Cover worn, pages great but worn at spine 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Minnesota

The New Guide to Relaxation 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Book About Giraffes 

Tall Blondes

Finding Paris

Melody Moezzi

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Bipolar Life

With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity. Born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland, Melody Moezzi was bound for a bipolar life. At 18, she began battling a severe physical illness, and her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies and hyacinths. But when she attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, there were no flowers. Despite several stays in psychiatric hospitals, bombarded with tranquilizers, mood-stabilizers, and anti-psychotics, she was encouraged to keep her illness a secret—by both her family and an increasingly callous and indifferent medical establishment. Refusing to be ashamed or silenced, Moezzi became an outspoken advocate, determined to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness and reclaim her life along the way. Both an irreverent memoir and a rousing call to action, Haldol and Hyacinths is the moving story of a woman who refused to become a victim. Moezzi reports from the frontlines of an invisible world, as seen through a unique and fascinating cultural lens. A powerful, funny, and moving narrative, Haldol and Hyacinths is a tribute to the healing power of hope and humor.

Haldol and Hyacinths

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Glendy Vanderah

A Novel

In this gorgeously stunning debut, a mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again. After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles. With concerns about the child's home situation, Jo reluctantly agrees to let her stay--just until she learns more about Ursa's past. Jo enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the mystery of the charming child. But the more time they spend together, the more questions they have. How does a young girl not only read but understand Shakespeare? Why do good things keep happening in her presence? And why aren't Jo and Gabe checking the missing children's website anymore? Though the three have formed an incredible bond, they know difficult choices must be made. As the summer nears an end and Ursa gets closer to her fifth miracle, her dangerous past closes in. When it finally catches up to them, all of their painful secrets will be forced into the open, and their fates will be left to the stars.

Where the Forest Meets the Stars

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Wesley Yang

Essays

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays--it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

In his celebrated and prescient essay "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award-winning "Paper Tigers," he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to "tiger mother" parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine's popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today's Internet-mediated dating lives.

Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.

The Souls of Yellow Folk

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Geraldine Brooks

"Brooks' chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling." --The New York Times Book Review

"Horse isn't just an animal story--it's a moving narrative about race and art." --TIME

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. 
 
New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.
 
Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.
 
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

Horse

ccf8a6e2-b222-4c10-ad38-8ada4b366f38-1

Ursula Villarreal-Moura

Slight indent at top of cover sheet and slightly worn at bottom 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A searing debut about the complexities of gender, power, and fame, told through the story of a young woman's destructive relationship with a legendary writer. It's 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. She loves this new life, but more than anything, she loves it for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City; the years she spent orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez. But when a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault by another woman, and the reporter is looking for corroboration. Tatum agrees to tell her story, but she begins with a clarification: while there are similarities, what happened to the other woman is not what happened to her. As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life? Searching for clarity, Tatum decides to tell her story a second way as well: in the form of a letter to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, from the moment they met to the night the relationship imploded. Told in a dual narrative that alternates between Tatum's present-day and her letter, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and the unexpected ways power dynamics can manifest.

Like Happiness

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Stephanie Rosenbloom

Has sticker on inside page as it was a gift, otherwise never read

Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude

"In Paris (or anywhere else, really) a table for one can be a most delightful place." --Alone Time, as seen in The New York Times

A wise, passionate account of the pleasures of traveling solo

In our increasingly frantic daily lives, many people are genuinely fearful of the prospect of solitude, but time alone can be both rich and restorative, especially when travelling. Through on-the-ground reporting and recounting the experiences of artists, writers, and innovators who cherished solitude, Stephanie Rosenbloom considers how being alone as a traveller--and even in one's own city--is conducive to becoming acutely aware of the sensual details of the world--patterns, textures, colors, tastes, sounds--in ways that are difficult to do in the company of others.

