. So when she sees flyers advertising the Scrabble Club, she thinks she might as well give it a try. She quickly realizes her faux pas when she walks into the library to find just one man, Walter Kretzer, who has a reputation for being "a bit intense."  Walter has taken his Scrabble club a pinch too seriously in the past, but when he meets Sally, with her golden-flecked eyes and sensible style, and discovers she is something of a prodigy at the game, he can't help but feel his fate is about to change.

At just four years old, Reza Farahan left Iran for what was supposed to be a quick family trip to Los Angeles. But while he was soaking up the California sun, revolution erupted back home, and Reza's short stay turned into permanent exile. Reza was an outsider in every sense of the word. He was a half-Muslim, half-Jewish, gay Persian kid just trying to survive 1980s America --- a place that saw him as a threat, even when all he wanted was to belong. But with an unapologetic spirit and bold personality, Reza was never destined to simply fit in. He was meant to shine.  Reza eventually became the larger-than-life, fan-favorite star of Bravo's "Shahs of Sunset", where he served looks, shade, and cultural pride in equal measure. And now Reza is opening up about the journey that took him from closeted teen to reality TV royalty, from hiding his truth to owning every inch of his spotlight.

During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group’s center was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal stepsister. Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history.

NO WAY HOME tells the haunting story of Terrence Tully, an LA medical resident who is abruptly informed that his mother has died. Arriving at her home in a forlorn Nevada desert town, the naive doctor finds himself “like a swimmer caught in a riptide,” drawn into a love triangle involving the manipulative, margarita–swilling receptionist Bethany and her ex–boyfriend Jesse, a vengeful middle–school teacher cocksure about his sexual prowess. There is indeed no way home for Tully, who cannot extricate himself from this aimless, post–20–something world where motorcycle races and violent brawls puncture the daily grind of nowhere jobs, aimless sex, and recreational highs. Is retribution, Boyle asks, a natural human instinct? Can sexual jealousy bring on a level of vengeance that is downright pathological?

Indian American author Manil Suri grew up in a large crumbling apartment in Bombay (now Mumbai) which his parents, who were Hindu, shared with three Muslim families. Their single room, at times a refuge from the religious and territorial tensions pervading the apartment, was also a prison that held them captive. At age 20, Suri managed to break free and come to the US, where he finally found the freedom to embrace his sexuality and find a life partner. But the room, which still held his parents hostage, kept wrenching him back to Bombay. Eventually it was only his mother, Prem, left, who had staked all her happiness on her son but was unable to escape the room’s hold on her. When a rash of mysterious incidents seemed to beset the room, Suri realized how little time he had left to convince Prem that a happier life might await beyond the four walls that both enthralled and imprisoned her.

For 30 years Anne Enright --- one of our greatest living novelists (Times) --- has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays, collated from throughout Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen–eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles’s Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway; writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights; and offers new perspectives on writers such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.

Anne Kim is a lawyer in New York, her success built on forgetting the past. When her father dies, she returns to Edmonton for the funeral and is shocked to discover he was from North Korea and left his brother behind. As she reads the undelivered letters her father wrote to his brother about life in Canada, she is transported back to her childhood in the 1980s and 90s. She recalls the struggles her parents faced as immigrants who ran a grocery store in a rural prairie town. Anne and her brother, Charles, felt the weight of their father’s expectations: Anne was driven to excel and overachieve, whereas Charles rebelled, determined to pursue his own dreams. His rebellion created a rift that culminated in a devastating act, irrevocably shattering their family and leaving Anne overwhelmed by an inescapable guilt.

Nineteen-year-old undocumented immigrant Hee-Jin lies on the floor of her cramped Seoul apartment, listening for footsteps. But the knock on the door isn’t the police finally coming to deport her to North Korea. Instead, sprawled on the doorstep is a disfigured, bird-like corpse --- and it has her eyes. Her younger sister, artist Hee-Young, is meant to be on an art program in America, not dead of a strange overdose. But in Hee-Young’s pocket is a plane ticket and US passport. Seeing her chance for freedom, Hee-Jin steals her sister’s identity and takes her place, determined to uncover what really happened to her. But the deeper she dives into the program’s strange workings, the closer she gets to the monstrous secret at its heart.

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair 12 years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work. So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past --- an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son --- en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present.