#hardcover #fiction #crimejunkie #debut #debutnovel #familylifefiction #familyfiction #lifefiction 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Arkansas

For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this "marvelous debut" (Alice McDermott, National Book Award-winning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Florida's lush swamps and wetlands.

Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni's neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.

Going through her mother's things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget--a childhood marked by her father Boyd's death by drowning and her mother Ruth's persistent bad mood. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger--"There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd's death"-- she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife, who seem to thwart her at every turn. To make matters worse, she meets a man in Florida whose attractive simple charm threatens everything she's worked toward.

Pulled between worlds--her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood--Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and either avenge the past or bury it, once and for all.

The Marsh Queen explores what it means to be a daughter and how we protect the ones we love. Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War, writes that "fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read."

The Marsh Queen

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#ya #debut #comingofage #hardcover #fiction 

Pennsylvania

The Martin Chronicles

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#hardcover #fiction #drama #poetic #debut #anorexia #dancer #yarazgheib

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Alabama

A Novel

The Girls at 17 Swann Street

ce85b111-fbc5-4f3b-bf5e-815b2dc8761d

#hardcover #christmas #familydrama #fiction #debut #family #funny 

California

"It's Christmas, and for the first time in years the entire Birch family will be under one roof. Even Emma and Andrew's elder daughter--who is usually off saving the world--will be joining them at Weyfield Hall, their aging country estate. But Olivia, a doctor, is only coming home because she has to. Having just returned from treating an epidemic abroad, she's been told she must stay in quarantine for a week--and so too should her family. For the next seven days, the Birches are locked down, cut off from the rest of humanity--and even decent Wi-Fi--and forced into each other's orbits"--

Seven Days of Us

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#hardcover #debut #crime #mystery #detective #catholic #dublin #benjaminblack

In the debut crime novel from the Booker-winning author, a Dublin pathologist follows the corpse of a mysterious woman into the heart of
a conspiracy among the city's high Catholic society
 
It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse--and concealing the cause of death.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious--and very well-guarded--secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family.

Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of Booker Prize winner John Banville's fiction to a thrilling, atmospheric crime story. Quirke is a fascinating and subtly drawn hero,Christine Falls is a classic tale of suspense, and Benjamin Black's debut marks him as a true master of the form.

Christine Falls

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#hardcover #lgbtq #love #lesbian #sex #comedy #debut 

A deliciously disarming debut novel about a twenty-something Londoner who discovers that she may have been looking for love -- and pleasure -- in all the wrong places (i.e. from men).



Julia has had enough. Enough of the sex noises her roommate makes. Enough of her dead-end government job. Enough of the one-night stand who accused her of breaking his penis. The only thing she hasn't had enough of is orgasms; she hasn't had proper sex in three years.



So when Julia gets invited to a warehouse party in a part of town where trendy people who have lots of sex go on a Friday night, she readily accepts. And that night she meets someone: a figurative artist, who also happens to be a woman.



Julia's sexual awakening begins; her new lesbian life is exhilarating. She finds her tribe at queer swing dancing classes, and guided by her new lover Sam, she soon discovers London's gay bars and BDSM clubs . . .  and the complexities of polyamory. Soon it becomes clear that Sam needs to call the shots, and Julia's newfound liberation comes to bear a suspicious resemblance to entrapment . . . 



In at the Deep End is an unforgettable and audacious odyssey through the pitfalls and seductions we encounter on the treacherous path to love and self. 

In at the Deep End

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Indiana

Critics and readers everywhere stood up and took notice when Laura Moriarty's captivating debut novel hit the stores in June '03. Janet Maslin of the New York Times praised The Center of Everything as "warm" and "beguiling." USA Today compared the scrappy yet tender-hearted Evelyn Bucknow to Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It garnered extensive national attention; from Entertainment Weekly to the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, the press raved about the wisdom and poignancy of Moriarty's writing. The Book-of-the-Month Club snatched it up as a Main Selection, as did the Literary Guild. It was a USA Today Summer Reading Pick, a BookSense Top 10 Pick, and a BN.com book club feature title. And still, months after The Center of Everything's original publication date, reviews and features of the book continue to run nationwide.

