Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

A Novel

INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE * A remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing--the story of three generations of women on an unlikely journey to a Croatian island and a secret that needs to be told--from the internationally best-selling author of To the End of the Land
 
"A magnificent book ... The way Grossman writes about these regions is unique, with a deep understanding of our experience." --Josip Mlakić, Express (Croatia)

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili--abandoned by Nina when she was just three--has always been close to her grandmother.
 
With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey--filtered through the lens of Gili's camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life--lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.
 
More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman's longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok ("the Adriatic Alcatraz"). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman's fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world. 

More Than I Love My Life

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Patricio Pron

Mara Faye Lethem

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Florida

From the acclaimed Argentine writer, one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists: a bold, ambitious new novel about how art became politics and politics became crime during the cataclysm of the Second World War. Pinerolo, Italy; April 1945. At a conference in support of Fascism, a writer disappears and is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Thirty years later, a young man--a political activist or a terrorist, depending on your perspective--interviews survivors from the conference, to try to uncover the truth about what happened and its consequences. Who was the writer? What did he believe in? Why, shortly before his death, did he save a man who could have killed him? Where is his lost work? And what does any of this have to do with a teenager in contemporary Milan involved in a violent confrontation with the police? Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is a razor-sharp, completely original exploration of our most timeless concerns--guilt, betrayal, the legacy of earlier generations--and probes the question of what literature is: how it explains our times and irrevocably changes our lives.

Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

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Lisa Harding

South Carolina

"Shocking--and shockingly good. It is thought-provoking, anger-provoking, guilt-provoking, and--most importantly--it is a brilliantly written novel."--Roddy Doyle 

Thrown together by a harrowing twist of fate, two girls will find hope and redemption in friendship in this award-winning, emotional gut punch of a novel from the author of Bright Burning Things.

Sassy, streetwise Sammy is a teenage girl who is falling through the cracks. Neglected by an alcoholic mother, the problems she endures at school and home lead her into the hands of adults who don't have her best interests in mind. Failed by them at every turn, Sammy acts out, seeking attention from boys, then men, when what she wants most is protection.

Meanwhile, in a small village in Eastern Europe, preternaturally beautiful and naïve Nico is about to turn thirteen and as her family falls upon desperate times, her father is approached to marry her off. Her family knows that the nice life this stranger seems to be offering Nico is too good to be true, but they and Nico hope for the best as she's shuttled across the border into Ireland, where she and Sammy find one another in their new home, a suburban brothel.

As Nico and Sammy journey into this dark underbelly and out the other side, their friendship--and the unexpected acts of kindness they give and receive--form a potent bond.

Heartbreaking and breathtakingly beautiful, Cloud Girls exposes the failings of polite society and the cruelty that exists beneath its surface, yet reminds us that goodness and love can flourish in the darkest times.

Cloud Girls

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Arkansas

Aves del mismo Plumaje

Birds of a Feather

Georgia

This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in the Japan: “Pressingly real . . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us” (Japan Times). Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own. Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including the female body, the roles women are assigned by society, and the bullying and social pressures that leave young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.

So We Look to the Sky

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#paperback #suspense #fiction #erotic #france #shortread #intranslation #translated 

Mississippi

"Fascinating . . . Adèle has glanced at the covenant of modern womanhood--the idea that you can have it all or should at least die trying--and detonated it." --The New York Times Book Review "[A] fierce, uncanny thunderbolt of a book." --Entertainment Weekly From the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny--one of the 10 Best Books of the Year of The New York Times Book Review--as well as Sex and Lies and In the Country of Others, her prizewinning novel about a sex-addicted woman in Paris She wants only one thing: to be wanted. Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. Suspenseful, erotic, and electrically charged, Adèle is a captivating exploration of addiction, sexuality, and one woman's quest to feel alive.

Adèle

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Gaëlle Josse

Natasha Lehrer

Iowa

New York, November 3, 1954: The last immigration officer of Ellis Island looks back at 45 years as gatekeeper to America.

