M. G. Lord

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

Barbie is a strong, independent doll. But is she a feminist icon? It's complicated.

Forever Barbie

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Jazmina Barrera

Christina MacSweeney

"This book is a light at the end of the tunnel." --The Paris Review

Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses--those structures whose message is "first and foremost, that human beings are here."

Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others.

In trying to "collect" lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone--from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one--concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.

On Lighthouses

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Gretchen Sisson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem. With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.

Relinquished

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Melissa Broder

A Novel

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION “Bold, virtuosic, addictive, erotic – there is nothing like The Pisces. I have no idea how Broder does it, but I loved every dark and sublime page of it.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety — not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection. Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.

The Pisces

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Lisa Jewell

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA COVER TO COVER BOOK CLUB PICK “Rich, dark, and intricately twisted, this enthralling whodunit mixes family saga with domestic noir to brilliantly chilling effect.” —Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author “A haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read.” —Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author From the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light. Be careful who you let in. Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them. Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone. In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

The Family Upstairs

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Virginie Grimaldi

Hildegarde Serle

Full of humor and compassion, a profound exploration of sisterhood, healing, and the ineffable beauty of life from France's most beloved contemporary novelist Laughter, tears, the transformative power of love, unexpected revelations, and striking natural beauty: these are the ingredients that combine to make best-selling author Virginie Grimaldi's American debut the feel-good read of 2024. Grimaldi is among France's top ten contemporary authors and her uplifting, unputdownable literary novels have quickly garnered her millions of adoring fans. This, her American debut, is among her most delicately wrought and emotionally compelling novels to date. Emma and Agathe are sisters. They were thick as thieves when they were young but have always been as different as can be. Agathe, the younger sister, is disorderly, chaotic, and fiery. Five years older, Emma has always been the more mature sister, the defender, the protector, the worrier. Their relationship as adults is scarred by a tragedy that transformed their happy, ordinary childhoods into something much more complex and challenging. For a long time, Emma hasn't wanted to be involved in Agathe's life. But then they must return together to the Basque Country, to the house of their adored grandmother, to empty out her home and in the process to reconcile, to remember, and to pour out what is in their hearts. The story alternates between Agathe and Emma's childhood and their present day, with everything in between, and readers see them as young girls, teenagers, young women, mothers, wives, partners, individuals, sisters. This is a story that encompasses whole lives, complex lives, women's lives, asking all the while how the scars of the past can be healed and what, in the end, is a good life.

A Good Life

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Soseki Natsume

Aiko Ito

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

"A nonchalant string of anecdotes and wisecracks, told by a fellow who doesn't have a name, and has never caught a mouse, and isn't much good for anything except watching human beings in action…" —The New Yorker Written from 1904 through 1906, Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the most significant writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

I Am a Cat

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Jesmyn Ward

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Let Us Descend

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Rebecca Solnit

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Memoir

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. Beyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced--and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.

Recollections of My Nonexistence

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Mithu Sanyal

Alta L. Price

"A searing satire, one similar to those of Percival Everett or Paul Beatty.... Sanyal has created an exhaustively researched, entertaining, and timely novel about the ways social media and scandals dictate so much of the discourse about identity politics." -Starred review, Booklist

Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student is in awe of her supervisor-superstar postcolonial and race studies South-Asian professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita's praise of her professor during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks-and before she learns the truth-calls into question her own reputation as a young activist.

Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world. As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends, Nivedita's assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor.

In her thought-provoking, genre-bending debut, Mithu Sanyal solicited the contributions and commentary of public intellectuals as if Saraswati were a real person. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates about identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice.

Identitti

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Lily Brooks-Dalton

For readers of Station Eleven and Where the Crawdads Sing comes a hopeful, sweeping story of survival and resilience spanning one extraordinary woman's lifetime as she navigates the uncertainty, brutality, and arresting beauty of a rapidly changing world.



Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state's infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.



As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.



Told in four parts--power, water, light, and time--The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

 

The Light Pirate

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Orhan Pamuk

Robert Finn

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Part detective story, part historical epic—a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900 on the imaginary island of Mingheria—a state of the Ottoman Empire—located between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives, the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, an accomplished quarantine expert races to the island, but not everyone is happy with the precautions or the quarantine he enforces. What follows is a shocking murder. The plague continues its rapid spread and stricter quarantine measures are declared, but the incompetence of the island’s governor, increased hostility between the two religions, and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure. As the death count rises to insurmountable amounts, warships blockade the island to keep the disease from spreading. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

Nights of Plague

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Joyce Carol Oates

Tales of the Grotesque

Sixteen neo-gothic tales of horror, the grotesque, and the dark side of the human imagination focus on the themes of violence in American society and the exploitation of women and children.

Haunted

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Elvira Navarro

An ambitious tale of feminine friendship, madness, a radically changing city, and the vulnerability that makes us divulge our most shameful secrets. It begins as Elisa transcribes the chaotic testimony of her roommate Susana, acting as part-therapist, part-confessor as Susana reveals the gripping account of her strange sexual urges and the one man who can satisfy them. But is Susana telling the truth? And what to make of the story that follows, where Elisa considers her own life failures, blending her literary ambitions with her deep need for catharsis? And then, one last surprise makes us question everything we have just read.

A Working Woman

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Phong Nguyen

A "gripping historical adventure" of ancient Vietnam based on the true story of two warrior sisters who raised an army of women to overthrow the Han Chinese and rule as kings over a united people, for readers of Circe and The Night Tiger (Booklist).



Gather around, children of Chu Dien, and be brave.

For even to listen to the story of the Trung Sisters is,

in these troubled times, a dangerous act.



In 40 CE, in the Au Lac region of ancient Vietnam, two daughters of a Vietnamese Lord fill their days training, studying, and trying to stay true to Vietnamese traditions. While Trung Trac is disciplined and wise, always excelling in her duty, Trung Nhi is fierce and free spirited, more concerned with spending time in the gardens and with lovers.



But these sister's lives--and the lives of their people--are shadowed by the oppressive rule of the Han Chinese. They are forced to adopt Confucian teachings, secure marriages, and pay ever‑increasing taxes. As the peoples' frustration boils over, the country comes ever closer to the edge of war.



When Trung Trac and Trung Nhi's father is executed, their world comes crashing down around them. With no men to save them against the Han's encroaching regime, they must rise and unite the women of Vietnam into an army. Solidifying their status as champions of women and Vietnam, they usher in a period of freedom and independence for their people.



Vivid, lyrical, and filled with adventure, The Bronze Drum is a true story of standing up for one's people, culture, and country that has been passed down through generations of Vietnamese families through oral tradition. Phong Nguyen's breathtaking novel takes these real women out of legends and celebrates their loves, losses, and resilience in this inspirational story of women's strength and power even in the face of the greatest obstacles.

Bronze Drum

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Jo Nesbo

Neil Smith

From the internationally best-selling author, a chilling fresh spin on the classic horror novel When the voices call, don't answer. In the wake of his parents’ tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Black Mirror Wood. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . . You know who I am. She’s going to burn. The one you love is going to burn. There’s not a thing you can do about it. When another classmate disappears, Richard must find a way to prove his innocence—and preserve his sanity—as he grapples with the dark magic that is possessing Ballantyne and pursuing his destruction. Then again, Richard may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story . . .

The Night House

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Julie Otsuka

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE WINNER * From the award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine comes a novel that "starts as a catalogue of spoken and unspoken rules for swimmers at an aquatic center but unfolds into a powerful story of a mother's dementia and her daughter's love" (The Washington Post).

The swimmers are unknown to one another except through their private routines (slow lane, medium lane, fast lane) and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief.
 
One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese American incarceration camp in which she spent the war. Alice's estranged daughter, reentering her mother's life too late, witnesses her stark and devastating decline.

The Swimmers

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Raul Palma

A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores the weight of the devil’s bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom. Hugo Contreras’s world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo’s debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo. One day, Hugo’s nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo’s debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there’s one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn’t believe in spirits. Hugo plans to do what he’s done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo’s old tricks don’t work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi’s demons in an explosive climax. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe—to ourselves, our families, and our histories.

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens

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How to Do Nothing

Community Board

I actually really want to read this book I just have two copies for some reason 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Banyan Moon

Nothing special 

I’ve finally given up the delusion that I will ever read this book

Browse by categories

M. G. Lord

Forever Barbie

Jazmina Barrera; Christina MacSweeney

On Lighthouses

Gretchen Sisson

Relinquished

Melissa Broder

The Pisces

Lisa Jewell

The Family Upstairs

Virginie Grimaldi; Hildegarde Serle

A Good Life

Soseki Natsume; Aiko Ito

I Am a Cat

Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend

Rebecca Solnit

Recollections of My Nonexistence

Mithu Sanyal; Alta L. Price

Identitti

Lily Brooks-Dalton

The Light Pirate

Orhan Pamuk; Robert Finn

Nights of Plague

Joyce Carol Oates

Haunted

Elvira Navarro; Christina MacSweeney

A Working Woman

Phong Nguyen

Bronze Drum

Jo Nesbo; Neil Smith

The Night House

Julie Otsuka

The Swimmers

Raul Palma

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

Tara Conklin

Community Board

Thai Thai

Banyan Moon

Nicole Flattery

Nothing special

Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See

Andrew Ridker

Hope

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