Maribeth Fischer

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Missouri

A Novel

A Season of Perfect Happiness fundamentally questions what makes a “good” mother, with a propulsive and heartrending portrayal of one woman’s efforts to find her voice. Ten years after an unspeakable tragedy caused Claire to flee her hometown in Delaware, she finally feels content. She has a quiet, tidy life in Wisconsin, a place she picked at random for its shape on a map. Her careful existence centers on a simple plan: keep her social circle small and keep the past a secret. But when she meets Erik—a lighthearted theater nerd who gives Claire more of a chance than she’s given herself in a long time—that plan seems increasingly impossible, especially after she finds herself emotionally entangled not only with Erik, but with his ex-wife, Annabelle; their three young children; and a small set of friends, the kind she’d always wanted to have around her. Life after the accident can be full of joy, Claire realizes—going on a date to see a thousand-pound pig at the state fair, giggling over obscure inside jokes with friends at a music gig, making smoothies while the kids wear their infamous cooking hats. Being a partner, a best friend, a mother. But when a person from her past arrives, Claire’s worst mistake threatens her new life, and the deep friendships she’s made hang in the balance. If Claire chooses to share the parts of herself she has kept locked away for so long, will the family she has built still recognize her—and have a place for her? Or will everything she has spent the last decade working toward fall apart?

A Season of Perfect Happiness

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Tessa Bailey

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Tessa Bailey is back with a Schitt's Creek-inspired rom-com about a Hollywood "It Girl" who's cut off from her wealthy family and exiled to a small Pacific Northwest beach town... where she butts heads with a surly, sexy local who thinks she doesn't belong. Piper Bellinger is fashionable, influential, and her reputation as a wild child means the paparazzi are constantly on her heels. When too much champagne and an out-of-control rooftop party lands Piper in the slammer, her stepfather decides enough is enough. So he cuts her off, and sends Piper and her sister to learn some responsibility running their late father's dive bar... in Washington. Piper hasn't even been in Westport for five minutes when she meets big, bearded sea captain Brendan, who thinks she won't last a week outside of Beverly Hills. So what if Piper can't do math, and the idea of sleeping in a shabby apartment with bunk beds gives her hives. How bad could it really be? She's determined to show her stepfather--and the hot, grumpy local--that she's more than a pretty face. Except it's a small town and everywhere she turns, she bumps into Brendan. The fun-loving socialite and the gruff fisherman are polar opposites, but there's an undeniable attraction simmering between them. Piper doesn't want any distractions, especially feelings for a man who sails off into the sunset for weeks at a time. Yet as she reconnects with her past and begins to feel at home in Westport, Piper starts to wonder if the cold, glamorous life she knew is what she truly wants. LA is calling her name, but Brendan--and this town full of memories--may have already caught her heart.

It Happened One Summer

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Dolly Alderton

Collected Wisdom

"One of the foremost 'it' writers of our time. . . . There is no writer quite like Dolly."--Lisa Taddeo, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Three Women "Nora Ephron for the millennial generation."--Elizabeth Day, author of How to Fail and The Party Advice and answers to your questions about dating, love, sex, family, friendship and more from the author of Everything I Know About Love and longtime Sunday Times Style columnist For years, New York Times bestselling author Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth, and wit with the diverse universe of fans who have turned to her "Dear Dolly" column seeking guidance on a host of life problems. Dolly has thoughtfully answered questions ranging from the painfully--and sometimes hilariously--relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, relationships platonic and romantic, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between. Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures with love, friends, and dating, Dolly helps us navigate the labyrinths of life. In this wonderful collection, she brings together her collected knowledge in one invaluable volume that will make you think, make you laugh, and help you confront any conundrum or crisis.

Dear Dolly

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Andrew DeYoung

"Regan Peters knows her husband John wants to give her and their children a good life. The long hours he puts in as a financial advisor prove his dedication, and despite how mysterious he is about his past, that's been enough for her to get through the hard days. Until the FBI shows up at their door looking for John, and Regan learns that her husband has been running a Ponzi scheme, is mixed up with dangerous criminals, and has been living under an assumed identity all these years. Everything she thought she knew about her husband has been a lie. That includes the outrageous birthday present John gifted her the day before he disappeared--a lake house, bought with cash, and put in her name only. With her life falling apart, Regan must make a split-second decision: does she tell the FBI about the house? Or does she buy some time to forge her own path to saving herself? But one compromise inevitably leads to another, and one dangerous secret builds on the next. When her lies of omission to the FBI agents begin to raise questions, Regan becomes inextricably embroiled in John's crimes, the true extent of which are just beginning to be revealed. Now that her comfortable life is clearly over, Regan is learning she is capable of far more than she ever imagined. She will do anything to protect herself, her children, and their future. Anything"--

The Day He Never Came Home

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Bea Fitzgerald

Then Things Went Dark

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Kailee Pedersen

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology. The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever. But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations. Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

Sacrificial Animals

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Ingrid Rojas Contreras

"When women of color write history, we see the world as we have never seen it before. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras honors the lives of girls who witness war. Brava! I was swept up by this story." --SANDRA CISNEROS, author of The House on Mango Street A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree

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Ashley Winstead

"In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar--and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town's secret underbelly in search of true evil. A dark and powerful novel like fans have come to expect from Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour is an examination of the ways we've come to expect love, religion, and stories to save us, the lengths we have to go to in order to take back power, and the monstrous work of being a girl in this world."--

Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

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Rosalie M. Lin

Genres collide in this dark and atmospheric reimagining of 1930s Shanghai for fans of Nghi Vo and S. A. Chakraborty. Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit... When a series of cabaret dancers are targeted—the attacker stealing their faces—Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai's glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price. Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers—women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends—Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city's underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai's bones.

Daughter of Calamity

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Jennette McCurdy

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother--and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother's dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called "calorie restriction," eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, "Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn't tint hers?" She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail--just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi ("Hi Gale!"), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I'm Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

I'm Glad My Mom Died

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Amanda Quain

A Margaret Dashwood Novel

In this contemporary update of Sense and Sensibility, Margaret Dashwood is setting sail on an adventurous summer cruise—unless love sinks her first. Margaret Dashwood lives her life according to plan, and it involves absolutely zero heartbreak, thank you very much. Five years ago, love tore her family apart, and since then, she’s kept her own heart as safe as possible. It hasn’t been easy, especially since her sister Marianne—the world’s biggest romantic—has conveniently forgotten that love burned her so badly she literally almost died. So when their oldest sister Elinor invites Margaret along for a Marianne-free summer cruise, she can’t wait to soak up every scheduled moment with sensible Elinor before heading off to college. But just before they set sail, a newly-single Marianne announces that she’s crashing their vacation. Suddenly, Margaret’s itineraries are thrown overboard, and the ship’s cabin feels even tinier with her sister wailing about her breakup from the bottom bunk. The only solution? Find Marianne a dose of love to tide her over until they reach land. With help from Elinor, her husband Edward, and Gabe—a distractingly handsome new friend on the crew—Margaret sets out to create a series of elaborate fake dates that will give Marianne the spontaneously curated summer romance of a lifetime. But between a chaotic sister, the growing storm of feelings between Margaret and Gabe, and an actual storm on the horizon, this summer is destined to go off course. Margaret will have to decide what’s more important—following the plan, or following her heart.

Dashed

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Claire Coughlan

"A thrillingly dark and atmospheric tale, richly evocative of its time, especially for those of us old enough to remember 1968."--John Banville An immersive, literary thriller set in 1960s Dublin about an ambitious young female journalist whose investigation of a long missing actress will take her through misty streets and the tangled underworld--and force her to confront the long buried secrets of her own past. Some stories demand to be told. They keep coming back, echoing down through the decades, until they find a teller . . . Dublin, 1943. Actress Julia Bridges disappears. She was last seen entering the house of Gloria Fitzpatrick, who is later put on trial for the murder of a woman whose abortion she facilitated. But it's never proved that Gloria had a hand in Julia's death--and Julia's body has never been found. Gloria, however, is sentenced to life in an institution for the criminally insane, where she's found dead a few years later from an apparent suicide, and the truth of what happened to Julia Bridges dies with her. Until . . . Dublin, 1968. Nicoletta Sarto is an ambitious junior reporter for the Irish Sentinel when the bones of Julia Bridges are discovered in the garden of a house on the outskirts of the city. Drawn into investigating the 25-year-old mystery of Julia's disappearance and her link to the notorious Gloria Fitzpatrick, Nicoletta becomes immersed in the tangled underworld of the illegal abortion industry, stirring up long-buried secrets from her own past. A beautifully atmospheric, timely thriller, Where They Lie uses a murder mystery as a lens to focus on the long struggle of women fighting to achieve autonomy and succeed in a man's world.

Where They Lie

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Muriel Barbery

Alison Anderson

The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

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White Ivy

White Teeth

Joanna Quinn

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK * A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II--a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation.

"The Whalebone Theatre is absolute aces...Quinn's imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold." --The New York Times

"Utterly heartbreaking and joyous...I just disappeared into The Whalebone Theatre and didn't want to leave." --Jo Baker, author of Longbourn

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household--her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist--build a theatre from the beast's skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.

As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France--a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

The Whalebone Theatre

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Kirsten Miller





"Miller triumphs...THE CHANGE is that rare treat: a suspenseful story with great pacing, memorable characters, and an engaging voice. Fantastic in every way, this fierce anthem against misogyny is a smash."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Big Little Lies meets The Witches of Eastwick--a gloriously entertaining and knife-sharp feminist revenge fantasy about three women whose midlife crisis brings unexpected new powers--putting them on a collision course with the evil that lurks in their wealthy beach town. 

In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment...

After Nessa James's husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she's left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn't take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead--a gift she's inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn't left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett's life is far from over--in fact, she's undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw--until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl's murder leads to more bodies, and to the town's most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don't apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands...

The Change

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Laurie Lico Albanese

A vivid reimagining of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne, the tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a journey into the enduring legacy of New England's witchcraft trials.

Who is the real Hester Prynne?

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Edinburgh for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic--leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows--while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward's safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?

In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past, and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a "real" American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of "unusual" women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese's Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down.

Hester

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Ava Reid

In the vein of Naomi Novik's New York Times bestseller Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden's national bestseller The Bear and the Nightingale, this unforgettable debut-- inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology--follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant. In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned by the gods. The villagers blame her corrupted bloodline--her father was a Yehuli man, one of the much-loathed servants of the fanatical king. When soldiers arrive from the Holy Order of Woodsmen to claim a pagan girl for the king's blood sacrifice, Évike is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered. But when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their captive en route, slaughtering everyone but Évike and the cold, one-eyed captain, they have no choice but to rely on each other. Except he's no ordinary Woodsman--he's the disgraced prince, Gáspár Bárány, whose father needs pagan magic to consolidate his power. Gáspár fears that his cruelly zealous brother plans to seize the throne and instigate a violent reign that would damn the pagans and the Yehuli alike. As the son of a reviled foreign queen, Gáspár understands what it's like to be an outcast, and he and Évike make a tenuous pact to stop his brother. As their mission takes them from the bitter northern tundra to the smog-choked capital, their mutual loathing slowly turns to affection, bound by a shared history of alienation and oppression. However, trust can easily turn to betrayal, and as Évike reconnects with her estranged father and discovers her own hidden magic, she and Gáspár need to decide whose side they're on, and what they're willing to give up for a nation that never cared for them at all.

The Wolf and the Woodsman

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Ben Alderson-Day

The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other

A psychologist's journey to understand one of the most unusual experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone.

These experiences of sensing a Presence when no one else is there have been given many names--the Third Man, guardian angels, shadow figures, "social" hallucinations--and they have inspired, unsettled, and confounded in equal measure.

While the contexts in which they occur are diverse, they are united by a distinct and uncanny feeling of visitation by another. But what does this feeling mean, and where does it come from? When and why do presences emerge? And how can we even begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it, and yet so hard to put into words?

The answers to these questions lie in this tour-de-force through contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy. Presence follows Ben Alderson-Day's attempts--as a psychologist and a researcher--to understand how this experience is possible. What is a voice when it isn't heard, and how otherwise do we know or feel that someone is in our presence? Is it a hallucination connected to psychosis, a change in the working of the brain, or something else?

The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds. Presence is the story of who we carry with us, at all times, as parts of ourselves.

Presence

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Julia Bartz

"Darkly satirical and action-packed....An absolutely splendid debut!" --Wendy Walker, nationally bestselling author of Don't Look for Me

The Plot meets Please Join Us in this psychological suspense debut about a young author at an exclusive writer's retreat that descends into a nightmare.

Alex has all but given up on her dreams of becoming a published author when she receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: attend an exclusive, month-long writing retreat at the estate of feminist horror writer Roza Vallo. Even the knowledge that Wren, her former best friend and current rival, is attending doesn't dampen her excitement.

But when the attendees arrive, Roza drops a bombshell--they must all complete an entire novel from scratch during the next month, and the author of the best one will receive a life-changing seven-figure publishing deal. Determined to win this seemingly impossible contest, Alex buckles down and tries to ignore the strange happenings at the estate, including Roza's erratic behavior, Wren's cruel mind games, and the alleged haunting of the mansion itself. But when one of the writers vanishes during a snowstorm, Alex realizes that something very sinister is afoot. With the clock running out, she's desperate to discover the truth and save herself.

A claustrophobic and propulsive thriller exploring the dark side of female friendships and fame, The Writing Retreat is the unputdownable debut novel from a compelling new talent.

The Writing Retreat

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Sabine Durrant

Features patient information on sun damage to skin, provided by the University of Illinois McKinley Health Center. Discusses skin cancer, tips to prevent sun damage, and treatment for sunburn.

Sun Damage

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Maria Kuznetsova

An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel. “A fresh perspective—one that’s both haunting and hilarious—on dual-timeline war stories, a feat that only a writer of Kuznetsova’s caliber could pull off.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine—tired of everything really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that’s because she just had a baby, and she’s struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, a struggling actress, and a host to her husband’s slacker best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in their cramped one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan. When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family’s Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, she reluctantly agrees. Maybe Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though telling the story makes her heart ache. Larissa recounts the nearly three-year period when she fled with her self-absorbed sister, parents, and grandmother to a factory town in the Ural Mountains where they faced starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and where she was torn in her affections for two brothers from a wealthy family. But neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments. Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.

Something Unbelievable

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Amy Feltman

A "big-hearted, lively, and expansive portrait of a family" that follows a neurodivergent father, his nonbinary teenager, and the sudden, catastrophic reappearance of the woman who abandoned them (Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author).



Morgan Flowers just wants to hide. Raised by their neurodivergent father, Morgan has grown up haunted by the absence of their mysterious mother Zoe, especially now, as they navigate their gender identity and the turmoil of first love. Their father Julian has raised Morgan with care, but he can't quite fill the gap left by the dazzling and destructive Zoe, who fled to Europe on Morgan's first birthday. And when Zoe is dumped by her girlfriend Brigid, she suddenly comes crashing back into Morgan and Julian's lives, poised to disrupt the fragile peace they have so carefully cultivated.



Through it all, Julian and Brigid have become unlikely pen-pals and friends, united by the knowledge of what it's like to love and lose Zoe; they both know that she hasn't changed. Despite the red flags, Morgan is swiftly drawn into Zoe's glittering orbit and into a series of harmful missteps, and Brigid may be the only link that can pull them back from the edge. A story of betrayal and trauma alongside queer love and resilience, ALL THE THINGS WE DON'T TALK ABOUT is a celebration of and a reckoning with the power and unintentional pain of a thoroughly modern family.

 

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