The Center of Everything

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Only slight yellowing to the book! #hardcover #debut #fiction 

Massachusetts

Recalling contemporary classics such as Americanah, Behold the Dreamers, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a funny, poignant, and insightful debut novel that explores the complexities of family, immigration, prejudice, and the American Dream through meaningful and unlikely friendships forged in unusual circumstances. Pival Sengupta has done something she never expected: she has booked a trip with the First Class India USA Destination Vacation Tour Company. But unlike other upper-class Indians on a foreign holiday, the recently widowed Pival is not interested in sightseeing. She is traveling thousands of miles from Kolkata to New York on a cross-country journey to California, where she hopes to uncover the truth about her beloved son, Rahi. A year ago Rahi devastated his very traditional parents when he told them he was gay. Then, Pival’s husband, Ram, told her that their son had died suddenly—heartbreaking news she still refuses to accept. Now, with Ram gone, she is going to America to find Rahi, alive and whole or dead and gone, and come to terms with her own life. Arriving in New York, the tour proves to be more complicated than anticipated. Planned by the company’s indefatigable owner, Ronnie Munshi—a hard-working immigrant and entrepreneur hungry for his own taste of the American dream—it is a work of haphazard improvisation. Pival’s guide is the company’s new hire, the guileless and wonderfully resourceful Satya, who has been in America for one year—and has never actually left the five boroughs. For modesty’s sake Pival and Satya will be accompanied by Rebecca Elliot, an aspiring young actress. Eager for a paying gig, she’s along for the ride, because how hard can a two-week "working" vacation traveling across America be? Slowly making her way from coast to coast with her unlikely companions, Pival finds that her understanding of her son—and her hopes of a reunion with him—are challenged by her growing knowledge of his adoptive country. As the bonds between this odd trio deepens, Pival, Satya, and Rebecca learn to see America—and themselves—in different and profound new ways. A bittersweet and bighearted tale of forgiveness, hope, and acceptance, America for Beginners illuminates the unexpected enchantments life can hold, and reminds us that our most precious connections aren’t always the ones we seek.

America for Beginners

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#hardcover #legalfiction #legalthriller #debut 311 pages

Washington

After getting a confessed killer off on a technicality, brilliant young defense attorney Jack Swyteck, estranged son of Governor Harry Swyteck, a proponent of the death penalty, finds himself framed for murder.

The Pardon

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#hardcover #fiction #aburning #debut  #readwithjenna #bookofthemonth #botm #muslim #thriller #debutauthor




Georgia

"After a fiery attack on a train leaves 104 people dead, the fates of three people become inextricably entangled. Jivan, a bright, striving woman from the slums looking for a way out of poverty, is wrongly accused of planning the attack because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir, a slippery gym teacher from Jivan's former high school, has hitched his aspirations to a rising right wing party, and his own ascent becomes increasingly linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely, a spirited, impoverished, relentlessly optimistic hjira, who harbors dreams of becoming a Bollywood star, can provide the alibi that would set Jivan free--but her appearance in court will have unexpected consequences that will change the course of all of their lives. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths--A Burning is a debut novel of exceptional power and urgency, haunting and beautiful, brutal, vibrant, impossible to forget"--

A Burning

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#hardcover #sisters #birds #wisconsin #retrospect #spinster #debut #rebeccarasmussen

When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health.
 
But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told. That was the summer their golf pro father got into an accident that cost him both his swing and his charm, and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. It was the summer their priest, Father Rice, announced that God didn't exist and ran off to Mexico, and a boy named Asa finally caught Milly's eye. And, most unforgettably, it was the summer their cousin Bett came down from a town called Deadwater and changed the course of their lives forever.
 
Rebecca Rasmussen's masterfully written debut novel is full of hope and beauty, heartbreak and sacrifice, love and the power of sisterhood, and offers wonderful surprises at every turn.

The Bird Sisters

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#hardcover #fiction #debut #domesticlife #drama #family #familylife #literaryfiction 

""There were so many of us, children of these double families who dreamed of the other side. That night, I fantasized about the separate spheres of our lives colliding..." Introspective and headstrong, and fueled by an intensity she can't name, Margot Louve has lived as her parents' secret. For seventeen years, her father - an influential French politician with presidential ambitions - has led a double life, his only contact with Margot and her mother in moments stolen from his wife and his official duties. Margot's mother, Anouk - a charismatic and prominent stage actress - constructs a private, shimmering world of secrecy around their hidden family in their tiny Parisian apartment on the Left Bank. It is a carefully constructed house of cards that Margot decides fatefully to tumble when one evening, at the opening night of one of her mother's plays, she meets the man who will set her plan in motion: the powerful and well-regarded journalist David Perrin. The next day, the front pages of the morning papers are emblazoned with news of the affair, and Margot finds herself drawn into another marriage - that of David and his beguiling wife Brigitte, each of whom want more from her than she is willing to give up. In just one stunning revelation, Margot discovers how her impulsive decision will change the contours of everyone's life around her in ways she could never have imagined. In this simmering debut, Sanaë Lemoine exposes the seams between private and public faces, truth and deceit, love and persuasion. Insightful and moving, woven in sensuous prose, The Margot Affair explores razor-sharp turns between women - from the bone-deep bond between mothers and daughters to the devotion and betrayal of friendship - and the dangers of pushing beyond the boundaries of a life lived in the shadows"--

The Margot Affair

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#hardcover #fiction #botm #debut #siblings #contemporary #bookofthemonth 

Ren Ishida is nearly finished with graduate school when he receives news of his sister, Keiko's, sudden death. She was viciously stabbed one rainy night on her way home, and there are no leads. Ren heads to Akakawa to conclude his sister's affairs, still failing to understand why she chose to abandon the family and Tokyo for this desolate town years ago. As he comes to know the figures in Akakawa, from the enigmatic politician to his fellow teachers and a rebellious, alluring student named Rio, Ren delves into his shared childhood with Keiko and what followed, trying to piece together what happened the night of her death. Haunted in his dreams by a young girl who is desperately trying to tell him something, Ren struggles to find solace in the void his sister has left behind.

Rainbirds

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#doubleexposure #alfredgough #milesmillar #smallville #thriller #suspense #novel #debut #hardcover #fiction 

Illinois

From the creators of Smallville comes an action-packed debut thriller set in the 1960s about a war veteran and CIA officer who are swept up into a global conspiracy that may prove that Hitler is still alive. In the early 1960s, David Toland, decorated war veteran and Director of Preservation at the Library of Congress, is pulled back into active service by an urgent request by CIA officer Lana Welles involving a film canister, smuggled over the Berlin Wall at great cost, that may prove that Hitler is still alive. After a death-defying escape that draws them closer than mere colleagues, David and Lana flee the country on the hunt for the truth about Hitler's whereabouts, as clandestine forces chase them from Europe to South America. But the truth they will discover is even more dangerous than it first appears, and sets in motion a showdown deep in the Amazon that will have enormous, world-changing ramifications.

Double Exposure

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#hardcover #african #novel #epic #debut #love #music 

North Carolina

Taduno's Song

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#hardcover #fiction #community #juvenilefiction #debut #new #ya #teen #youngadult

Miriam, sixteen, is chosen for marriage by someone other than the boy she loves and begins to question her entire life in New Jerusalem, a desert compound safe from the world's evils.

The Virtue of Sin

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Virginia

"[A]n homage to true love, painful childhood experiences, and emotional scars that last a lifetime. It's a story of forgiveness, especially for one's self....Extraordinary." --The Washington Post

From "America's librarian" and NPR books commentator Nancy Pearl comes an emotionally riveting debut novel about an unlikely marriage at a crossroads.

George and Lizzie have radically different understandings of what love and marriage should be. George grew up in a warm and loving family--his father an orthodontist, his mother a stay-at-home mom--while Lizzie grew up as the only child of two famous psychologists, who viewed her more as an in-house experiment than a child to love.

