Donna Tartt

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New Jersey

Growing up in a small Mississippi town in a family haunted by the murder of her brother, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes lives in a world of her imagination, until, at the age of twelve, she decides to find the murderer and exact her revenge. By the author of The Secret History. Reprint. 250,000 first printing.

The Little Friend

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Emma Donoghue

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

From the author of the worldwide bestseller Room: "Her greatest achievement yet...Emma Donoghue shows more than range with FROG MUSIC--she shows genius." -- Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, FROG MUSIC digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.

Frog Music

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Katie Lumsden

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

A gripping and atmospheric debut that is at once a chilling gothic mystery and a love letter to Victorian fiction.

Nobody ever goes to Hartwood Hall. Folks say it's cursed...

It's 1852 and Margaret Lennox, a young widow, attempts to escape the shadows of her past by taking a position as governess to an only child, Louis, at an isolated country house in the west of England.
 
But Margaret soon starts to feel that something isn't quite right. There are strange figures in the dark, tensions between servants, and an abandoned east wing. Even stranger is the local gossip surrounding Mrs. Eversham, Louis's widowed mother, who is deeply distrusted in the village.
 
Lonely and unsure whom to trust, Margaret finds distraction in a forbidden relationship with the gardener, Paul. But as Margaret's history threatens to catch up with her, it isn't long before she learns the truth behind the secrets of Hartwood Hall.

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall

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Joanna Quinn

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

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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Douglas Westerbeke

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi in this dazzlingly epic debut that charts the adventures of one woman as she walks herself around the world many times over trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she ever stops moving—or returns to the same place twice. Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death. When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she discovers that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than three or four days or return to a place she’s already been. From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the blinding, snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry through the decades of her life, as she learns what it takes to survive and fall in love, with goodbye always on the tip of her tongue. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s… Fierce, hopeful, and full of tender yearning, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about finding gratitude and meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reinforces the message that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that matters.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

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Kate Atkinson

The #1 national bestselling, award-winning author of Life after Life transports us to a restless London in the wake of the Great War--a city fizzing with money, glamour, and corruption--in this spellbinding tale of seduction and betrayal.

1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.  
 
The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie's empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho's gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.
 
With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson gives us a window in a vanished world. Slyly funny, brilliantly observant, and ingeniously plotted, Shrines of Gaiety showcases the myriad talents that have made Atkinson one of the most lauded writers of our time.

Shrines of Gaiety

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Matt Bell

“For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali with its claws . . . as gorgeous as it is devastating.” —The Washington Post In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods, the second moon weighing down the fabric of their starless sky, and the labyrinth of memory dug into the earth beneath their house. This novel, from one of our most exciting young writers, is a powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.

In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

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Patrick deWitt

Undermajordomo Minor

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Hannah Whitten

"As the only Second Daughter born in centuries, Red has one purpose-to be sacrificed to the Wolf in the Wood in the hope he'll return the world's captured gods. Red is almost relieved to go. Plagued by a dangerous power she can't control, at least she knows that in the Wilderwood, she can't hurt those she loves. Again. But the legends lie. The Wolf is a man, not a monster. Her magic is a calling, not a curse. And if she doesn't learn how to use it, the monsters the gods have become will swallow the Wilderwood-and her world-whole"--

For the Wolf

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Jennifer Egan

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a “sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize- and NBCC Award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad—an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private. The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. It’s 2010. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone. In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets. If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music’s more disjunctive approach. The parts are titled: Build, Break, Drop. With an emphasis on gaming, portals, and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. Egan takes to stunning new heights her “deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture” (Vogue). The Candy House delivers an absolutely extraordinary combination of fierce, exhilarating intelligence and heart.

The Candy House

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Ann Patchett

#1 New York Times Bestseller The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them. When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another. Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

Commonwealth

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Dodie Smith

Valerie Grove

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her impoverished family in a crumbling castle. Her journal records her life with her bored sister Rose, her stepmother Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer's block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when American heirs to castle arrive.

I Capture the Castle

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Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Allison Markin Powell

Akutagawa's magical final work is a short novel with a magic spell all its own--poignant, fantastical, wry, melancholic, and witty

Kappa

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Emily Bitto

WINNER OF AUSTRALIA'S 2015 STELLA PRIZE For readers of Atonement, a powerful and haunting story of three sisters and their friend who grow up on the outskirts of their parents' glamorous bohemian lifestyle. On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. Lily has never experienced anything like the Trenthams' home, where Evan and his wife have created a wild, makeshift family of like-minded artists, all living and working together to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930's Australia. An only child accustomed to loneliness, Lily soon becomes infatuated with the creative chaos of the Trenthams and aches to fully belong. Despite the Trenthams' glamorous allure, the artists' real lives are shaped by dire Faustian bargains and spectacular falls from grace. As the girls find themselves drawn closer to the white-hot flame of creativity, emotions and art collide with explosive consequences--and Evan's own daughters may be forced to pay a dangerous price for his choices.

The Strays

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Danielle Dutton

A Lit Hub Best Book of 2016 • One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016 • An Entropy Best Book of 2016 “The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First...Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment.” —Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional 17th–century Duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, who encouraged her writing and her desire for a career. After the War, her work earned her both fame and infamy in England: at the dawn of daily newspapers, she was "Mad Madge," an original tabloid celebrity. Yet Margaret was also the first woman to be invited to the Royal Society of London—a mainstay of the Scientific Revolution—and the last for another two hundred years. Margaret the First is very much a contemporary novel set in the past. Written with lucid precision and sharp cuts through narrative time, it is a gorgeous and wholly new approach to imagining the life of a historical woman. "In Margaret the First, there is plenty of room for play. Dutton’s work serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhapsalways already been: provoking and serious fantasies,convincing reconstructions, true fictions.”—Lucy Ives, The New Yorker “Danielle Dutton engagingly embellishes the life of Margaret the First, the infamousDuchess of Newcastle–upon–Tyne.” —Vanity Fair

Margaret the First

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Akwaeke Emezi

"A tender, potent, and compulsively readable novel of a Nigerian-Indian family and the deeply held secret that tests their traditions and bonds"--

The Death of Vivek Oji

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Hildegarde H. Swift

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Restored Edition

A little lighthouse on the Hudson River regains its pride when it finds out that it is still useful and has an important job to do, in a tale first published in 1942. 30,000 first printing.

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

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Laura van den Berg

Ex-library copy with usual stamps and stickers. Clean pages and tight binding 

Joy, a loner who works the graveyard shift at a grocery store, finds herself immune to a strange and fatal virus that is sweeping the United States and sets off across the devastated country in search of her birth mother. By the author of The Isle of Youth.

Find Me

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Kathleen Alcott

Ex-library with usual stamps and markings. Tight binding, lightly read

The story of an ad hoc family and the crisis they must overcome together.

Infinite Home

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Michael Andreasen

Ex-library copy with usual stamps and markings. Lightly read and tight binding

Stories

"The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores hope, love, and loss across a series of surreal landscapes and wild metamorphoses. Romping through the fantastic with big-hearted ease, these stories cut to the core of what it means to navigate family, faith, and longing"--Provided by publisher.

The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

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Catherynne M. Valente

"One of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century."-Time magazine, on the Fairyland series When a young troll named Hawthorn is stolen from Fairyland by the Red Wind, he becomes a changeling-a human boy-in the strange city of Chicago, a place no less bizarre and magical than Fairyland. Left with a human family, Hawthorn struggles with his troll nature and his changeling fate, while attending school and learning about human kindnesses-and un-kindnesses. In a starred review, Kirkus noted, "Every page of this book contains at least one stunning sentence. Valente's descriptions of the human world make it sound like an exotic place, even when she just lists things to see: "diamonds and dinosaur bones and Canadian geese and the Cathedral of Notre Dame and ballpoint pens." Readers may wish the words were food, so they could eat them up. And they may keep reading this series for just as long as people have been arguing about Oz." In this fourth installment of her saga, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, Catherynne M. Valente's wisdom and wit will charm readers of all ages.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

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"One of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century."—Time magazine, on the Fairyland series September has longed to return to Fairyland after her first adventure there. And when she finally does, she learns that its inhabitants have been losing their shadows—and their magic—to the world of Fairyland Below. This underworld has a new ruler: Halloween, the Hollow Queen, who is September's shadow. And Halloween does not want to give Fairyland's shadows back. Fans of Valente's bestselling, first Fairyland book will revel in the lush setting, characters, and language of September's journey in The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, all brought to life by fine artist Ana Juan. Readers will also welcome back good friends Ell, the Wyverary, and the boy Saturday. But in Fairyland Below, even the best of friends aren't always what they seem. . . .

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

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"One of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century." —Time magazine on the Fairyland series September misses Fairyland and her friends Ell, the Wyverary, and the boy Saturday. She longs to leave the routines of home and embark on a new adventure. Little does she know that this time, she will be spirited away to the moon, reunited with her friends, and find herself faced with saving Fairyland from a moon-Yeti with great and mysterious powers. The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two is another rich, beautifully told, wisely humorous, and passionately layered book from New York Times–bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente.

The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

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Nicci French

Ex-library copy with usual stamps and stickers. Clean pages and tight binding

In this twisty new stand-alone novel from internationally bestselling author Nicci French, a young woman agrees to do a favor for her first love--but when things go horribly wrong, one small task turns into a murder investigation that completely upends her life, ensnaring her in a deadly web of secrets and lies. It's a simple enough favor. Jude hasn't seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can't refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station--without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once. She owes him. After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record. Now he's gone. When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he's become. Now she's tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong--even if she destroys her own life in the process.

Browse by categories

Donna Tartt

The Little Friend

Emma Donoghue

Frog Music

Katie Lumsden

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall

Joanna Quinn

The Whalebone Theatre

Douglas Westerbeke

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

Kate Atkinson

Shrines of Gaiety

Matt Bell

In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Patrick deWitt

Undermajordomo Minor

Hannah Whitten

For the Wolf

Jennifer Egan

The Candy House

Ann Patchett

Commonwealth

Dodie Smith; Valerie Grove

I Capture the Castle

Ryunosuke Akutagawa; Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda; Allison Markin Powell

Kappa

Emily Bitto

The Strays

Danielle Dutton

Margaret the First

Akwaeke Emezi

The Death of Vivek Oji

Hildegarde H. Swift

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

Laura van den Berg

Find Me

Kathleen Alcott

Infinite Home

Michael Andreasen

The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

Catherynne M. Valente

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

Catherynne M. Valente

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

Catherynne M. Valente

The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

Nicci French

The Favor

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