Coming Soon

In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Peters melds traditional storytelling with beautiful, spare prose to describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A grieving mother finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. And a nervous child dances in her first Mawi’omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award-winning and title story “Waiting for the Long Night Moon.” At times sad, sometimes disturbing but always redemptive, these stories will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.

No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be ex-husband Jonah. Hailey has always tried to do what is expected of her and is regarded as the family peacemaker. The months leading up to Jonah’s death have been fraught, including a bitter separation and a messy custody battle over their young daughter, Maya. Sherry, Hailey’s mother, will stop at nothing to keep Jonah from getting what he wants. Nate, Hailey’s older brother, has tried to keep his distance, but he can’t stand to see his little sister suffer. And then there’s Solomon, the patriarch, who is keeping a secret that threatens the stability and security Sherry has worked so hard to maintain. Soon, they are forced to reckon with who they are as individuals and as a family, and just how far they will go for each other.

All Hamish Macbeth ever wants is a quiet life in his Highland village of Lochdubh. He is mulling over the idea of taking a holiday with his new love, Claire, when his constable presents both a surprise and a secret. Getting to the bottom of the secret becomes the least of Hamish’s problems when he meets a family who has a score to settle with a sinister man who has mysteriously gone missing. Discovering a murdered woman’s body puts further pressure on Hamish, especially when it becomes clear that the woman and the missing man were linked, although their true identities become yet another mystery. To Hamish’s horror, he finds himself working on the murder case with the despicable Detective Chief Inspector Blair. With a growing list of suspects, ever more bewildering circumstances and Blair hindering him at every turn, Hamish must find the murderer before anyone else falls victim.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence and always allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers --- and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney --- despite her training --- ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. All she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe, and that this time, she must stay away. On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, from a nice Irish family and they have another baby on the way. But he also monitors Ciara's every move, flies into unpredictable rages and has isolated her from work, friends and family. With no job and no support, Ciara struggles to provide a sense of normalcy for her little girls after moving into a hotel room. Ryan, meanwhile, wages a relentless campaign to win her back, and Ciara wavers.

When a painting vanishes from a maritime museum and a dead body is found nearby, the newly established Lockwood Antique Hunter’s Agency, Freya Lockwood and her Aunt Carole, are called to investigate. Following a lead that takes them aboard a glamorous antiques cruise sailing toward the Red Sea in Jordan, they quickly discover that the ships art gallery is filled with stolen antiquities. In chasing a murderer with a stolen painting, they may have found something more sinister than they could’ve imagined...Their hunt soon turns deadly when they learn the enigmatic and dangerous art trafficker named The Collector could be on board. But on a ship full of antiques enthusiasts, will Freya and Carole be able to discover the Collector’s identity and stop his murderous plans before the ship docks? Or will the killer strike again?

Hana Babic is a quiet librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that a dark remnant of the past she and her friend shared has come for her. Thirty years before, Hana was Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in war-torn Bosnia --- until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. She joined a band of militia fighters, where she became the legendary, deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head. Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora --- and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and call out mysterious messages to her, Pauline Sinclair, age 99, knows she will not make it to her 100th birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmer in the area and experiencing both deep passion and true loss. Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan,  a white American man who came decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.  

Charismatic daredevil and extreme adventurer Maverick Dillan invites you to the ultimate game of hide-and-seek. But as the players gather on Falcao Island, the event quickly spirals into a chilling test of survival. A storm rages as a deadly threat stalks the contestants, turning the challenge into something far more sinister than the social media stunt it was intended to be. Enter Adele, a single mother with a fierce determination to protect her children at all costs. When she begins the game, she unwittingly enters a twisted web of deception and intrigue. Can she maneuver through the treacherous storm and the relentless competition and get home to her family? In a ruthless battle for survival where the stakes are higher than ever, the blurry line between the virtual and the real proves that the only person we can trust is ourselves.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.” The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox and Percy can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs --- and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both and set Joe on a path to indie-rock stardom. But it also bruises Joe’s ego and traps Percy in a role she resents. How long can Percy ignore the roars of her heart and of her own unique talent, to protect their thrilling collaboration? 

It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla’s life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note. Then it starts. Breaking news: there's a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn't a hostage. Her husband --- doting father, eternal optimist --- is the gunman. What she does next is crucial. Because only she knows what the note he left behind that morning says.

