Coming Soon

In this spirited and emotionally resonant collection, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki turns her singular gaze to the short story, exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. With her distinctive blend of wit, warmth, and deep humanity, she brings us eleven richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds --- grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life. THE TYPING LADY is an electrifying meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we abandon, and the stories we become. Threaded with the tactile ephemera of writing --- typewriters, letters, manuscripts, and disappearing ink --- the book reveals how we record ourselves in language, and how language, over time, records us in return

In a darkly brilliant thriller set in Maine’s rural Kennebec River Valley, the body of a young runaway from a “troubled teens” school has been found in the water, seemingly drowned, while a teenage girl has gone missing, believed dead. Now it is up to one man, private investigator Charlie Parker, to find the connection, and bring two evils --- one new and one ancient --- to an end.

Alan Anderson is a powerful ad exec who has built a successful life. He’s up for the biggest pitch of his career, but when an anarchist farmer tanks Alan’s presentation, Alan bombs the pitch but ends the day with an epiphany. Alan is opting out. This development is anathema to his wife, Vivian. As if contending with a daughter who wants to write plays (!) and another who has an unnatural empathy with animals isn’t enough to manage, she can only watch as Alan moves into their backyard playhouse to live off the land and spend time with the family. But instead of shocking the neighbors, Alan’s commitment to a less-is-more lifestyle seems to be catching on. Could everyone want what Alan’s not selling? 

1605, London. Beatrix lives a solitary life in the shadows, wandering the city streets looking for ways to forget. Forget that everyone she has ever loved has been dead for nearly a century. Forget that, for her, love can only ever mean loss. Because Beatrix has a secret: a lifetime ago her deathbed wish was granted, making her immortal. Until one day, while picking pockets amidst the raucous crowds of The Globe Theatre, she meets Oliver. They spend a single, perfect day together before he tells her that he has to leave. She’s not surprised; eternity is a lonely place. When Beatrix and Oliver meet again by chance a century later, recognition hits her like a bolt of lightning. It’s impossible. He’s impossible. Just like her. A chance for Beatrix to truly live --- and love --- again sparks into existence.

In September 2022, the unthinkable happened: 19-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen in a stunning face-to-face match. Within days, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating --- a bombshell allegation that rocked the chess world. As the scandal spiraled, Chess.com --- the dominant force in online chess --- launched a high-stakes investigation igniting a global media firestorm. But CHECKMATE is about more than a cheating scandal. It’s the story of a teenager willing to risk everything to rise to the top; a reclusive genius suddenly fighting to protect his legacy; and a centuries-old game transforming into a billion-dollar industry fueled by streaming, sponsorships and Silicon Valley power players.

In the frigid air high above the Arctic Ocean American C-17 carrying a cutting-edge laser of immense power, successfully shoots down a ballistic missile nearly four hundred miles away. Before the celebration can even begin, the aircraft goes dark, vanishing off radar and disappearing into mist at the top of the world. As the details emerge it becomes obvious that the aircraft has been hijacked, the crew murdered at their stations. Its last known heading would take it directly to Russia, but the CIA insisted it never arrived. An odd signal suggests it crashed into the Arctic Ocean halfway between Norway and the North Pole. In a tense meeting the President asks how deep the waters are in that area. Not deep enough, is the answer. With the rules of engagement suspended and lives hanging in the balance, Kurt and the NUMA special projects team pull on the threads connecting the mystery only to discover the great nations of the world being manipulated by a single man with a deadly plan of revenge.

Max Kitson is a world-renowned pianist, and his twin sister, Natasha, is his manager and minder. But when, in 1957, at age 20, the former prodigy begins making uncharacteristic mistakes, he abruptly cancels his latest world tour. Without consulting Natasha, Max arranges to stay in the home of an enigmatic French patron, never realizing that Henri has been his sister's lover. Over the course of one summer, Natasha's long-simmering resentments and Max's deep insecurities drive the siblings apart as each vie for Henri's attentions. But neither twin can have their host entirely to themselves, because while, during the day, Henri woos Natasha with lavish gifts and trips to the ballet, it's Max's music that draws Henri from bed each night.

Facing the global threat of a rising Communist world power in the aftermath of World War II, the US employed hundreds of Black Americans to speed read Russian communications and gather essential information on the US’s most dangerous nuclear rival. The result was the creation of a segregated civilian codebreaking unit known as the Traffic Processing Division --- The Plantation. Despite wage discrimination, grueling hours, strict quotas and harsh conditions, the Plantation’s 100 college-educated Black women made invaluable breakthroughs in United States’ Soviet intelligence even as the Red Scare and the backlash against civil rights eroded their democratic freedoms at home. Their underappreciated top-secret work led directly to victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War 30 years later. In this thrilling history, Sarah Valentine tells their remarkable story in full for the first time.

The Shipman sisters are returning to their picturesque summer home on the New Hampshire coast for what they believe is a family reunion, the first without their late mother. However, their tranquil setting quickly becomes a stage for drama when their father, Calvin, drops the bombshell news that he plans to sell the cherished beach house. Mae, the youngest daughter, is distraught, already dealing with her own emotional scars. Natalie, the middle sister and social media darling, is equally anxious, especially since her flawless public image is on the verge of imploding. Meanwhile, Jordan, the eldest, is ready to be rid of the house so she can tend to her own professional disaster. As old memories are stirred up, the arrival of Calvin’s new wife pushes Jordan, Natalie and Mae to decide how far they’re willing to go to preserve the Shipman bond.

James Drayton has always found things too easy. Ambitious, brilliant, disciplined --- he graduates with a top first from Oxford and is on track to become the youngest ever partner at leading management consultancy McKinsey. His former classmate Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive dreamer: charming and restless, his boundless enthusiasm matched only by his knack for self-sabotage. When Roland takes a job at the same firm as James, the two men only vaguely remember one another. But as the financial crisis starts to unfold, a chance encounter sparks an idea and an unlikely partnership begins to take shape. Sent to Scotland to shutter offices and lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: What if they were made for more than this? What if they could build something that might even change the world?

Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of this pivotal summer, where the girls have nowhere new to go and everything new to feel. Looking back, an adult Mina traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. The rituals of girlhood become threads in a delicate, volatile web of intimacy, in which everything feels achingly fleeting and permanently etched. Loving one person, Mina learns, can change the way we love everyone else --- including ourselves.

I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU presents Marilyn in a startling new light. It draws upon unpublished letters from Marilyn, Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio; case notes and private letters from Monroe’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson; and unpublished audio recordings from the likes of Jane Russell, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Amy and Milton Greene, housekeeper Eunice Murray (the last person to see Marilyn alive) and many more. We go behind the scenes of her marriages to teenage sweetheart Jim Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. We see Marilyn train with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, working to dismantle the common perception that she was merely a dumb blonde. And in the concluding chapters, Wilson dissects what happened on the night Marilyn died after a suspected drug overdose.

Bestselling romance author Ivy Harcourt has been as unlucky in love as she’s been successful in writing --- as her sad relationship track attests, there are no good dating options left in New York. Until she rescues an escaped dog in the park and runs into Liam. Charming, British, hot architect Liam. The exact description of the love interest in her next book. When an instant connection leads to a whirlwind relationship, Ivy is convinced she’s found the dream man. Except he may be too perfect. He may be hiding something. And Ivy may have secrets of her own.

Sixtysomething, twice-divorced Barbara is at a crossroads. In the midst of her emotional uncertainty, she looks back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life, in hopes of figuring out how to optimize finding her 10th, and hopefully last, best friend. Barbara is acerbic, opinionated and wrong about many things, but she also doesn't shy away when she's at fault. The turning point of her predicament comes from Barbara’s choice, in friends, between (too-young) Caitlyn and the (unsuitable) Other Barbara. Will she repeat the exciting mistakes of the past, or will she try a new kind of mistake for a change? She feels like an out-of-season Scrooge who is unexpectedly, and all at once, surprised and entirely transformed by the possibility of joy.

