Sarah Langan

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

A Novel

Named by Goodreads as One of the Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2021 “A modern-day Crucible….Beneath the surface of a suburban utopia, madness lurks.” —Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish “Good Neighbors is a wickedly funny, unnerving puzzle box of a novel. Sarah Langan has a delightfully twisted sensibility.” —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths of deception and damage in a Long Island suburb—pitting neighbor against neighbor and putting one family in terrible danger. Welcome to Maple Street, a picture-perfect slice of suburban Long Island, its residents bound by their children, their work, and their illusion of safety in a rapidly changing world. But menace skulks beneath the surface of this exclusive enclave, making its residents prone to outrage. When the Wilde family moves in, they trigger their neighbors’ worst fears. Dad Arlo’s a gruff has-been rock star with track marks. Mom Gertie’s got a thick Brooklyn accent, with high heels and tube tops to match. Their weird kids cuss like sailors. They don’t fit with the way Maple Street sees itself. Though Maple Street’s Queen Bee, Rhea Schroeder—a lonely college professor repressing a dark past—welcomed Gertie and her family at first, relations went south during one spritzer-fueled summer evening, when the new best friends shared too much, too soon. By the time the story opens, the Wildes are outcasts. As tensions mount, a sinkhole opens in a nearby park, and Rhea’s daughter Shelly falls inside. The search for Shelly brings a shocking accusation against the Wildes. Suddenly, it is one mom’s word against the other’s in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood. A riveting and ruthless portrayal of American suburbia, Good Neighbors excavates the perils and betrayals of motherhood and friendships and the dangerous clash between social hierarchy, childhood trauma, and fear.

Good Neighbors

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Kai Harris

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Pennsylvania

Named A Most Aniticipated Book of 2022 by *Marie Claire* Buzzfeed* Essence* Bookbub and more! In the vein of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel told by almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), as she and her sister try to make sense of their new life with their estranged grandfather in the wake of their father's death and their mother's disappearance. An ode to Black girlhood and adolescence as seen through KB's eyes, What the Fireflies Knew follows KB after her father dies of an overdose and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit. Soon thereafter, KB and her teenage sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing, Michigan. Over the course of a single sweltering summer, KB attempts to navigate a world that has turned upside down. Her father has been labeled a fiend. Her mother's smile no longer reaches her eyes. Her sister, once her best friend, now feels like a stranger. Her grandfather is grumpy and silent. The white kids who live across the street are friendly, but only sometimes. And they're all keeping secrets. As KB vacillates between resentment, abandonment, and loneliness, she is forced to carve out a different identity for herself and find her own voice. A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up--the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.

What the Fireflies Knew

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Simon Han

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Iowa

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar “A tender, spiky family saga about love in all its mysterious incarnations.” —Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs and Birds of America “Absolutely luminous . . . Weaves the transience of suburbia between the highs and lows of a family saga . . . Shocks, awes, and delights.” —Bryan Washington, author of Memorial From the outside, the Chengs seem like so-called model immigrants. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn’t this what they sacrificed so much for? But then little Annabel begins to sleepwalk at night, putting into motion a string of misunderstandings that not only threaten to set their community against them but force to the surface the secrets that have made them fear one another. How can a man make peace with the terrors of his past? How can a child regain trust in unconditional love? How can a family stop burying its history and forge a way through it, to a more honest intimacy? Nights When Nothing Happened is gripping storytelling immersed in the crosscurrents that have reshaped the American landscape, from a prodigious new literary talent.

Nights When Nothing Happened

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Jason Gurley

No dust jacket. Ex library book. Cover isn't the prettiest, but the rest of the book is in tip top shape.

Alabama

Years after an accident claims her twin's life and triggers her father's abandonment and mother's ascent into alcoholism, Eleanor begins to experience supernatural dissociations that reveal her parents' unhappy pasts and her role in helping them heal.

Eleanor

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Pam Jenoff

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Oklahoma

From the author of the runaway bestseller The Orphan's Tale comes a remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II. 1946, Manhattan One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs--each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal. Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.

The Lost Girls of Paris

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Leila Meacham

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

One hundred fifty years of Roses' Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts! We begin in the antebellum South on Plantation Alley in South Carolina, where Silas Toliver, deprived of his inheritance, joins up with his best friend Jeremy Warwick to plan a wagon train expedition to the "black waxy" promise of a new territory called Texas. Slavery, westward expansion, abolition, the Civil War, love, marriage, friendship, tragedy and triumph-all the ingredients (and much more) that made so many love Roses so much-are here in abundance.

Somerset

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Recently orphaned, eleven-year-old Cathy Benson feels she has been dropped into a cultural and intellectual wasteland when she is forced to move from her academically privileged life in California to the small town of Kersey in the Texas Panhandle where the sport of football reigns supreme. She is quickly taken under the unlikely wings of up-and-coming gridiron stars and classmates John Caldwell and Trey Don Hall, orphans like herself, with whom she forms a friendship and eventual love triangle that will determine the course of the rest of their lives. Taking the three friends through their growing up years until their high school graduations when several tragic events uproot and break them apart, the novel expands to follow their careers and futures until they reunite in Kersey at forty years of age. Told with all of Meacham's signature drama, unforgettable characters, and plot twists, readers will be turning the pages, desperate to learn how it all plays out.

Tumbleweeds

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Jenny Jackson

Connecticut

A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan

"A vibrant and hilarious debut...Pineapple Street is riveting, timely, hugely entertaining and brimming with truth." --Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process; Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family, and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; and Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't have, and must decide what kind of person she wants to be. 

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one-percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, loveable--if fallible--characters, it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love--all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight.

Pineapple Street

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Susie Yang

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

"White Ivy begins as many coming-to-America stories do: Ivy Lin, a Chinese immigrant, grows up in a low-income apartment complex in Massachusetts desperate to assimilate with her American peers. She develops a crush on the golden boy Gideon Speyer, whose patrician New England family is the paragon of the WASP ideal. Ivy's mother is a Tiger Mom, berating Ivy regularly when she disapproves of her grades, her looks, her attitude. But that's where the familiar story ends. Because Ivy has a mentor-her grandmother Meifeng- from whom she learns to shoplift to get the things she needs. Ivy develops a taste for winning and for wealth. Years later, when she bumps into Gideon's father, Ivy believes it's destiny. She's worked long and hard to be the right woman for Gideon. But just as they begin dating, another man from Ivy's past appears, and he has his own set of rules. Ivy soon has a foot in two vastly different worlds. The question is: Which will she choose? A coming-of-age story, a love triangle, an exploration of class and race and identity" -- Front jacket flap.

White Ivy

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#hardcover #fiction #literaryfiction #france #romance #thelittleparisbookshop #ninageorge

Maryland

Following a failed suicide attempt inspired by her loveless marriage, Marianne Messman travels to Brittany with the intention of trying again but changes her mind when the guests of a charming bistro reintroduce her to life's delights.

The Little French Bistro

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David Mitchell

Missouri

Interweaves six narratives spanning the period between 1984 and the 2030s to chronicle a secret war between a cult of soul-decanters and a small group of vigilantes who would take them down. By the award-winning author of Cloud Atlas. 200,000 first printing.

The Bone Clocks

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#hardcover #fiction  #adultfiction #literaryfiction #contemporary #novels #mystery Ex Library 

"A father searches for his addict son while grappling with his own choices as a parent (and as a user of sorts)"--

Eat Only When You're Hungry

085ad165-d40f-4db5-bec6-71f9aa46b265-1

#hardcover #booksintranslation #literaryfiction #majalunde #thehistoryofbees #fiction #clifi #climatechange #apocalypse #harpervia

From the author of the number-one international bestseller The History of Bees, a captivating story of the power of nature and the human spirit that explores the threat of a devastating worldwide drought, witnessed through the lives of a father, a daughter, and a woman who will risk her life to save the future. In 2019, seventy-year-old Signe sets sail alone on a hazardous voyage across the ocean in a sailboat. On board, a cargo that can change lives. Signe is haunted by memories of the love of her life, whom she'll meet again soon. In 2041, David and his young daughter, Lou, flee from a drought-stricken Southern Europe that has been ravaged by thirst and war. Separated from the rest of their family and desperate to find them, they discover an ancient sailboat in a dried-out garden, miles away from the nearest shore. Signe's sailboat. As David and Lou discover Signe's personal effects, her long ago journey becomes inexorably linked to their own. An evocative tale of the search for love and connection, The End of the Ocean is a profoundly moving father daughter story of survival and a clarion call for climate action.

The End of the Ocean

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#hardcover #frenchbraid #annetyler #familydrama #literaryfiction #adult 

A major new novel from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--a freshly observed, funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s up to our pandemic present. The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation. Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close--yet how unknowable--every family is to itself.

French Braid

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#paperback #fiction #historicalfiction #drama #oprah #literaryfiction #legal #thriller

Illinois

In the winter of 1981, trapped by unpassable roads, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes a life-altering decision when she performs an emergency cesarean section on a woman she fears has died of a stroke

Midwives

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Miranda Popkey

For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill--a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction Miranda Popkey's first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt--written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women--the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage--and careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Edgy, wry, shot through with rage and despair, Topics of Conversation introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.

Topics of Conversation

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Matthew Weiner

Florida

The explosive debut novel - about family, power and privilege - from the creator of the award-winning Mad Men. Named a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year Mark and Karen Breakstone have constructed the idyllic life of wealth and status they always wanted, made complete by their beautiful and extraordinary daughter Heather. But they are still not quite at the top. When the new owners of the penthouse above them begin construction, an unstable stranger penetrates the security of their comfortable lives and threatens to destroy everything they've created.

Heather, the Totality

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Kamila Shamsie

Never opened. Has some minor imperfections on the dust jacket, see photos

New Jersey

"A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces." --Madeline Miller

"A shining tour de force about a long friendship's respects, disrespects, loyalties and moralities." --Ali Smith 

From the acclaimed author of Home Fire, the moving and surprising story of a lifelong friendship and the forces that bring it to the breaking point

Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though--or maybe because--they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future.
 
Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences--and find out whether their friendship can survive.
 
Thought-provoking, compassionate, and full of unexpected turns, Best of Friends offers a riveting take on an age-old question: Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend?
 
 
 

Best of Friends

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Tom Rachman

Georgia

From the author of The Italian Teacher, this acclaimed debut novel set in Rome follows the topsy-turvy lives of the denizens of an English language newspaper. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • The Economist • NPR • Slate • The Christian Science Monitor • Financial Times • The Plain Dealer • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • The Globe and Mail • Publishers Weekly Look in the back of the book for a conversation between Tom Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper. As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions. Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

The Imperfectionists

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Elizabeth Strout

Washington

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind. “Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement.”—Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart. At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

Oh William!

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Arizona

Matrix

Yaa Gyasi

Slight wear to top corner of dust jacket, otherwise like new 

California

"A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice"--

Transcendent Kingdom

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From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

Call Me Zebra

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Susan Perabo

New York

When a middle school girl is abducted in broad daylight, a fellow student and witness to the crime copes with the tragedy in an unforgettable way. What happens to the girl left behind? A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. The minutes tick inexorably by, and Meredith lurches between comforting the sobbing Lisa and imagining her own impending death. Then the man orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith the girl left behind. After Lisa's abduction, Meredith spends most days in her room. As the community stages vigils and searches, Claire, Meredith's mother, is torn between relief that her daughter is alive, and helplessness over her inability to protect or even comfort her child.

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Sarah Langan

Good Neighbors

Kai Harris

What the Fireflies Knew

Simon Han

Nights When Nothing Happened

Jason Gurley

Eleanor

Pam Jenoff

The Lost Girls of Paris

Leila Meacham

Somerset

Leila Meacham

Tumbleweeds

Jenny Jackson

Pineapple Street

Susie Yang

White Ivy

Nina George

The Little French Bistro

David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks

Lindsay Hunter

Eat Only When You're Hungry

Maja Lunde; Diane Oatley (Translator)

The End of the Ocean

Anne Tyler

French Braid

Chris Bohjalian

Midwives

Miranda Popkey

Topics of Conversation

Matthew Weiner

Heather, the Totality

Kamila Shamsie

Best of Friends

Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists

Elizabeth Strout

Oh William!

Lauren Groff

Matrix

Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Call Me Zebra

Susan Perabo

The Fall of Lisa Bellow