Bryan Washington

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

A Novel

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time? When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.

Family Meal

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Libby Hubscher

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

When an advice columnist's picture-perfect life implodes, she opts to go rogue in this hilarious, heartwarming romance from the author of Meet Me in Paradise. Violet Covington pens Dear Sweetie, the most popular advice column in the state of North Carolina. She has an answer for how to politely handle any difficult situation...until she discovers her husband, Sam, has been cheating on her. Furious and out of sensible solutions, Violet leaves her filter at the door and turns to her column to air her own frustrations. The new, brutally honest Dear Sweetie goes viral, sending more shock waves through Violet's life. When she burns Sam's belongings in a front-yard, late-night bonfire, a smoking-hot firefighter named Dez shows up to douse the flames, and an unexpected fling quickly shows potential to become something longer lasting. A lot of people want to see the old polished Violet return--including her boss, who finds her unpredictability hard to manage, and Sam, who's begging for another chance. But Dez appreciates Violet just the way she is--in fact, he can't get enough of her. The right answers don't come easily when Violet finds herself at her own personal crossroads. But maybe, by getting real, Violet can write her own happy ending.

If You Ask Me

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A. J. Pearce

This charming, irresistible debut novel set in London during World War II about a young woman who longs to be a war correspondent and inadvertently becomes a secret advice columnist is “a jaunty, heartbreaking winner” (People)—for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Lilac Girls. Emmeline Lake and her best friend Bunty are doing their bit for the war effort and trying to stay cheerful, despite the German planes making their nightly raids. Emmy dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent, and when she spots a job advertisement in the newspaper she seizes her chance; but after a rather unfortunate misunderstanding, she finds herself typing letters for the formidable Henrietta Bird, renowned advice columnist of Woman’s Friend magazine. Mrs. Bird is very clear: letters containing any Unpleasantness must go straight into the bin. But as Emmy reads the desperate pleas from women who many have Gone Too Far with the wrong man, or can’t bear to let their children be evacuated, she begins to secretly write back to the readers who have poured out their troubles. “Fans of Jojo Moyes will enjoy AJ Pearce’s debut, with its plucky female characters and fresh portrait of women’s lives in wartime Britain” (Library Journal)—a love letter to the enduring power of friendship, the kindness of strangers, and the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary times. “Headlined by its winning lead character, who always keeps carrying on, Pearce's novel is a delight” (Publishers Weekly). Irrepressibly funny and enormously moving, Dear Mrs. Bird is “funny and poignant…about the strength of women and the importance of friendship” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis).

Dear Mrs. Bird

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Rachel Dodes

Lauren Mechling

"A total joyride of a novel. The Memo is a funny, fascinating exploration of love, friendship, ambition and what it truly means to live a good life. I loved it."--J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of Commencement, Maine, and Friends and Strangers If you could rewrite your life story, would you dare? That's the question at the heart of this charming and propulsive debut novel about love, life, and a woman finding herself and what it means to be happy and successful. Do you ever feel like your life doesn't measure up to everyone else's--and wonder if you just didn't get the memo helping you make the right choices? Jenny Green dreads her upcoming college reunion. Once top of her class, the thirty-five-year-old finds herself stuck in a life that isn't the one she expected. Her promising career has flamed out (literally) and her deadbeat boyfriend is cheating on her (again). All her friends seem to have it all figured it out, enjoying glittering lives and careers that she can only envy from the sidelines. Did she just not get the memo they all did? As it turns out, she didn't! When she arrives at her alma mater for the festivities, she receives a text from an unlisted number. "Jenny Green: please collect your memo." Somewhere on campus, a discreet female-led organization provides comprehensive memos to select students, a set of instructions that are a blueprint for success. The first time around, Jenny didn't receive hers. Now, she's being given the second chance she wants--an opportunity to relive her life and make all the right decisions this time around. But at what price? Smart, addictive, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant, The Memo will enchant readers of In Five Years and Cassandra in Reverse as well as fans of Emma Straub and Maria Semple.