In her second story collection, Curtis Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned. In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,” a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,” a married artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel PREP a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school. 

When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Fearless, adventurous and independent, they represented a new kind of empress --- one who rebelled against tradition and anticipated and embraced modern values. Yet both women endured hardship in their private and public lives. Elisabeth was plagued by a mother-in-law who snatched her infant children away and undermined her authority at court. Eugénie’s husband was an infamous philanderer who could not match the military prowess of his namesake. Between them, Elisabeth and Eugénie were personally involved in every major international confrontation in their turbulent century, which witnessed thrilling technological advances, as well as revolutions, assassinations and wars.

In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her. Why is she having visions of a young man who died 20 years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality --- including events in his own life.

As Hollywood prepares for its most glamorous evening, five actresses compete to see who will claim the top prize. Adria, a dignified and highly regarded grand dame of the movie industry, is intent on cementing her legacy as one of the greatest thespians of all time. Bitty must keep a nervous breakdown --- and an increasingly debilitating alcohol addiction --- at bay. Contessa, a former child star, is determined to make the world take her seriously. Davina attempts to find her footing in superficial Los Angeles, a far cry from her roots as a serious London stage actress. And Jenny --- always the underdog to her rival, Adria --- sees this awards season as her personal redemption. And while they work to push their careers forward and maintain the public’s goodwill, all five are forced to confront truths about themselves that they would rather ignore.

As head costume designer for Lux Pictures, Lena Taylor hears startling confessions from the biggest movie stars. She knows how to keep their secrets --- after all, none of their scandals can match her own. Lena was once Elsie Gruner, her gift for fashion design helped her win a coveted spot at an art academy in Rome. While in Italy, she became enthralled by the charismatic Julia, who drew her into a shadowy world of jazz clubs, code words, and mysterious deliveries. When one of Julia’s intrigues ended in murder, Elsie found herself in the middle of a bewildering sinister international plot. So she ran. After fleeing to LA, Elsie became Lena --- but she’s never stopped looking over her shoulder. Now, as her engagement to a screenwriter throws her into the spotlight, she’s terrified her façade won’t hold up. Will she figure out the truth about her past before everything falls apart?

Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all.

At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies.

Isabelle Shelton has always found comfort in the predictable world of her mother’s dressmaking shop, Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, while her sister Sylvia turned her back on the family years ago to marry a wealthy doctor whom Izzie detests. When their mother dies unexpectedly, the sisters are stunned to find they’ve jointly inherited the family business. Izzie is determined to buy Sylvia out, but when she’s conscripted into the WAAF, she’s forced to seek Sylvia’s help to keep the shop open. Realizing this could be her one chance at reconciliation with her sister, Sylvia is determined to save Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions from closure --- and financial ruin. Through letters, the sisters begin to confront old wounds, new loves and the weight of family legacy in order to forge new beginnings.

After a tragic accident upends her life, Kate Mercer leaves London to work at an old guest house near the Scottish border, where she hopes to find a fresh start and heal from her loss. When she arrives, she begins to unravel the truth about her past, but discovers that the mysterious elderly proprietor is harboring secrets of her own. Audrey James is weeks away from graduating from a prestigious music school in Berlin, where she’s been living with her best friend, Ilse Kaplan. As war looms, Ilse’s family disappears and high-ranking Nazi officers confiscate the house. In desperation, Audrey becomes their housekeeper while Ilse is forced into hiding in the attic. When a shocking turn of events embroils Audrey in the anti-Hitler movement, she must decide what matters most: protecting those she loves or sacrificing everything for the greater good.

Something is not right with George the shepherd. George has cared for the sheep, reading them books every night, and now he lies pinned to the ground with a spade. His flock, far savvier about the workings of the human mind than your average sheep, set out to find George’s killer, led by Miss Maple, the smartest sheep in Glennkill (and possibly the world). Her team of investigators includes Othello, the “bad-boy” of the group; Mopple the Whale, a merino remembers everything; and Zora, a thoughtful, if gloomy, ewe. Together, the sheep engage in nightlong discussions about the crime, and their speculations vary wildly. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, they embark on furtive missions into the village, where they encounter some likely two-legged suspects. With wit and heart, this clever international bestseller is a mystery to chew on --- and savor.