Alone Time is divided into four parts, each set in a different city, in a different season, in a single year. The destinations--Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York--are all pedestrian-friendly, allowing travelers to slow down and appreciate casual pleasures instead of hurtling through museums and posting photos to Instagram. Each section spotlights a different theme associated with the joys and benefits of time alone and how it can enable people to enrich their lives--facilitating creativity, learning, self-reliance, as well as the ability to experiment and change. Rosenbloom incorporates insights from psychologists and sociologists who have studied solitude and happiness, and explores such topics as dining alone, learning to savor, discovering interests and passions, and finding or creating silent spaces. Her engaging and elegant prose makes Alone Time as warmly intimate an account as the details of a trip shared by a beloved friend--and will have its many readers eager to set off on their own solo adventures.

Alone Time

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Francine Prose

"Francine Prose is a powerhouse. The Vixen will fascinate and complicate the histories that haunt our present moments. Like Coney Island's Cyclone, this story tumbles and tangles a reader's grip of reality. It's told with the heart, humor and daring of a true artist. Prose's Vixen is a triumph and a trip though the solid magic that books make real."--Samantha Hunt "A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive."--Maria Semple Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg--an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive, dangerous new world. It's 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island. But Simon's first assignment--editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm's failing finances--makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg's. His parents mourn Ethel's death. Simon's dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen's author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon's control, he must face what he's lost by exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents' Coney Island apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot--and that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future. At once domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and heartbreaking, enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from Anya's hilariously bad novel, The Vixen illuminates a period of history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment. Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation, and learn to live with the mysteries of love, family, art, life and loss?

The Vixen

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Brené Brown

***CARD SIGNED BY AUTHOR INCLUDED!!  

One or two yellow highlighted sentences in book

The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations, and culture, from the #1 bestselling author of Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection Look for Brené Brown’s new podcast, Dare to Lead, as well as her ongoing podcast Unlocking Us! REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.” Social scientist Brené Brown, PhD, MSW, has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives—experiences of courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy. In Braving the Wilderness, Brown redefines what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization. With her trademark mix of research, storytelling, and honesty, Brown will again change the cultural conversation while mapping a clear path to true belonging. Brown argues that we’re experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other. She writes, “True belonging requires us to believe in and belong to ourselves so fully that we can find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary. But in a culture that’s rife with perfectionism and pleasing, and with the erosion of civility, it’s easy to stay quiet, hide in our ideological bunkers, or fit in rather than show up as our true selves and brave the wilderness of uncertainty and criticism. But true belonging is not something we negotiate or accomplish with others; it’s a daily practice that demands integrity and authenticity. It’s a personal commitment that we carry in our hearts.” Brown offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness. Brown writes, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”

Braving the Wilderness

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Christie Tate

How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The refreshingly original and “startlingly hopeful” (Lisa Taddeo) debut memoir of an over-achieving young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to group therapy and gets psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers—and finds human connection, and herself. Christie Tate had just been named the top student in her law school class and finally had her eating disorder under control. Why then was she driving through Chicago fantasizing about her own death? Why was she envisioning putting an end to the isolation and sadness that still plagued her despite her achievements? Enter Dr. Rosen, a therapist who calmly assures her that if she joins one of his psychotherapy groups, he can transform her life. All she has to do is show up and be honest. About everything—her eating habits, childhood, sexual history, etc. Christie is skeptical, insisting that that she is defective, beyond cure. But Dr. Rosen issues a nine-word prescription that will change everything: “You don’t need a cure. You need a witness.” So begins her entry into the strange, terrifying, and ultimately life-changing world of group therapy. Christie is initially put off by Dr. Rosen’s outlandish directives, but as her defenses break down and she comes to trust Dr. Rosen and to depend on the sessions and the prescribed nightly phone calls with various group members, she begins to understand what it means to connect. “Often hilarious, and ultimately very touching” (People), Group is “a wild ride” (The Boston Globe), and with Christie as our guide, we are given a front row seat to the daring, exhilarating, painful, and hilarious journey that is group therapy—an under-explored process that breaks you down, and then reassembles you so that all the pieces finally fit.

Group

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Abigail Dean

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A stunning debut.” —Washington Post “Haunting [and] powerful.” —The New York Times “A modern-day classic.” —Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Collector “Fantastic, I loved it.” —Paula Hawkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train She thought she had escaped her past. But there are some things you can’t outrun. Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared. What begins as a propulsive tale of escape and survival becomes a gripping psychological family story about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships--about the secrets our siblings keep, from themselves and each other. Who have each of these siblings become? How do their memories defy or galvanize Lex's own? As Lex pins each sibling down to agree to her family's final act, she discovers how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and who among them remains in its thrall and who has truly broken free. For readers of Room and Sharp Objects, an absorbing and psychologically immersive novel about a young girl who escapes captivity–but not the secrets that shadow the rest of her life.

Girl A

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Susan Jane Gilman

Tales of Growing up Groovy and Clueless

From the author of "Kiss My Tiara" comes a funny and poignant collection of true stories about women coming of age that for once isn't about finding a date.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

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Joan Juliet Buck

A Memoir

From Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris and "one of the most compelling personalities in the world of style" (New York Times) comes her dazzling, compulsively readable memoir: a fabulous account of four decades spent in the creative heart of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris--"If you loved The Devil Wears Prada, you'll adore The Price of Illusion" (Elle).

In a book as rich and dramatic as the life she's led, Joan Juliet Buck takes us into the splendid illusions of film, fashion, and fame to reveal, in stunning, sensual prose, the truth behind the artifice.

The only child of a volatile movie producer betrayed by his dreams, she became a magazine journalist at nineteen to reflect and record the high life she'd been brought up in, a choice that led her into a hall of mirrors where she was both magician and dupe. After a career writing for Vogue and Vanity Fair, she was named the first American woman to edit Vogue Paris. The vivid adventures of this thoughtful, incisive writer at the hub of dreams across two continents over fifty years are hilarious and heartbreaking.

Including a spectacular cast of carefully observed legends, monsters, and stars (just look at the index!), this is the moving account of a remarkable woman's rocky passage through glamour and passion, filial duty and family madness, in search of her true self.

The Price of Illusion

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Alice Carrière

A powerful literary debut of a young woman's coming-of-age in the bohemian '90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder. Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father's confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger--a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision. When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men--ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father, whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.

Everything/Nothing/Someone

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Ann Napolitano

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • A “dazzling” novel that “will break your heart and put it back together again” (J. Courtney Sullivan, bestselling author of Saints for All Occasions) about a young boy who must learn to go on after surviving tragedy NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Parade • LibraryReads • “A reading experience that leaves you profoundly altered for the better . . . Don’t miss this one.”—Jodi Picoult, bestselling author of Small Great Things and A Spark of Light What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live? One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor. Edward’s story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a part of himself has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery—one that will lead him to the answers of some of life’s most profound questions: When you’ve lost everything, how do you find the strength to put one foot in front of the other? How do you learn to feel safe again? How do you find meaning in your life? Dear Edward is at once a transcendent coming-of-age story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again. Praise for Dear Edward “Dear Edward made me think, nod in recognition, care about its characters, and cry, and you can’t ask more of a novel than that.”—Emma Donoghue, New York Times bestselling author of Room “Weaving past and present into a profoundly beautiful, page-turning story of mystery, loss, and wonder, Dear Edward is a meditation on survival, but more important, it is about carving a life worth living. It is about love and hope and caring for others, and all the transitory moments that bind us together.”—Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley and The Good Thief

Dear Edward

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Lorna Landvik

A funny, heartwarming story about a feisty group of women who shake, spice, and heat things up with a "recipe" book for romance, from the bestselling author of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons.

Newly installed at All Souls Lutheran, Mallory "Pastor Pete" Peterson soon realizes that her church isn't merely going through turbulent waters, but is a sinking ship. With the help of five loyal members of the Naomi Circle, the young, bold minister brainstorms fundraising ideas. They all agree that the usual recipe book won't add much to the parish coffers, but maybe one with all the ingredients on how to heat up relationships rather than casseroles will...