The Memo

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Jessica Lepe

For fans of Lynn Painter and Lyssa Kay Adams, You've Got Mail goes back to high school in this laugh-out-loud debut rom-com where the anonymous (and anxious) woman behind @TheMissGuidedCounselor must decide if she can take her own advice and reach for the life, and love, she wants. Guidance counselor Lucy Galindo works hard at being Harview High's Most Likely to Blend In. Between managing her anxiety and depression and having never found her place, Lucy knows she'd crumble at the center of attention. So when she spills boiling tea on the hot new teacher (in front of everyone!), it's a nightmare come to life . . . Aldrich Fletcher is having the worst first day: thanks to a clumsy (and well, beautiful) mystery woman, his pants are soaked; his ex-girlfriend is his new co-worker, and his estranged dad won't stop trying to talk to him. Thankfully, he can count on his online confidant, the wildly popular @TheMissGuidedCounselor, for advice: like how to woo Lucy, for whom he's falling hard . . . Only Lucy has a secret: she's @TheMissGuidedCounselor. And because her alter-ego is everything she's not--brave, confident, wise--Lucy's terrified of her two lives meeting. So when Fletcher realizes the truth, how can he find the courage to tell her--knowing it might end their growing romance? But for them to have a future, Lucy will need to realize she and her alter-ego aren't so different. Because loving yourself can be the bravest thing of all.

Flirty Little Secret

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Justin Taylor

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A raucous and wickedly smart satire of Hollywood, toxic fandom, and our chronically online culture, following a washed-up actor on his quest to revive the cult TV drama that catapulted him to teenage fame David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit 90s teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence. Hollywood, the Internet, and a fractured nation have other plans, however, and David soon drinks himself to a realization: This seemingly innocuous revival of an old Buffy rip-off could be the spark that sets ablaze a nation gripped by far-right conspiracies, toxic fandoms, and mass violence. Reboot is a madcap and eerily prescient speculative comedy for our era of glass-eyed doomscrolling and 90s nostalgia—a tale of former teen heartthrobs, online edge lords, and fish-faced cryptids, perfect for anyone who still agonizes over Angel versus Spike, lives in fear of the QAnon mom next door, or has run afoul of a rabid “stan” and lived to tell.

Reboot -ARC

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Ayana Mathis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel—set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama—about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival "Emotionally propulsive ... Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.”– Oprah Daily • "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." – Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend Two bold, utopic communities are at the heart of Ayana Mathis’s searing follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Bonaparte, Alabama – once 10,000 glorious Black-owned acres – is now a ghost town vanishing to depopulation, crooked developers, and an eerie mist closing in on its shoreline. Dutchess Carson, Bonaparte's fiery, tough-talking protector, fights to keep its remaining one thousand acres in the hands of the last five residents. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, her estranged daughter Ava is drawn into Ark – a seductive, radical group with a commitment to Black self-determination in the spirit of the Black Panthers and MOVE, with a dash of the Weather Underground’s violent zeal. Ava’s eleven-year-old son Toussaint wants out – his future awaits him on his grandmother’s land, where the sounds of cicada and frog song might save him if only he can make it there. In Mathis’s electrifying novel, Bonaparte is both mythic landscape and spiritual inheritance, and 1980s Philadelphia is its raw, darkly glittering counterpoint. The Unsettled is a spellbinding portrait of two fierce women reckoning with the steep cost of resistance: What legacy will we leave our children? Where can we be free?

The Unsettled

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Jane Roper

In this timely and witty combination of So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? a viral photo of a politician's wife's “feminine hygiene malfunction” catapults her to unwanted fame in a story that's both a satire of social media stardom and internet activism, and a tender mother-daughter tale. Kathleen Held’s life is turned upside down when she arrives home to find her house on fire and her husband on the front lawn in his underwear. But the scandal that emerges is not that Bill, who's running for Senate, is having a painfully cliched affair with one of his young staffers: it's that the eyewitness photographing the scene accidentally captures a period stain on the back of Kathleen’s pants. Overnight, Kathleen finds herself the unwitting figurehead for a social media-centered women’s right movement, #YesWeBleed. Humiliated, Kathleen desperately seeks a way to hide from the spotlight. But when she stumbles upon the Society of Shame—led by the infamous author Danica Bellevue—Kathleen finds herself part of a group who are all working to change their lives after their own scandals. Using the teachings of the society, Kathleen channels her newfound fame as a means to reap the benefits of her humiliation and reclaim herself. But as she ascends to celebrity status, Kathleen's growing obsession with maintaining her popularity online threatens her most important relationship IRL: that with her budding activist daughter, Aggie. Hilarious and heartfelt, The Society of Shame is a pitch-perfect romp through politics and the perils of being "extremely online"—without losing your sanity or your true self.

