VOLUME I

Afterlives

Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s epic novel explores the impacts of colonialism on the lives of a handful of characters in East Africa from the early 1900s to the 1960s.

Ain’t Burned All the Bright

Ain’t Burned All the Bright, the second collaboration between award-winning young adult author Jason Reynolds and artist Jason Griffin, is an art book and a poem, illustrating the anguish of a multigenerational Black family in the summer of 2020. Quarantined (and one infected) because of the deadly COVID-19 virus, the family members react to news reports of Black people being killed and brutalized by police.

All Down Darkness Wide

Seán Hewitt’s memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, recounts the author’s experience in a relationship turned upside down by a period of suicidal depression. Told through flashbacks to this period in his life, Hewitt weaves a story that attempts to account for the harm that can be done when one is forced to hide the most important parts of oneself, including mental illness and sexual identity.

All My Rage

In Sabaa Tahir’s contemporary novel, Pakistani American protagonists and estranged best friends Noor and Salahudin navigate their senior year of high school while confronting racism, financial hardships, and family crises in the California desert.

All the Flowers Kneeling

All the Flowers Kneeling, Paul Tran’s debut collection, explores the experiences of a young, queer, transgender Vietnamese American dealing with the aftermath of abuse and imperialist violence, seeking acceptance, hope, and a way of making sense of their past.

All This Could Be Different

A 2022 National Book Award finalist, Sarah Thankam Mathews’s All This Could Be Different chronicles a young lesbian woman’s professional travails, her platonic and romantic relationships, and her struggles with her traditional Indian family.

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me

Writer Ada Calhoun’s hybrid memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me is both an attempt to finish a biography of the poet Frank O’Hara that her father had begun over forty years prior and an examination of the relationship between her and her father, the lapsed poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

In this dark and violent historical fantasy novel, R. F. Kuang constructs an alternate version of 1830s England to offer thought-provoking commentaries on academia, race, colonialism, and empire. It focuses on a Chinese immigrant-scholar who, along with three of his cohorts, learns how to harness the magical and destructive powers of silver-working while studying at Oxford University’s vaunted Royal Institute of Translation, colloquially known as Babel.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands

Bad Mexicans offers an account of the origins of the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution that focuses on the efforts of Ricardo Flores Magón, whose work was carried out primarily within the borders of the United States and helped to lead to the downfall of the long-serving dictator Porfirio Díaz. This lens enables Hernández to explore US involvement in Mexico in the years leading up to the revolution and the treatment of Mexicans in the United States.

Big Girl

Big Girl is a fraught but triumphant coming-of-age story about a resilient young girl and her besieged Black community, both under intense pressures to become thin, colorless versions of themselves.

Black Cake

Black Cake (2022) is an intergenerational and multicultural story of a Caribbean woman’s survival, the secrets she keeps her entire life, and how she chooses to reveal them to her adult children after her death.

Black Cloud Rising

Black Cloud Rising tells the fictionalized story of the real-life Sergeant Richard Etheridge, who was freed from bondage and joined the Union Army’s African Brigade in 1863. Etheridge is best known for his post-war military service commanding a unit that served as a forerunner of the Coast Guard, but Black Cloud Rising illustrates how Etheridge’s character was forged through his experiences as a sergeant leading other men recently freed from enslavement in combat.

Blank Pages and Other Stories

Bernard MacLaverty’s short story collection Blank Pages and Other Stories explores quiet moments of human connection in the face of despair and the ways in which people move through loneliness in an isolating world.

Bliss Montage

Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma, is a kaleidoscope of moments set against the danger and violence women—in this case mostly Chinese American women—experience in the world. Protagonists range from ex-girlfriends to daughters to expectant mothers, all of whom are trying to make sense of their place in the world and navigate sticky situations, told through Ma’s vivid prose.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Part craft book, part memoir, this acclaimed best-selling essay collection examines the many challenges and rewards of personal narrative writing. Drawing on extensive research and her experiences as both an author and teacher, Melissa Febos offers practical tips and keen insights into the transformative power of the medium.

The Book Eaters

A haunting tale of motherhood and loyalty, Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters follows a woman who dares to break away from her restrictive family of supernatural entities.

Book Lovers

A story that challenges the stereotypical way in which female characters and love are presented within the romance genre, Book Lovers is the third romance novel by New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

The Books of Jacob: Or: A Fantastic Journey across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment

In The Books of Jacob, the Nobel Prize–winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk presents a novel of epic proportions chronicling the career of Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century Jewish heretic who proclaimed himself a messiah and led a religious movement that won thousands of adherents.

Booth

Karen Joy Fowler’s epic, generation-spanning novel Booth focuses on a specific, tragic era of United States’ history, the lead-up to and eventual start of the Civil War, and the experiences of the Booth family—including John Wilkes Booth—within those times. Told from the perspectives of several members of the Booth family, the novel creates a patchwork of experiences preceding one of the most infamous moments in American history: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

The Bullet That Missed: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery

The Bullet That Missed is the third installment of English author Richard Osman’s best-selling mystery series The Thursday Murder Club. Elderly, amateur sleuths Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce, and Ibrahim have found a new cold case—the unsolved murder of a Kent TV reporter named Bethany Waites—and, in pursuing it, uncover a much larger web of deceit.

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life

In Buster Keaton, the noted biographer James Curtis presents a definitive and appreciative account of the life of the great twentieth-century silent film comedian Buster Keaton. Curtis covers Keaton’s life in great detail, from his early days as a child vaudeville performer to his final years.

Call Me Cassandra

This novel by award-winning Cuban writer Marcial Gala tells the story of a boy growing up in 1970s Cuba who sees himself as the reincarnation of the doomed prophet Cassandra from Ancient Greek myth. It explores issues of identity, fate, and violence in unusual and compelling ways.

Calling for a Blanket Dance

Oscar Hokeah’s debut novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance (2022), follows the growth and development of Ever Geimausaddle, an Oklahoman of Cherokee, Kiowa, and Mexican heritage, as related by members of his family.

Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

In Camera Man, the veteran film critic Dana Stevens presents an appreciative study of Buster Keaton that attempts to place the man and his work in the context of his times. Stevens sees Keaton, a comedic star of silent films during the twentieth century, as a figure whose tumultuous career reflected key cultural and technological trends of the time.

The Candy House

A sequel to the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House examines ideas about human connectivity, relationships, technology, and memory.

Carrie Soto Is Back

Taylor Jenkins Reid solidifies her status as a leading voice in popular fiction with this suspenseful and emotionally powerful 1990s-set drama, which centers around the post-retirement comeback of a legendary female tennis champion.

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s biography explores the life of Constance Baker Motley, an influential civil rights attorney and the first Black woman to be appointed a US federal court judge.

The Colony

The Colony, Irish novelist Audrey Magee’s Booker Prize–nominated novel, explores the harms and complexities of colonialism. In it, an arrogant English painter visits a remote Irish island in 1979, at the same time a French linguist is staying there, during the height of the bloody sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.

Companion Piece

Novelist Ali Smith follows up her acclaimed Seasonal Quartet with a fifth companion novel exploring the nature of freedom and constraint and what it means to live in post-Brexit Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Constructing a Nervous System

Literary critic Margo Jefferson’s unorthodox memoir combines remembrance, personal reflection, quotation, and analyses of various artistic works to bring to life a portrait of the author’s imaginative life.

Corrections in Ink

In this gritty and unflinchingly honest debut memoir, investigative journalist Keri Blakinger, who was once addicted to drugs and spent almost two years in prison for heroin possession, examines her own rise, fall, recovery, and redemption, providing harrowing revelations about the inhumane conditions and gross inequities inside US prisons.

Customs

Solmaz Sharif’s second book of poetry explores the experiences of exile and of moving between borders, filtered through the author’s experience as an Iranian American.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s eighth novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, is a fresh take on H. G. Wells’s nineteenth-century tale of a man facing dire consequences for the arrogance of delving into forbidden science.

Daughter of the Moon Goddess

A thrilling fantasy novel inspired by the myth behind the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, Daughter of the Moon Goddess places a feminist spin on the legend, examining the bond between mother and daughter and the sacrifices we make to save a loved one.

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir—and a Love Letter to a Way of Life

Nyle DiMarco, who was born into a large family of Deaf people, here recounts in an impressively cheerful and uplifting book the challenges he has faced during his life but also the real joy he feels every day in living as a Deaf person.

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver’s tenth novel tells the story of a boy growing up poor and orphaned in rural Appalachia. An intelligent survivor, he becomes a sympathetic guide to a landscape abandoned by the modern economy and ravaged by drugs, where real hope seems scarce.

Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs, a novel by award-winning author Lydia Millet about a wealthy man seeking absolution from his privilege, is a meditation on how to be good in a world defined by disaster and doom.

The Door of No Return

Told in lyric verse, Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return brings the horrific realities of the slave trade front and center in a manageable way for young readers who are learning about this tragic history.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

In this graphic memoir, artist and writer Kate Beaton recounts her two years working in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada. While determined to use the job to pay off her college loans, she struggles with loneliness, the sexist attitudes of management and her male coworkers, and the disturbing information she learns about the oil industry’s impact on the environment and Canada’s Indigenous population.

Easy Beauty

Chloé Cooper Jones’s first full-length work, the memoir Easy Beauty, explores the concept of beauty from classical times to the present, as it relates to public perceptions of, and her internal thoughts about, her disability.

Either/Or

A sequel to Batuman’s 2017 novel, The Idiot, Either/Or follows Selin Karadağ over her sophomore year at Harvard University and her summer traveling in Turkey as she reflects on the events of her freshman year and continues her journey of self-discovery.

Fellowship Point

Alice Elliott Dark’s second novel, Fellowship Point, explores lifelong friendship, family legacies, and the power of place as two older women fight to preserve their land in coastal Maine.

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Political theorist Lea Ypi presents a beautifully written memoir of her early life in Albania as the country’s strict communist regime came to an end. She compellingly documents the suffocating atmosphere of a totalitarian state as seen through the eyes of an innocent, as well as the chaotic attempt to transition to a market economy.

Gathering Blossoms under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000

Gathering Blossoms under Fire is an edited collection of journal entries from the Pulitzer Prize–winning American writer Alice Walker.

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

In this engagingly told history, Matthew F. Delmont offers a comprehensive look at the experiences of Black Americans during World War II, chronicling their various indispensable roles in the war effort both at home and abroad while experiencing pervasive racial segregation, prejudice, and violence.

Happy-Go-Lucky

In Happy-Go-Lucky, a collection of eighteen semiautobiographical essays, humorist David Sedaris delves into his fraught relationship with his father, the COVID-19 pandemic, and several other topics, all with his signature empathy, humor, and absurdity.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

The twelve stories in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak revolve around a village called Deh-Naw in the Logar province of Afghanistan, though many are set in California. Fantastical, strange, and surreal, Jamil Jan Kochai’s stories grapple with a history of generational violence in surprising ways.

Heartbroke

Heartbroke, Chelsea Bieker’s dark and powerful first collection of short fiction, offers a poignant yet unsentimental portrait of lost souls and broken hearts set against the beautifully bleak backdrop of California’s Central Valley.

Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be

In Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be, music journalist Marissa R. Moss chronicles the pitfalls and obstacles faced by women in country music who dared to step away from tradition and sexist standards. Told through a vivid narrative, the book provides a rich history of women in the modern country music world, from the 1990s to the 2020s.

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

In His Name Is George Floyd, journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa use primary sources and hundreds of recorded interviews with family members, lawmakers, activists, and others to understand the life of George Floyd within the context of the political, social, economic, educational, and legal policies and practices that impacted him and other Black people in the United States.

Horse

With multiple, interwoven narratives spanning nearly two centuries, Horse presents a fictionalized odyssey centered around the life and legacy of a real-life nineteenth-century racehorse. Taking on weighty issues of race, art, science, and social unrest, the novel emphasizes the importance of perseverance and following one’s passion.

How to Raise an Antiracist

Written by renowned American author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi, How to Raise an Antiracist is a guide for parents and teachers on how to educate children about racism and, in turn, protect them from its harmful impact.

The Hurting Kind

Ada Limón’s sixth poetry collection, The Hurting Kind, finds the writer in familiar territory: uncovering the deeply personal within the frame of the natural world, laying devotion upon the seemingly ordinary, and revealing its extraordinariness. Written during the pandemic, her poems call the reader back to the body, back to the earth, with moments of wonder made deeper by pain.

I Cried to Dream Again: Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance

Activist Sara Kruzan’s memoir, written with the assistance of veteran writer Cori Thomas, chronicles her abusive childhood, descent into sex work as a trafficking victim, conviction for murder, and imprisonment for life without possibility of parole. The narrative, which concludes with her ultimate release from prison after nearly two decades, provides insight into not only the flaws of the American criminal justice system and the horrific realities of sex trafficking but also the human capacity to move beyond trauma.

I Must Betray You

Set in communist Romania in late 1989, I Must Betray You follows Cristian Florescu, a seventeen-year-old high school student who is blackmailed by the “Securitate,” the regime’s secret police, to become an informer. Living in a society where isolation and fear reign supreme, Cristian hopes to expose to the world the reality of Romania, a country in the throes of revolution.

If I Survive You

If I Survive You, the debut short-story collection by Jonathan Escoffery, follows a Jamaican American family living in Florida and explores issues of identity and belonging.

I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife & Motherhood

I’ll Show Myself Out is a tragicomic memoir of new motherhood. In this collection of essays, Jessi Klein, a comedian, writer, and producer, explores topics ranging from details of the physical trauma following childbirth, to the psychological challenges of changes to the body, to the disconnect of rosy social images of motherhood versus the struggles of its daily realities.

I’m Glad My Mom Died

I’m Glad My Mom Died is a memoir written by actor, singer, writer, and director Jennette McCurdy about her traumatic youth. Based on her one-woman show, it is her first book.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us

The second book by journalist Ed Yong, An Immense World is a guide to sensory biology and the different ways that animals experience life on Earth.

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

The Impossible City chronicles the coming of age of a young woman dealing with both personal difficulties and the upheavals of postcolonial Hong Kong while documenting the vibrant—and possibly vanishing—culture of the city in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age

In Index, a History of the, Dennis Duncan chronicles the history of the index from the development of alphabetic order to the emergence of computerized indexing technology thousands of years later.

Inheritance: A Visual Poem

Inheritance presents an illustrated version of a poem by acclaimed writer Elizabeth Acevedo that originated as a spoken word piece. It uses the subject of Black hair to explore the complicated ancestral legacy and present-day impact of Afro-Latinidad heritage, and Dominican identity in particular.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness takes on the author’s experience with mysterious autoimmune syndromes and disease, chronicling her fight to be taken seriously by the medical establishment and find relief, if not a cure, to her debilitating issues. Taking into account the work of writers like Christina Crosby and Susan Sontag and the research and opinions of countless medical doctors, it strives to provide a detailed look at the barriers facing so many people with illness that presents itself inside rather than out.

The Kaiju Preservation Society

John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society follows a startup marketing executive who, after being demoted and then fired during the COVID-19 pandemic, takes a job with a mysterious animal rights organization whose mission is to save strange, secret creatures living in a parallel world.

Kaikeyi

A reimagining of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, Kaikeyi tells the ancient story through the lens of a character commonly portrayed as a villain, Rama’s stepmother, Kaikeyi.

Killers of a Certain Age

Best known for her best-selling mysteries set in Victorian England, author Deanna Raybourn’s novel Killers of a Certain Age is a contemporary thriller featuring a cast of female assassins in their sixties. After forty years of killing Nazis, drug lords, and dictators, the assassins are set to retire, when they find that they have become the targets of their former organization.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

Historian Deborah Cohen traces the careers of four American foreign correspondents whose work shaped public opinion and marked a significant era of journalism in the United States in the period leading up to and during World War II.

The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

The Last Slave Ship, a history by award-winning environmental journalist and filmmaker Ben Raines, weaves together a complex captivating saga of criminal deception, and a legacy of trauma, recovery, and resilience in telling the story of the discovery of the Clotilda, the final ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States.

The Last White Man

Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel, The Last White Man, explores intimate and sensitive issues of identity and perception through a world in which people have begun mysteriously exhibiting different racial characteristics.

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

In this tender and humorous memoir, best-selling author and screenwriter Delia Ephron takes readers on a journey of loss, love, and hope as she chronicles her near-fatal battle with an aggressive leukemia after losing her first husband to cancer and unexpectedly finding love again at age seventy-two.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Historian Caroline Elkins documents the extreme measures political leaders in Britain used to sustain its empire during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the face of growing independence movements in colonial territories around the globe.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a collection of surreal and fantastical short stories that hold up a warped mirror to modern life, dealing with technology and uncertainties about the future as well as timeless themes of grief and the search for human connection.

Lessons

The novel Lessons follows one man’s life over the course of more than sixty years of history, tackling existential questions of time, relationships, trauma, and meaning.

Lessons in Chemistry

The best-selling novel Lessons in Chemistry, which has been published in some forty countries, tells the story of a female chemist named Elizabeth Zott intent on bucking the chauvinism and misogyny of the male-dominated scientific community in mid-twentieth-century America. After Elizabeth reluctantly agrees to host an educational television cooking show, she becomes a source of inspiration and empowerment to other women.

The Letters of Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn was not only a major post-war British poet but also a key figure in the growing gay rights movement in twentieth-century society and literature. The selections from his thousands of letters collected in The Letters of Thom Gunn provide much valuable information about the poet’s life and work.

Liberation Day

In Liberation Day, a 2022 collection of short stories by award-winning author George Saunders, characters try and fail to break free from oppressive systems.

Lost & Found

This memoir explores an interval in the author’s life during which her father succumbed to his final illness and the author also met and eventually married her partner. Through these important life markers of grief and celebration, Kathryn Schulz explores the concepts of lost, found, and “and”—the latter representing living with the coexistence of both “lost” and “found.”

Lucy by the Sea

Lucy by the Sea, an examination of loneliness, love, and friendship, follows a long-divorced New York couple who escape the pandemic to shelter in a remote house in coastal Maine.

VOLUME II

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s first memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, is a story about family inheritances, including trauma, mystery, and genetics, and how each generation processes the last. Told through the author’s perspective following an accident that left her with temporary amnesia, this book excavates the life of her mother, grandfather, and the family gift (an ability to tap into the mystical and ghostly) with curiosity, wonder, and compassion.

Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up

Selma Blair’s debut as a writer, Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up, is the story of her life so far, which reveals much previously unknown information surrounding her development as a person and growth as an actor.

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer

The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer is a literary extension of lead author Janelle Monáe’s 2018 album and short film, Dirty Computer. In five short stories by Monáe and five coauthors, gender nonconformists resist the memory standardization efforts of New Dawn, a totalitarian regime in an Afrofuturistic dystopia.

Memphis

Memphis, set against the backdrop of a city in flux, follows the story of a family of strong Black women. The characters contend with troubled relationships and internal struggles, as well as events of world-changing significance, as they attempt to survive—and even thrive.

Moon Witch, Spider King

The second volume in the Dark Star Trilogy, Moon Witch, Spider King traces the life of Sogolon, the titular Moon Witch, from girlhood through the events of the preceding novel.

Moth

Moth, an intensely dramatic work of historical fiction, vividly depicts the life of one Brahmin family before and after the violent partition that established India and Pakistan as two independent nations in 1947.

Mother Noise

Mother Noise is a memoir about writer and artist Cindy House’s experiences with addiction as well as her life in recovery as a mother.

The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride

The memoir of civil rights leader David J. Dennis Sr., written with his son, journalist David J. Dennis Jr., focuses on the elder Dennis’s role in the Freedom Rides and voter registration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi in the early 1960s. The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride also includes a recounting of the efforts of Dennis and his son to reach an understanding of their relationship and the impact of the father’s work on that of his son.

My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist’s Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole

This inspirational memoir by attorney, civil rights activist, and local government leader Will Jawando chronicles how he navigated the pains and triumphs of life as a Black male in the United States with the help of seven Black men who mentored him over the years. His experience also sheds light on broader issues of race, family, and masculinity in society.

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees

In The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, the distinguished foreign correspondent Matthieu Aikins presents a compelling account of his undercover journey on the migrant trail from Afghanistan to Europe with his friend Omar, a former interpreter with the Canadian and United States armed forces in Afghanistan who hoped to escape war and poverty and make a new life in the West. Aikins’ book is both a tale of danger and survival and a penetrating meditation on the moral, political, and economic crisis resulting from the mass movement of people in a disordered world.

A New Name: Septology VI–VII

A New Name is the final installment of Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s seven-volume Septology series that explores ideas surrounding art, God, and the human experience.

Night of the Living Rez

Morgan Talty’s first full-length work; Night of the Living Rez (2022), collects a dozen linked stories, most published individually between 2017 and 2020, as told from the changing perspective of a young boy on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine who seeks answers to questions about his purpose and existence.

Nightcrawling

Seventeen-year-old Kiara struggles to support herself, her brother, and the child of a neighbor. When she gets pulled into a legal case involving a group of police officers, her life is turned upside-down, forcing her to determine the true meaning of family.

The Nineties

In The Nineties, distinguished journalist and author Chuck Klosterman presents a penetrating analysis of the last decade of the twentieth century. Mixing political and cultural commentary, he deftly analyzes a decade that, because of the digital revolution that took off in the early twenty-first century, may often seem more distant than it actually is chronologically.

