The narrator’s initial reasons for visiting the abbey are vague: She’s tired; she wants to escape; her marriage is falling apart; she’s still grieving her parents, dead for more than 35 years; she’s disillusioned with her work in the environmental conservation movement. The predictability of the nuns’ rituals turns out to be profoundly restorative. When […]
Glimmering with foreboding, Bamford’s debut is an eerie consideration of family secrets in a sun-dappled setting. The action is confined to a late-1980s summer day in the life of a group of relatives, accompanied by their partners and children, but the novel also reaches to the backstory as everyone gathers in Frankie’s house to celebrate […]
Alone in the gym, 10-year-old Zack hears a curious scratching sound as he’s putting away the floor hockey equipment. Zack’s used to odd noises—St. Joseph’s is more than a century old, after all—but this one is different. His best friend, Henry, agrees that the sound is definitely not normal, but gym teacher Mrs. Clark and […]
O’Neill, a University of Southern California historian, excavates the story of two East African princes who boarded a British ship with the intention of traveling to London, only to be sold into slavery in Jamaica. After years of enslavement, the princes persuaded a lawyer to help them regain their freedom, setting up the next stage […]
It’s certainly her most sharply focused. Alarmed that a series of anonymous threats she’s been receiving have escalated, London magazine editor Sarah Lampson asks Nancy Graham, her old roommate and colleague at Diagonal Press, to help figure out which of her former lovers is intent on killing her. But it’s already too late, for one […]
Lila Kennedy thought she had the perfect family—a loving mother, a doting stepfather, two wonderful daughters, and a great husband. She even wrote a self-help book about repairing a marriage, which was published a mere two weeks before her husband left her. After her own mother’s sudden death, Lila finds herself an unexpected single mom […]
In her nonfiction debut, futurist and technology entrepreneur Rad helps readers acclimate to a world “where change accelerates far faster than any standardized test or rubric can reflect or contain.” Humanity is experiencing huge advances in processing power, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, along with the advent of all kinds of neural interfaces on the horizon—technological […]
In the early 20th century, the zoo at Moore Park in Sydney, Australia, moved to the suburb of Taronga. Most of the animals were transported by truck, but Jessie was far too large for any vehicle, so she simply walked through the town in the early morning before most people had awakened, then boarded a […]
Recent college graduate Elise is in debt—she can’t even afford her antidepressants—although she doesn’t tell her boyfriend, Tom, nor does he know about her longtime eating disorder. Elise is grateful for the opportunity to make good money with Salt of the Earth Sugar, plus she sees harvest work as “a real life experience. Something they […]
The book opens with a scene of a newborn daughter, Eleanor, on a mother’s chest, with the grandparent speaker experiencing sympathy twinges in her own womb (“Grandmothers”). Another poem prays for infants in their “sheltering globes” in an intensive care unit, where “my first grandchild” was treated (“Neonatal ICU Prayer”). In “Alternate Reality,” set at […]