Over the course of their marriage, nothing has changed--George is happy; Lizzie remains...unfulfilled. When a shameful secret from Lizzie's past resurfaces, she'll need to face her fears in order to accept the true nature of the relationship she and George have built over a decade together.

With pitch-perfect prose and compassion and humor to spare, George and Lizzie is an intimate story of new and past loves, the scars of childhood, and an imperfect marriage at its defining moments.

George and Lizzie

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#hardcover #fiction #darkacademia #mystery #suspense #gothic #bipoc #debut 

Texas

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free--but acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years, summers included, completely removed from the outside world. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige. Among this year's incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline, only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. But the House's strange protocols soon make this refuge feel increasingly like a gilded prison.

Catherine House

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#hardcover #debut #paperback #family #fiction #immigration #prejudice 

#hardcover #debut #family #fiction #immigration #prejudice #hardback 

Kentucky

#paperback #fiction #debut #southernfiction

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

South Carolina

"After Alice's older brother runs away at fifteen, the next she hears of him is that he's dead. Eight years after the funeral, Alice cleans out her childhood home in Georgia only to find her brother's autopsy report showing the many lies behind his death. She also discovers sealed, addressed letters he wrote shortly before he died. In a search for the truth, Alice delivers the letters to his closest friends, lovers, and enemies, each letter daring her to finally open her eyes to her family's dark past and her own role in it. But it's the last letter that takes Alice to her brother's final home in New Orleans, and it will force her to choose if she'll let the secrets break her or finally bring her home"--

How to Bury Your Brother

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#hardcover #fiction #debut #botm #siblings #contemporary 

New York

#hardcover #youngadult #fiction #debut #fantasy #heirs #kingdom #rule #ellengoodlett

Three Dark Crowns meets Pretty Little Liars in this sensational and striking new fantasy from debut author Ellen Goodlett. Three girls. Three deadly secrets. Only one can wear the crown. The king is dying, his heir has just been murdered, and rebellion brews in the east. But the kingdom of Kolonya and the outer Reaches has one last option before it descends into leaderless chaos. Or rather, three unexpected options. Zofi has spent her entire life trekking through the outer Reaches with her band of Travelers. She would do anything to protect the band, her family. But no one can ever find out how far she's already gone. Akeylah was raised in the Eastern Reach, surrounded by whispers of rebellion and abused by her father. Desperate to escape, she makes a decision that threatens the whole kingdom. Ren grew up in Kolonya, serving as a lady's maid and scheming her way out of the servants' chambers. But one such plot could get her hung for treason if anyone ever discovers what she's done. When the king summons the girls, they arrive expecting arrest or even execution. Instead they learn the truth: they are his illegitimate daughters, and one must become his new heir. But someone in Kolonya knows their secrets, and that someone will stop at nothing to keep the sisters from their destiny... to rule. Magic, mystery, and blackmail abound in the first book of this sensational and striking fantasy duology.

Virginia Hartman

The Marsh Queen

John Fried

The Martin Chronicles

Yara Zgheib

The Girls at 17 Swann Street

Francesca Hornak

Seven Days of Us

Benjamin Black

Christine Falls

Kate Davies

In at the Deep End

Laura Moriarty

The Center of Everything

Leah Franqui

America for Beginners

James Grippando

The Pardon

Megha Majumdar

A Burning

Rebecca Rasmussen

The Bird Sisters

Sanaë Lemoine

The Margot Affair

Clarissa Goenawan

Rainbirds

Alfred Gough; Miles Millar

Double Exposure

Odafe Atogun

Taduno's Song

Shannon Schuren

The Virtue of Sin

Nancy Pearl

George and Lizzie

Elisabeth Thomas

Catherine House

Leah Franqui

America for Beginners

Leah Franqui

America for Beginners

Lindsey Rogers Cook

How to Bury Your Brother

Clarissa Goenawan

Rainbirds

Ellen Goodlett

Rule

Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles