Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only 27 years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed WUTHERING HEIGHTS. It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë --- an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, THIS DARK NIGHT constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. 

For 30 years, Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across 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’ 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 including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

Judy Blume’s influential novels turned classics touched the lives of tens of millions of readers. For more than 55 years, her work has done something revolutionary: it rewired the world’s expectations of what literature for young people can be --- frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity. But little is known about the real woman behind the iconic persona, and the unlikely journey of her literary ascension, until now. In JUDY BLUME, longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself, invaluable access to her papers and correspondence, and thoughtful analysis of Blume’s beloved novels, including early, unpublished works that shed light on the pathbreaking writer she would become. 

What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In THE IRISH GOODBYE, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships --- with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between five former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town, for which she poses. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction, a form Fennelly innovated in the genre-defying HEATING & COOLING. 

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

The 15th century was a violent age. In QUEENS AT WAR, Alison Weir chronicles the five queens who got caught up in wars that changed the courses of their lives: the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses between the royal Houses of Lancaster and York. Against this tempestuous backdrop, Weir describes the lives of five Plantagenet queens, who occupied the consort’s throne from 1403 to 1485: Joan of Navarre, Katherine of Valois, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Widville and Anne Neville. The Medieval Queens books strip away centuries of historical mythologizing to shed light on the genuine accomplishments and bravery of these fascinating female monarchs. QUEENS AT WAR brings the series to an action-packed close.

Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents --- entomologist father, dietician mother --- Margaret Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated, but also thrilling and beautiful. From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking seminal moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape --- from the cruel year that spawned CAT’S EYE to the Orwellian 1980s Berlin where she wrote THE HANDMAID’S TALE. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.

When Sue Monk Kidd was in high school, a home economics teacher wrote a list of potential occupations for women on the blackboard: teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary. “Writer” was nowhere to be found. On that day, Kidd shut the door on her writerly aspirations and would not revisit the topic until many years later when she announced to her husband and two children that she was going to become a writer. And so began her journey into the mysteries and methods of the writerly life. In WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL, Sue Monk Kidd pulls from her own life and the lives of other writers --- including Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou and Harper Lee --- to provide a map for anyone who has ever felt lost as a writer.

Mma Ramotswe can sense the rain long before it comes. It’s been a long, dry summer, but the first downpour of the season tends to bring with it new growth. In this case, it also brings a new client, who suspects his wife of having an affair. Mma Ramotswe is on the case, and she decides to bring Charlie along. But as they look further into the matter, they begin to suspect their client may not have been entirely truthful in explaining his predicament. Meanwhile, Mr. J.L.B.’s Matekoni has struck up a new friendship with a man named Mr. Mogorosi, a prominent figure in the motor trade business. Mma Ramotswe is concerned that Mr. Mogorosi may have ulterior motives for his attentions. When the two go on a fishing trip in waters teeming with dangerous crocodiles, she begins to worry for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s safety.

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews --- all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer --- surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time that Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory.