Fiction

Description: In the future United States, our own history has faded into myth and traveling across the country means navigating wastelands and ever-changing landscapes. The country teems with monsters and artificial intelligences try to unpack their own becoming by recreating myths and legends of their human creators. Prospector Ed, an emergent AI who wants to understand the people who made him, assembles a ragtag team to reach the mythical Monument City. In this nanotech Western, Alex Irvine infuses American mythmaking with terrifying questions about the future and who we will become.

Description: "Berlin, 1938. Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon's creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked, and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science's greatest achievement. New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler's scientists. Chief among Jack's suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer's mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for"--Provided by publisher.

Description: "Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a 'room salon', an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roomate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the super-wealthy heir to one of Korea's biggest companies. Down the hall in their apartment building lives Ara, a hair stylist for whom two preoccupations sustain her: obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that is commonplance. And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to get pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise and educate in the cutthroat economy. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale that's seemingly unfamiliar, yet unmistakably universal in the way that their tentative friendships may have to be their saving grace" -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Fleeing the ravages of wartime Vienna, Pepa and her family find safe harbor in the small town of El Castillo, on the banks of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. There her parents seek to eradicate Yellow Fever while Pepa falls under the spell of the jungle and the town's eccentric inhabitants. But Pepa's life -- including her relationship with local boy Guillermo -- comes to a halt when her family abruptly moves to New York, leaving the young girl disoriented and heartbroken. As the years pass, Pepa and Guillermo's lives diverge, as does the fate of Guillermo's homeland. Nicaragua soon becomes engulfed in revolutionary fervor as the Sandinista movement vies for the nation's soul. Guillermo's daughter transforms into an accidental revolutionary. Pepa's son defies his parents' wishes and joins the revolution in Nicaragua, only to disappear into the jungle. It will take decades before the fates of these two families converge again, revealing how love, grief, and passion are intertwined with a nation's destiny. Spanning generations and several wars, Only the River explores the way displacement both destroys two families and creates new ones, sparking a revolution that changes their lives in the most unexpected ways" --Provided by publisher.

Description: "Paul Marden is grappling with the way that a sudden, devastating illness and his slow recovery have made him reevaluate what "normal" is for a man in his sixties who grew up in a time of change that promised better days than the ones he is now living through. Lelee was born male and wanted to transition to female but the process has been hindered by heart issues. Lelee also believes that she can speak to the dead, although she is skeptical of her own experiences. At one point, she tells Paul that she thinks the dead are all liars or themselves deceived about who or what they are. The rundown beach town both Paul and Lelee grew up in is in a transitional phase: suddenly rediscovered by surfers and other millennials, it has become a magnet for hipsters and hence, almost unrecognizable to its old inhabitants. The coastal town where Paul and Lelee live now lies between a bridge to another upscale beach town and an area of canals and marshland and has been heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Paul's rented house, on Satellite Street, is one of the few that survived the storm. Set amongst the context of these thematic elements, the story revolves around Paul's relationship with these places and with Lelee as well as his father, an elderly nursing home patient. It is Paul's father who inadvertently involves him in a feud between The Great Oswaldo, a long-ago children's program host who has become a professional skeptic and Happy Howie, who speaks through Lelee, demanding that Paul settle an old score for him with Oswaldo. In the 1960s, when Howie was a famous radio personality in New York, Oswaldo outed him as gay. In that era, a disc jockey on a rock and roll station couldn't be a darling of teenage girls who lived their lives by the top ten hit list on the radio and also be queer. Lelee is astonished to be "contacted" by Howie and will have to reevaluate what she thinks of her own interactions that lead beyond the human horizon. Paul will have to incorporate all these experiences with the help of a fondness for an old movie about Godzilla, the atomic beast who, as a child, he felt sorry for. After all, Paul was an unhappy kid who understood what it meant to be so angry that you wanted to destroy the world. Now, in his diminished physical state, and presented with a seemingly petty request to settle a score from beyond the grave, he's going to have to figure out how to use a monster's strength to survive this life and whatever may lie beyond" -- Provided by publisher.

Description: "Dre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful political consultant, his aggressive tactics have put him on thin ice with his boss, Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and mentored his career. She exiles him to the backwoods of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting to sell their pristine public land to the highest bidder. Dre arrives in God-fearing, flag-waving Carthage County, with only Mrs. Fitz's well-meaning yet naïve grandson Brendan as his team. Dre, an African-American outsider, can't be the one to collect the signatures needed to get on the ballot. So he hires a blue-collar couple, Tyler Lee and his pious wife, Chalene, to act as the initiative's public face. Under Dre's cynical direction, a land grab is disguised as a righteous fight for faith and liberty. As lines are crossed and lives ruined, Dre's increasingly cutthroat campaign threatens the very soul of Carthage County and perhaps the last remnants of his own humanity" --Provided by publisher.

Description: "Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong" -- Provided by publisher.