The Society of Shame

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Arianna Reiche

This haunting debut novel—perfect for fans of Iain Reid, Jeff VanderMeer, and Julia Armfield—is a “wild genre-and-mind-bending ride” (Laura Sims, author of Looker) about a loyal employee at a collapsing theme park questioning the recent death of a celebrity visitor, the arrival of strange new guests, her boyfriend’s erratic behavior, and ultimately her own sanity. Delphi has spent years working at a vast and iconic theme park in California after fleeing a trauma in her rural hometown. But following the disturbing death of a beloved Hollywood starlet on the park grounds, Delphi is tasked with shuttering it for good. Meanwhile, two siblings with ties to the park exchange letters, trying to understand why people who work there have been disappearing. Before long, they learn that there’s a reason no one is meant to see behind its carefully guarded curtain… What happens when the park empties out? And what happens when Delphi, who seems remarkably at one with it, is finally forced to leave? Simultaneously “a smart and surprising escape room of a novel” (Matt Bell, author of Appleseed) about the uncanny valley, death cults, optical illusions, and the enduring power of fantasy, Reiche’s debut is a mind-bending teacup ride through an eerily familiar landscape, where the key to it all is what happens at the end of every day.

At the End of Every Day

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The Midnight News

Melanie Maure

In the spirit of Heather Morris, Kate Quinn, and Pam Jenoff, an enthralling and deeply moving story that begins during World War II, about orphaned twin sisters in Ireland whose lives diverge for decades, until fate--and faith--reunite them in the twilight of their lives. Orphaned during the Second World War, Aelish and Isabel McGuire--known as the twins of Belfast--are given over to the austere care of the Sisters of Bethlehem. Though they are each all the other has, the girls are propelled in opposite directions as they grow up. Rebellious Isabel turns her back on the church and Ireland, traveling to Newfoundland where she pursues a perilous yet independent life. Devout Aelish chooses to remain in Northern Ireland and takes the veil, burying painful truths beneath years of silence. For decades the two are separated, each unaware of the other's life. But after years of isolation Aelish is unexpectedly summoned to Newfoundland, where she and her estranged sister begin to bridge the chasm between them. Reunion brings to light the painful secrets and seismic deceptions that have kept these sisters apart, leaving the McGuire twins to begin reconstructing their understanding about themselves as women and as family-what they know of love, hope, and above all, forgiveness. A story of faith--in religion, in the world, and in one another--Sisters of Belfast is a heartbreaking, tragic, and deeply moving novel about survival and the enduring power of sisterhood.

Sisters of Belfast -ARC

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Kitty Zeldis

"A haunting meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. Zeldis offers a fascinating look into historic New York City and New Orleans, and her skill as a storyteller is matched by her compassion for her characters. What a beautiful read."--Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Magnolia Palace

"By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kitty Zeldis's The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, set against the backdrop of the not-always-so-roaring Twenties, is an only-in-America story of reinvention, rising above tragedy, and finding family."--Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of Band of Sisters

For fans of Fiona Davis, Beatriz Williams, and Joanna Goodman, a mesmerizing historical novel from Kitty Zeldis, the author of Not Our Kind, about three women in 1920s New York City and the secrets they hold.

Brooklyn, 1924. As New York City enters the jazz age, the lives of three very different women are about to converge in unexpected ways. Recently arrived from New Orleans, Beatrice is working to establish a chic new dress shop with help from Alice, the orphaned teenage ward she brought north with her. Down the block, newlywed Catherine is restless in her elegant brownstone, longing for a baby she cannot conceive.

When Bea befriends Catherine and the two start to become close, Alice feels abandoned and envious, and runs away to Manhattan. Her departure sets into motion a series of events that will force each woman to confront the painful secrets of her past in order to move into the happier future she seeks.

Moving from the bustling streets of early twentieth century New York City to late nineteenth-century Russia and the lively quarters of New Orleans in the 1910s, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights is a story of the families we are born into and the families we choose, and of the unbreakable bonds between women.

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights -ARC

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Emily March

"Feel good fiction [is] at its finest" (Susan Wiggs) in this New York Times bestselling author's new series, where after years of putting her family first, Genevieve Prentice is making a fresh start--but it's never easy to leave the past behind. 



Widowed young, Genevieve Prentice dedicated her life to raising her four children. Now, though, they're all grown and scattered to the wind, and Genevieve is ready for a change. In a flash of inspiration, she puts her home on the market and heads to Lake in the Clouds, Colorado, to renovate a rustic waterfront lodge with her sister. But just as they begin, Genevieve gets the shock of a lifetime: the arrival of her son.



Jake Prentice built a career out of being dependable, one that left him perennially stressed and overworked. Finally heeding his mother's words of wisdom, he's quit his job and is ready to find out what truly makes him happy. And now, as he stands surrounded by open sky and fresh, pine-scented air, he's got no regrets . . . until former colleague Tess Crenshaw appears at the lake, forcing him to reassess what--and who--he really wants.



As they work together to renovate the lodge, Genevieve and Jake embark on a heartfelt and inspiring journey to learn about themselves, each other, and the true meaning of family.

The Getaway -ARC

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Kat Devereaux

Moving between the Second World War and the present, an exhilarating debut novel in the vein of Jennifer Robson, Kate Quinn, and Natasha Lester, about two women, decades apart, whose fates converge in Florence, Italy.

Only fourteen, Stella Infuriati is the youngest member of her town's resistance network during World War II. Risking torture and death, she relays messages, supplies, and weapons to partisan groups in the Tuscan hills. Her parents have no idea, consumed instead by love and fear for their beloved son, Achille, a courier and unofficial mechanic for a communist partisan brigade.

Then, after 1945, Stella seemingly vanishes from the records. Her name and story are overshadowed by the tragic death of her brother--until a young writer arrives in Tuscany in the spring of 2019, uncovering long-buried secrets.

Fleeing an emotionally abusive marriage and a lonely life on an isolated estate, Tori MacNair has come to Florence, the beautiful city her grandmother taught her to love, to build a new life. As she digs into her family history with the help of Marco, a handsome lawyer, Tori starts to uncover secrets of the past--truths that stretch back decades, to a young woman who risked everything to save her world . . .

 



Jess

@jessreadsalot

Books Listed

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Followers

Bryan Washington

Family Meal

Libby Hubscher

If You Ask Me

A. J. Pearce

Dear Mrs. Bird

Rachel Dodes; Lauren Mechling

The Memo

Jessica Lepe

Flirty Little Secret

Justin Taylor

Reboot -ARC

Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled

Jane Roper

The Society of Shame

Arianna Reiche

At the End of Every Day

Jo Baker

The Midnight News

Melanie Maure

Sisters of Belfast -ARC

Kitty Zeldis

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights -ARC

Emily March

The Getaway -ARC

Kat Devereaux

Escape to Florence

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Browse by categories

Bryan Washington

Family Meal

Libby Hubscher

If You Ask Me

A. J. Pearce

Dear Mrs. Bird

Rachel Dodes; Lauren Mechling

The Memo

Jessica Lepe

Flirty Little Secret

Justin Taylor

Reboot -ARC

Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled

Jane Roper

The Society of Shame

Arianna Reiche

At the End of Every Day

Jo Baker

The Midnight News

Melanie Maure

Sisters of Belfast -ARC

Kitty Zeldis

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights -ARC

Emily March

The Getaway -ARC

Kat Devereaux

Escape to Florence

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