Our narrator has a lot going on. She wonders where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is  tangled up with than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life. She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early 20th century. There are the facts: Gertrude Stein studied medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her wife, the subject of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS. But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language?

Maeve and Therese Dunigan are sisters, but the two have been estranged for years. Maeve is the rule-follower and Therese is the rebel. But when their mother's death brings the family back together, the two find that they have inherited a painting, one that could be worth millions and could save each of them. The only issue is whether it’s real or a fake and the only way they can prove that theirs is the real McCoy is to solve the mystery of how this portrait made its way to their childhood home in Savannah, GA. This means a road trip to Ireland, to their family roots, and to a mysterious crime that occurred generations ago. With tensions simmering, the two hit the road and find themselves in colorful villages, at local pubs. Can Maeve and Therese actually survive the journey without killing each other? 

Indian-American Mira Guhathakurta is a poetry editor at a distinguished literary magazine in New York. She reconnects with Jack, an old acquaintance from college and feels as if she might have found her soulmate. All that remains is for Jack to meet her family: her beloved father and sister Joy, a high-powered lawyer. But when Joy commits an unthinkable act of betrayal, the sisters are impossibly fractured and their father's heart is broken. As the sisters navigate their tumultuous relationship and Mira starts over, it turns out that Joy isn't the only one who has been or continues to be dishonest.

When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s. As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, SOMETHING WE SAID follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map.

When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home. Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral. She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life. How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?

Lindy has the summer of a lifetime planned at her family’s beloved cottage in Summerland Cove, Maine, where she’s spent summers all her life and where she and her husband David met as teenagers. She’s slated big events three weekends in a row: David’s 50th birthday party, her parents’ 50th anniversary party and her oldest daughter Hailey’s wedding. But when David doesn’t show up for his own party, everything about the life they’ve created together is thrown into question. Has he been in an accident? Or is it something more cliché --- a midlife crisis, an affair? Surely, he’ll show up for his beloved daughter’s wedding --- won’t he? The agonizing days tick by and still no David. Lindy’s four nearly grown children are panicked. Lindy struggles to remain calm, even as long-buried details of the family’s past begin to surface.

"My name is Juan Planchard. I’m 29 years old, and I have five million dollars in my account. I own a house in Caracas, another in Madrid and a high-rise apartment in New York. I run a sportsbook at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. I share a private jet with a friend’s frontman. And I’m convinced --- down to my bones --- that every decision I made during the revolution was the right one. My descendants will thank me.”  So begins THE ADVENTURES OF JUAN PLANCHARD, the story of a middle-class nobody turned millionaire by weaponizing the very corruption that swallowed Venezuela. But in the middle of the chaos, greed and blood money, Juan falls hard for Scarlet, a sharp, seductive American beauty who just might be his way out --- or his ultimate downfall.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods. In one, she and her brother live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine. As the books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame --- until the night it all goes up in flames. Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl, Guinevere’s public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last 20 years running from.

Long before every moment of our lives was tracked by technology, Phill Branch was under surveillance. His father treated him as if he were defective and continually searched for proof to support this belief. Phill paid greatly for his failures at boyhood, especially when he was caught playing jump rope with girls. This taught him there were standards to be met, codes that were not to be violated, and strict punishment for any deviation from a Black man’s assigned position in the world. In this poignant, illuminating personal narrative, Branch reckons with the patriarchy and tradition of these social structures in Black America, their legacy, and how they molded and silenced him. His is an insightful and surprisingly humorous reflection on identity, masculinity, and the quiet, radical act of choosing to exist on your own terms.

Ten years ago, a bestselling, critically acclaimed literary author disappeared without a trace…and without a final novel. In recent days, that missing manuscript has surfaced, but it's an espionage novel full of all-too-stereotypical spycraft and James Bond-like twists. His former publisher has asked the author’s best friend --- and fellow author named C.B. Everett --- to annotate the novel with details from real life to give the strange novel context within his larger oeuvre. But as C.B. reads, he finds the espionage thriller is filled with references to events and people who feel a little too familiar, and soon he’s wondering if the novel might in fact be a key to his missing friend’s disappearance.