Nona the Ninth

In Nona the Ninth, the third installment in the Locked Tomb series, a young woman with amnesia navigates life in a besieged city while her companions attempt to discern her true identity.

Notes on an Execution

Danya Kukafka’s second novel, Notes on an Execution, traces the path of an individual as he evolves from neglected child to serial killer to Death Row inmate.

Nothing Burns as Bright as You

In her 2022 young adult novel Nothing Burns as Bright as You, acclaimed author Ashley Woodfolk uses poetic prose to tell the story of an intense, impassioned, and troubled first love affair.

Nothing More to Tell

In Nothing More to Tell, Karen M. McManus presents an engaging murder mystery aimed at a young adult audience. Returning to her old prep school after an absence of almost four years, student journalist Brynn Gallagher begins investigating the murder of a popular teacher that was never satisfactorily resolved; her efforts threaten to expose old secrets and lead to danger and romance.

Now Is Not the Time to Panic

Set in the sleepy southern town of Coalfield, Tennessee, Now Is Not the Time to Panic is a coming-of-age story, told from the perspective of teenager Frances (Frankie) Budge as she experiences a life-altering summer in which she and her friend Zeke’s seemingly insignificant creation sends the whole town of Coalfield, and beyond, spiraling into unimaginable territory.

The Ogress and the Orphans

The town of Stone-in-the-Glen was once a beautiful and happy place, but after the library and several other buildings burned down, the people fell into despair. A group of orphan children and a friendly ogress, however, remain hopeful and loving, eventually showing the townspeople that being a good neighbor can make a change for everyone.

Olga Dies Dreaming

Debut novelist Xochitl Gonzalez’s first book follows two Puerto Rican siblings living in New York as they weigh their personal lives against their larger family and social obligations.

Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds

In Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, paleobiologist Thomas Halliday takes readers back in time, exploring the often-unrecognizable environments of long-past eras and the creatures that thrived within them.

Our Missing Hearts

Celeste Ng’s third novel, Our Missing Hearts, is a story about the power of love during crisis. As the United States begins to experience extreme political upheaval in a dystopian near-future, Bird is a shy and awkward child who must learn to live without his mother as his father turns ever more inward.

Properties of Thirst

Award-winning author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins writes about World War II, the Los Angeles water wars, and Japanese internment in her 2022 novel Properties of Thirst.

The Rabbit Hutch

Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, offers a wide-ranging and highly assured look at the lives of a handful of characters living in a declining Midwestern city.

Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk

Interweaving personal life experiences with ancestral history, Coast Salish writer and artist Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores loss, healing, and the enduring spirit across generations of women in her memoir, Red Paint. The author also probes the wounds of her ancestors, exploring the intergenerational burdens of trauma and the path toward healing.

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

Rise brings together a wide range of contributors and draws on a number of different genres to tell the story of Asian America and its culture over the last thirty years.

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

Writer Candice Millard presents a compelling account of the turbulent relationship between explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke in their nineteenth-century quest to locate the source of the Nile River.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Veteran journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks gathers together twelve memorable long-form nonfiction pieces originally published in the New Yorker exploring people’s motivations, behavior, and morality in a variety of situations, including criminal ones.

The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan’s debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, imagines a world in which negligent mothers are forced to attend a prison-like school in hopes of winning back their children. Drawing on real-world policies, Chan’s impressive and devastating dystopian satire offers a glimpse of a near-future dominated by incarceration, surveillance, and perpetual punishment.

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel, Sea of Tranquility, combines elements from metafiction and speculative fiction to provide fresh twists on familiar time-travel tropes.

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

Seeking Fortune Elsewhere is the debut short story-collection from journalist Sindya Bhanoo. Centered largely around characters who are of South Indian descent, the stories touch on topics ranging from aging to parenthood to the strains and rewards of living in a new country while also keeping an eye on the past.

Serious Face

Writer Jon Mooallem’s first book of essays collects twelve of his pieces previously published in the New York Times Magazine, as well as one newly written essay, that explore a variety of offbeat subjects with curiosity and empathy.

Seven Empty Houses

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin explores themes of loneliness, love, and isolation through the guise of seven houses and apartments. Drawing on both familial intimacy that strains those closest to each other and the relentless passing of time, this collection understands that sometimes strangeness is what breaks a person, but sometimes a stranger is the one to save us.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a ghost story set amidst the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war. It is the second novel by the award-winning Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka.

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

In this exceptionally candid memoir, noted composer, author, and philanthropist Mary Rodgers offers insight into her own remarkable life as well as a wealth of juicy details about the many famous people she knew. Her incisively witty recollections, bolstered by extensive notes from coauthor Jesse Green, provide a unique view of the world of twentieth-century American musical theater.

Siren Queen

Seamlessly blending fantasy and reality, Siren Queen presents a unique take on the golden age of Hollywood, focusing on a Chinese American actor who stops at nothing to become an immortal silver screen star.

Small World

Spanning 170 years of American history, this epic and ambitious novel tracks the intersection of four modern families and their nineteenth-century ancestors as they struggle to find hope, meaning, and purpose in a rapidly changing world.

Solito

In the memoir Solito, award-winning author Javier Zamora chronicles his journey from El Salvador to the United States as an unaccompanied nine-year-old.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

The Song of the Cell, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee, explores the past, present, and future of cellular biology and its implications for one day eradicating cancer and other diseases.

South to America: A Journey below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Imani Perry’s National Book Award–winning work South to America: A Journey below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, combines cultural criticism, travelogue, and memoir to present a sociopolitical history of the Southern United States.

The Stardust Thief

Loulie al-Nazari is the Midnight Merchant, known as a dealer in magical relics which she tracks with her mysterious bodyguard, Qadir. After a brief meeting with the Sultan’s youngest son, she is coerced into chasing after a legendary lamp containing one of the last of the jinn kings. The ensuing journey is filled with mystery, adventure, and tragedy.

Stay True

In his debut memoir, Stay True, Hua Hsu recounts the unlikely friendship he struck up with Ken, a gregarious, confident young man who seemed his polar opposite, while they were attending the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990s California. When tragedy struck, Hsu turned to writing to excavate his grief.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs is a collection of interconnected short stories that explore gentrification, class struggle, and aspiration. It is the debut book from American author Sidik Fofana.

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet

The young adult novel The Summer of Bitter and Sweet tells the story of a Métis teenager named Lou whose last summer before leaving for college does not turn out as she had planned. After an old friend returns to the area, she begins to recognize not only how much she has changed but the extent to which her life has been based on lies. Author Jen Ferguson explores themes of family, friendship, sexuality, and trauma throughout the book.

Swim Team

Swim Team, a middle-grade graphic novel from illustrator Johnnie Christmas, follows a young girl named Bree as she faces her fear of swimming and learns to build lasting friendships. The book also explores the history of racism and segregation that continues to shape access to the sport of swimming.

The Swimmers

The Swimmers is a slim, stunning novel that meditates on the nature of aging, dementia, and identity, as well as mother-daughter relationships.

Take My Hand

Take My Hand, best-selling author Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s third novel, is a work of historical fiction that examines the involuntary sterilizations of Black girls and women that happened in the United States in the 1970s.

Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

Part reportage and part memoir, Elizabeth Krouse’s Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation chronicles the novelist and short-story writer’s work as a private investigator on a landmark sexual assault case involving a college football team in the early 2000s as well as how sexual abuse has affected her personally.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Thank You, Mr. Nixon is a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the cultural relationship between the United States and China. Featuring a rotating cast of characters—ranging from elderly parents to preteen children—the collection spans generations and continents attempting to understand geographic and political divides.

This Time Tomorrow

In This Time Tomorrow, best-selling author Emma Straub considers life and familial love in a time-bending story that is both funny and poignant. When a woman named Alice Stern, the daughter of the famous science-fiction novelist Leonard Stern, turns forty, she finds herself thrust back in time to the day of her sixteenth birthday. Alice must figure out how she got there, and what choices she must make to change the course of her life.

This Woven Kingdom

In Tahereh Mafi’s young adult fantasy novel, equal parts love story and political scheming, Alizeh, a jinn with special powers working secretly as a maid, accidentally meets the human crown prince of Ardunia, Kamran. Once their worlds collide, their curiosity and feelings about each other grow while the kingdom of Ardunia is thrown into turmoil.

A Thousand Steps into Night

Set in a world inspired by Japanese mythology, A Thousand Steps into Night is a fantasy novel by the best-selling American author Traci Chee.

Time Is a Mother

Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, finds the writer grappling with the 2019 death of his mother. Combining poignant descriptions and moments with a modernist sensibility, the poems blend perspective and create an atmosphere of timelessness as Vuong imagines both the past—near and distant—and a future spent without her.

A Tiny Upward Shove

A Tiny Upward Shove, journalist Melissa Chadburn’s gut-punch of a debut novel, is shocking for its brutal violence but also its vivid beauty. In it, a teenager named Marina, who is selling sex to maintain her heroin addiction, is murdered by serial killer Willie Pickton. In her dying moments, she reaches out to the aswang, a mysterious and vengeful spirit from Filipino folklore.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, is an emotionally absorbing story about video game designers making it big in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Zevin follows main characters (MCs in gaming parlance) Sadie, Sam, and Marx through worlds both virtual and real to tell a story about the importance of play, the creative process, and the power of true friendship.

The Trayvon Generation

The Trayvon Generation is a treatise about the generational impact of White supremacy and anti-Black racism on the lives of Black families with a focus on Black youth under the age of twenty-five that author Elizabeth Alexander defines as the Trayvon Generation.

The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth

In The Treeline, author Ben Rawlence focuses on a deep study of seven tree species of the boreal forest in an effort to bring greater clarity to the fundamental habitat changes already underway due to climate change. This work of ecojournalism is a call to action as well as a sobering account of the irreversible damages that are already underway.

True Biz

True Biz is a coming-of-age story that celebrates the American Deaf community while examining the sociopolitical challenges it continues to face within the hearing world. It is author Sara Nović’s third book.

Trust

Across four interconnected but contradictory narratives, Trust follows the story of the marriage of an elite New York City couple and probes themes of truth and fiction, morality and finance, and mental illness.

The Twist of a Knife

The author’s fictional alter ego Anthony Horowitz is arrested for the murder of a theater critic who panned his new play, forcing him to ask for help from Daniel Hawthorne, a detective with whom Horowitz had previously collaborated on three true-crime novels based on Hawthorne’s investigations.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation

In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa provides a comprehensive and well-supported investigation into systemic racial disparities that have roots in slavery and continue to impact African Americans’ medical care, overall health, and living conditions.

The Verifiers

Set in New York City, Jane Pek’s debut novel, The Verifiers, is a complex murder mystery involving the online matchmaking industry.

Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice

Victory. Stand! Raising My Fist for Justice presents the inspiring life story of the athlete and activist Tommie Smith in a graphic novel format aimed at young adult readers. Centered around the 1968 Olympic Games, at which Smith won a gold medal and raised a gloved fist on the podium in an iconic protest for civil rights, the book also covers Smith’s childhood and later life with particular attention to issues of racial justice throughout.

The Violin Conspiracy

Unfolding after the theft of a Stradivarius violin, owned by Ray McMillian, The Violin Conspiracy follows the frantic and global search for the violin while Ray continues to prepare to compete in the important Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Alongside the narrative of the theft, the novel unspools Ray’s family history and his struggles to be recognized as a high-performing Black professional in the majority-White world of classical music.

The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation

The Vortex offers a “novelistic” account of one of the deadliest storms in history—a 1970 cyclone that devastated much of Bangladesh, at the time part of Pakistan known as East Pakistan, and set the stage for Bangladeshi independence.

Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival among the Street Children of Lusaka

This nonfiction work examines the tenuous experience of impoverished children living in one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. Despite being a carefully researched anthropological study, it has the gripping narrative arc of a novel, painting detailed portraits of several young people who find themselves connected to a murder investigation.

The White Girl

Aboriginal artist Odette Brown lives in fear that the Welfare Board will take her light-skinned, blonde granddaughter, Sissy, away from her, especially when Odette begins to experience health problems. Set in a small Australian town in the 1960s, Tony Birch’s novel follows Odette as she searches for a way to protect the one person she has left.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On explores the concept of apocalypse, bringing together history and speculative futures to contextualize the many issues facing the world today and imagine how humanity might cope with or even overcome them.

Yonder

The novel Yonder offers a powerful evocation of the horrors of slavery and the promise of freedom while focusing on the humanity of enslaved people.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West have chosen fifty of acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston’s essays in this collection, covering issues such as folklore, art, race, gender and politics. Though many of the essays were previously published, there are several pieces that appear for the first time in this volume.

Young Mungo

Douglas Stuart’s second novel focuses on the story of Mungo Hamilton, a sensitive teenager living on the margins of society in Glasgow, Scotland, as he navigates young love and family dysfunction.