Pastor Pete has her doubts about the project, but it turns out the group of postmenopausal women has a lot to say on the subject of romance. While Charlene, the youngest member at fifty-two, struggles with the assignment, baker-extraordinaire Marlys, elegantly bohemian Bunny, I'm-always-right Velda, and ebullient Edie take up their contributions enthusiastically. After all, their book is really about cooking up love in all its forms.

But not everyone in the congregation is on board with this "scandalous" project. As the voices of opposition grow louder, Pastor Pete and these intrepid women will have to decide how hard they're willing to fight for this book and the powerful stories within--stories of discovery, softened hearts, and changed lives.

Last Circle of Love

97160923-1db9-4333-b82b-319632a38ef2-1

devon hase

nico hase

A Survival Guide for Modern Life

How Not to Be a Hot Mess

78252165-3d31-47f5-8bdd-ddf7ba7c1654-0

Jami Attenberg

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a swiftly changing American landscape as they seek lives they can fully claim as their own. The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone's lives soon take a dramatic turn. Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her. But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can't save you--and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward. Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.

A Reason to See You Again

3a43650b-cac0-4c44-9c0a-43423f19b56d-0

Colin McAdam

Two men--one a self-made contractor, the other a disaffected businessman--become friends and seek to find happiness in a world that seems bent on keeping both of them dissatisfied with their lives.

Some Great Thing

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Min Jin Lee

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 *A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

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Jennifer Weiner

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a warmhearted and empowering new novel about love, family, friendship, secrets, and the power of a trip to change your life. Thirty-four-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she just moved in. But she’s got good friends, she’s got her bike, and her bike club in Philadelphia. She’s at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she’s on track to marry her childhood sweetheart. Abby and Mark met at the weight-loss camp Abby’s perpetually-dieting mother, Eileen, forced her daughter to attend. Fifteen years later, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, and finds out that he still adores her, it feels like fate. Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that something isn’t right…or the memories of one mind-blowing night spent with a man named Sebastian two years ago. So when Abby gets a last minute call to lead a group bike trip from New York City to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, and a chance to make up her mind. But on the first day, Abby is shocked when she sees a familiar face in the tour group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she never thought she’d see again. As a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away, Sebastian is far from Mr. Perfect, and Abby is determined to keep her distance, even if their chemistry is undeniable. To make things even worse, there’s a last-minute addition to the trip—Abby’s mother, Eileen, whom Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo. Over the next two weeks, strangers become confidantes, hidden truths come to light, and a teenage girl with a secret will unite all the riders in surprising ways—while all of Abby’s certainties about herself, her mother, and the nature of love are challenged.

The Breakaway

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Katherine St. John

From Katherine St. John, author of The Lion's Den, comes another sublimely escapist thriller: When dangerously handsome megastar Cole Power hires his ex-wife Stella Rivers to play opposite him in his son's film, he sparks a firestorm on an isolated island that will unearth long-buried secrets -- and unravel years of lies. In the midst of a sizzling hot summer, some of Hollywood's most notorious faces are assembled on the idyllic Caribbean island of St. Genesius to film The Siren, starring dangerously handsome megastar Cole Powers playing opposite his ex-wife Stella Rivers. The surefire blockbuster promises to entice audiences with its sultry storyline and intimately connected cast. Three very different women arrive on set, each with her own motive. Stella, an infamously unstable actress, is struggling to reclaim the career she lost in the wake of multiple, very public breakdowns. Taylor, a fledgling producer, is anxious to work on a film she hopes will turn her career around after her last job ended in scandal. And Felicity, Stella's mysterious new assistant, harbors designs of her own that threaten to upend everyone's plans. With a hurricane brewing offshore, each woman finds herself trapped on the island, united against a common enemy. But as deceptions come to light, misplaced trust may prove more perilous than the storm itself.

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