Fiction

Description: "All Jessup wants is to enjoy his senior year at Cortaca High and get a scholarship to attend college. It doesn't seem impossible. He's a standout varsity football player. A good student. He works at the local movie theater to help his mother make ends meet. But it's hard to live a normal life when everybody in town knows that your stepfather is a white supremacist--a white supremacist who was involved in a violent encounter with two young black college students. And who is about to be released from prison. But his stepfather, David John, also saved Jessup's family from imploding, rescuing his mother and giving Jessup and his siblings a safe home for the first time. David John's release from prison sets off a chain of events that will forever define Jessup's entry into adulthood, dragging him into the swirling currents of irreconcilable ideologies, crushing loyalties, and unshakeable guilt"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing for bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director would first make her famous--then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysée, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast. Here, their father's fatalistic colleagues, the Reversalists, obsessively study the undowny bufflehead, a rare sea duck whose loss of waterproof feathers proves, they say, that evolution is running in reverse and humanity's best days are behind us. Stuck together in the close quarters of their island stilt-house, and provoked by the absurd antics of the remaining Reversalists, years of family secrecy and blame between Elsa and Nolan threaten to ruin them all over again. As the Greys urgently trek the island to find the so-called Paradise Duck, their father's final obsession, they begin to fear that they were their father's first evidence that the future held no hope. Is it possible to live in our broken world with both scientific pragmatism and hope? What does one generation owe another? How do we know which parts of the past, and ourselves, to jettison and which to keep? Family of Origin grapples with questions of nature and nurture, evolution and mating, intimacy and betrayal, progress and forgiveness.

Description: "At the heart of the story is an absence, an abyss that draws everyone nearer to its edge, created by the departure of a family's wayward only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes to him too; so does Mara, his former lover, who gave birth to a child who could be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain and commiserate, making mistakes and missteps, attempting to cope in the only ways that they know how. With a few brushstrokes, Natalia Ginzburg can flesh out an entire existence and all its pitfalls and disappointments with unmatched clarity."-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "On the outskirts of Johannesburg, seventeen-year-old Zodwa Bambisa lives in desperate poverty in tiny metal shack in a squatter camp, under the shadowy threat of a civil war and a growing AIDS epidemic. Eight months pregnant with a child she does not want, Zodwa carefully guards secrets that could get her killed if discovered. Meanwhile, at a rural farm outside the city, estranged sisters Ruth and Delilah each face a personal crisis that sends them back to their childhood home to lick their wounds. They live together in an uneasy peace until the day that they find a newborn baby on their doorstep. Abandoned with only a blanket wrapped around him, the child will change everything for the sisters, upending what they believed about race, motherhood, and the power of the past. As the mystery surrounding the infant's discovery grows, Zodwa, Ruth, and Delilah become inextricably linked. What follows is a mesmerizing look at family, identity, and the lengths to which the human heart will go to protect itself and the ones it loves"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: When your mother considers another country home, it's hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can't pronounce your name, it's hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it's hard to understand your place in the world. In Stubborn Archivist, a young British Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her--her mother, grandmother, and aunt. Our stubborn archivist takes us through first love and loss, losing and finding home, trauma and healing,and various awakenings of sexuality and identity. Shot through the novel are the narrator's trips to Brazil, sometimes alone, often with family, where she accesses a different side of herself--one, she begins to realize, that is as much of who she is as anything else."-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "There are riders willing to die just to win a single leg of the Tour, careening downhill at a suicidal ninety kilometers per hour; now I know there are also riders ready to kill for it. Marc, a French-Colombian professional cyclist with a military past, is on an elite Tour de France team led by his best friend, Steve, an American star and a favorite to win this year's Tour. But the competition takes a dark turn when someone begins eliminating racers in a series of violent "accidents," and all the remaining athletes become suspects. Marc agrees to help the French police with their investigation from the inside, but as the days progress, the dangers grow, and the number of potential murderers--and potential winners--shrinks. In fact, if there's any team that has been favored by the murderer's actions, it's Marc and Steve's. Who can Marc trust? Who should he protect? As the finish line approaches, Marc must decide what he's willing to risk for justice, victory, and friendship"-- Provided by publisher.

Description: "It is the waning days of the Russian monarchy. A reckless man rules the land and his dragons rule the sky. Though the Tsar aims his dragons at his enemies--Jews and Bolsheviks--his entire country is catching fire. Conspiracies suffuse the royal court: bureaucrats jostle one another for power, the mad monk Rasputin schemes for the Tsar's ear, and the desperate queen takes drastic measures to protect her family."-- Publisher's description.

Description: Dorothea Truelove is young, wealthy, and beautiful. Ruth Butterham is young, poor, and awaiting trial for murder. When Dorothea's charitable work brings her to Oakgate Prison, she is delighted by the chance to explore her fascination with phrenology and test her hypothesis that the shape of a person's skull can cast a light on their darkest crimes. But when she meets one of the prisoners, the teenaged seamstress Ruth, she is faced with another strange idea: that it is possible to kill with a needle and thread--because Ruth attributes her crimes to a supernatural power inherent in her stitches. The story Ruth has to tell of her deadly creations--of bitterness and betrayal, of death and dresses--will shake Dorothea's belief in rationality, and the power of redemption. Can Ruth be trusted? Is she mad, or a murderer? For fans of Shirley Jackson, The Poison Thread is a spine-tingling, sinister read about the evil that lurks behind the facade of innocence.