The Last Days of Ellis Island

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#paperback #shortstories #french #translated 

Alaska

At once wickedly funny and unexpectedly touching, Marie Desplechin's debut collection of stories explores life and love in contemporary Paris. Here are the trials and tribulations of sex in the city, as - with alarming frequency - her heroines' affairs fail to measure up to their expectations. They're not asking for much: but how much is too much? How long should they wait? And what should they do in the meantime? Sweet, sharp and unsentimental, Desplechin's stories capture eight unlikely moments of truth.

Taking It to Heart

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Rin Usami

Asa Yoneda

New York

A DECEMBER INDIE NEXT PICK!

"Haunting and sincere, Idol, Burning subverts and astonishes. Rin Usami balances humor, obsession, heartbreak, and sacrifice in her debut, crafting a story that's both enveloping and expansive. Usami's writing is thrilling and deft, and her novel illuminates the shadows cloaking our digital lives, leaving us with honesty and grace in equal measures. Idol, Burning is a barnburner and a prayer and a testament to the lengths that we'll go to reach for our dreams."--Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

The novel that lit the Japanese publishing world on fire: From a breathtaking up-and-coming writer, a twenty-first century Catcher in the Rye that brilliantly explores toxic fandom, social media, and alienated adolescence.

Akari is a high school student obsessed with "oshi" Masaki Ueno, a member of the popular J-Pop group Maza Maza. She writes a blog devoted to him, and spends hours addictively scrolling for information about him and his life. Desperate to analyze and understand him, Akari hopes to eventually see the world through his eyes. It is a devotion that borders on the religious: Masaki is her savior, her backbone, someone she believes she cannot survive without--even though she's never actually met him.

When rumors surface that her idol assaulted a female fan, social media explodes. Akari immediately begins sifting through everything she can find about the scandal, and shares every detail to her blog--including Masaki's denials and pleas to his fans--drawing numerous readers eager for her updates.

But the organized, knowledgeable persona Akari presents online is totally different from the socially awkward, unfocused teenager she is in real life. As Masaki's situation spirals, his troubles threaten to tear apart her life too. Instead of finding a way to break free to save herself, Akari becomes even more fanatical about Masaki, still believing her idol is the only person who understands her.

A blistering novel of fame, disconnection, obsession, and disillusion by a young writer not much older than the novel's heroine, Idol, Burning shines a white-hot spotlight on fandom and "stan" culture, the money-making schemes of the pop idol industry, the seductive power of social media, and the powerful emotional void that opens when an idol falls from grace, only to become a real--and very flawed--person.

Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda.

Idol, Burning

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Bernhard Schlink

Charlotte Collins

"Two world wars and the passage of more than a century do not overshadow [Bernhard Schlink's] story of lovers who never fully belong to each other, just as they never fully belonged to the world."--Booklist

"A brilliant novel about history and the nature of memory."--Evening Standard

A sweeping novel of love and passion from author of the international bestseller The Reader about a woman out of step with her time, whose life is witness to some of the most tumultuous events of modern age.

Abandoned by her parents, young Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village in the early years of the twentieth century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against ingrained chauvinism to find her place in a world run by lesser men.

When Olga falls in love with her neighbor, Herbert, the son of a local aristocrat, her life is irremediably changed. While Herbert indulges his thirst for exploration and adventure, Olga is limited by her gender and circumstance. Her love for Herbert goes against all odds and encounters many obstacles, but even when they are separated, it endures

Unfolding across decades--from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century--and across continents--from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west--Olga is an epic romance, and a wrenching tale of a woman's devotion to a restless man in an age of constant change. Though Olga exists in the shadows of others, she pursues life to the fullest and her magnetic presence shines--revealing a woman complex, fascinating, and unforgettable.

 Told in three distinct parts, brilliantly shifting from different points of view and narrative formats, Bernhard Schlink's magnificent novel is a rich, full portrait of a singular woman and her world.

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins 

Olga

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Ao Omae

Emily Balistrieri

Massachusetts

Stories

A fresh, thoughtful, and always surprising short story collection from a rising young star in the world of Japanese literature.

Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men.

In the title story, Nanamori and Mugito, two university students appalled by society's gendered roles, rebel. Refusing to interact with other people they use stuffed toys for emotional support. Unlike Nanamori and Mugito, their fellow plushie society member Shiraki does not talk to plushies. Pragmatic, she accepts the status quo that boys sometimes make nasty jokes; she believes their behavior resembles the real world.

In "Realizing Fun Things Through Water," a young woman named Hatsuoka must contend with a mother-in-law who swears by cancer-preventing "hyper-organization" water, and a sister who writes fake news for a living. "Bath Towel Visuals" illuminates the mental cost of not just laughing along at mean humor, while "Hello, Thank You I'm Okay" follows a family's response when their shut-in son announces he wants to throw himself a birthday party.

Written in brisk and gentle prose, Ao Omae's stories capture the subtleties and complexities of his characters' inner world, individuals struggling to conform in an inflexible society little tolerant of difference. These stories, sometimes comical, sometimes bittersweet, and always thought-provoking, speak to the pain and desires of all who embrace nuance, repudiate traditional sex roles, and long for a gentler and more tolerant world.

People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice

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Gaston Leroux

Pennsylvania

The novel that inspired the Lon Chaney film and the hit musical. "The wildest and most fantastic of tales."--New York Times Book Review.

The Phantom of the Opera

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Maria Gainza

Thomas Bunstead

Puerto Rico

New York Times Notable author María Gainza, who dazzled critics with Optic Nerve, returns with the captivating story of an auction house employee on the trail of an enigmatic master forger. In the Buenos Aires art world, a master forger has achieved legendary status. Rumored to be a woman, she specializes in canvases by the painter Mariette Lydis, a portraitist of Argentinean high society. But who is this absurdly gifted creator of counterfeits? What motivates her? And what is her link to the community of artists who congregate, night after night, in a strange establishment called the Hotel Melancólico? On the trail of this mysterious forger is our narrator, an art critic and auction house employee through whose hands counterfeit works have passed. As she begins to take on the role of art-world detective, adopting her own methods of deception and manipulation, she warns us “not to proceed in expectation of names, numbers or dates . . . My techniques are those of the impressionist.” Driven by obsession and full of subtle surprise, Portrait of an Unknown Lady is a highly seductive and enveloping meditation on what we mean by "authenticity" in art, and a captivating exploration of the gap between what is lived and what is told.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

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Leila Slimani

Sam Taylor

Virginia

A bored socialite becomes a cunning amateur sleuth in this wildly entertaining, Agatha Christie¬inspired mystery of murder and mayhem set in nineteenth-century Poland¶"An ingenious marriage of comedy and crime."--Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate and author of the Man Booker International Prize winner Flights¶ Cracow, 1893: Zofia Turbotynska--professor's wife, socialite, and bored homemaker--has little more to do than plan a charity auction sponsored by the wealthy residents of a local nursing home and the nuns who work there. But when one of those residents is found dead, Zofia finds a calling: solving crime. Ridiculed by the police, who have declared the deaths of natural cause, she starts her own murder investigation, unbeknownst to anyone but her loyal cook Franciszka and one reluctant nun. With her husband blissfully unaware of her secret, Zofia remakes herself into one the most surprising, and maybe even effective, detectives combing the city streets. But what will it take for her to find the killer. . .before she becomes the next victim?

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing

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 #hardcover #fiction #Hummingbird #thehummingbirdbook #epistolaryfiction #psychologicalfiction #familysagafiction

Illinois

"The Hummingbird is a remarkable accomplishment, a true gift to the world." --Michael Cunningham "Long considered one of Italy's leading writers, Sandro Veronesi has re-written the family saga. Ardent, gripping, and inventive to the core, it has already been hailed a classic."--Jhumpa Lahiri The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy.--Ian McEwan The #1 international sensation from a master of European literature--winner of Italy's Premio Strega--a saga of a Florentine family from the 1960s to the present that brilliantly captures the power of history and the multi-faceted experience of life itself as it explores how we contend with uncontrollable forces that both buffet and buoy us. Marco Carrera is "the hummingbird," a man with an almost supernatural ability to remain still amid the chaos of an ever-changing world. Though his life is rife with emotional challenges--suffering the death of his sister and the absence of his brother; caring for his elderly parents; raising his granddaughter when her mother, Marco's own child, is no longer capable; loving an enigmatic woman--Marco carries on with a noble stoicism that belies an intensity for living. As the years pass and the arc of his life bends, Marco finds himself filled with joy for the future as the baton passes from him to the next generation. A beautiful and compelling journey through time told in myriad narrative styles, The Hummingbird is a story of suffering, happiness, loss, love, and hope--of a man who embodies the quiet heroism that defines daily life for countless ordinary folk. A thrilling novel about the need to look to the future with hope and live with intensity to the very end, Sandro Veronesi's masterpiece--eminently readable, rich in insight, and filled with interesting twists and revelations--is a portrait of human existence, the vicissitudes and vagaries that propel and ultimately define us Translated from the Italian by Elena Pala A great novel, vibrating with life and death, happiness and pain, nostalgia and hope for the future. --Vanity Fair

The Hummingbird

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Connecticut

Jorn Lier Horst

North Carolina

A William Wisting Mystery

Tense and suspenseful, the only reason to stop racing through the pages of Jorn Lier Horst'sOrdealwill be to pause for a quick glance over your shoulder...

"The best Scandinavian crime fiction available." - Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Frank Mandt died after a fall down his basement steps, the same basement that holds a locked safe bolted to the floor. His granddaughter, Sofie Lund, inherits the house but wants nothing to do with his money. She believes the old man let her mother die in jail and is bitterly resentful.

Line Wisting's journalist instincts lead her into friendship with Sofie, and Line is with her when the safe is opened. What they discover unlocks another case and leads Chief Inspector William Wisting on a trial of murder to an ordeal that will eventually separate the innocent from the damned.

Ordeal

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Sandro Veronesi

Elena Pala

Texas

Julia Navarro

Andrew Hurley

Ex library copy. See photos. Clean and no markings. Thank you for supporting our non-profit choir and supporting the voices of women and girls!

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Minnesota

Available for the first time in English, this compelling new novel from the internationally bestselling author of "The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud" combines past and present in a riveting search for the source of Genesis itself.

The Bible of Clay

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Violaine Huisman

Leslie Camhi

"Beautiful and charismatic, Catherine, a.k.a. 'Maman, ' smokes too much, drives too fast, laughs too hard, and loves too extravagantly. During a joyful and chaotic childhood in Paris, her daughter Violaine wouldn't have it any other way. But when Maman is hospitalized after a third divorce and a breakdown, everything changes. As the story of Catherine's own traumatic childhood and adolescence unfolds, the pieces come together to form an indelible portrait of a mother as irresistible as she is impossible, as triumphant as she is transgressive"--Publisher's description.

The Book of Mother

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Zhou Haohui

Zac Haluza

Ohio

An elite police squad hunts a manipulative mastermind out to publically execute criminals the law cannot reach. A wild thriller and deadly game of cat-and-mouse from one of China's most popular authors. For fans of Jo Nesbo, Se7en, and Hong Kong police cinema. The brutal murder of respected police officer Sergeant Zheng Haoming sends shock waves through Chengdu, a modern metropolis in the heart of China's stunning Sichuan province. He had been obsessed by an unsolved, eighteen-year-old murder case until an entity calling itself Eumenides (after the Greek goddess of vengeance and retribution) releases a terrifying manifesto. Is the manifesto a sick joke, or something more sinister? Soon, the public starts nominating worthy targets for Eumenides to kill, and, two days later, Sergeant Zheng is dead. Eumenides' cunning game is only getting started. The police receive a "death notice," a chilling note announcing the the killer's next target, the crimes they have committed, and the date of their execution. The note is both a challenge and a taunt to the police. When the first victim dies in public, under their complete protection, the police are left stunned. More death notices are coming. The chase is on. Death Notice is an explosive, page-turning thriller filtered through a vibrant cultural lens. Zhou Haohui expertly adds an exhilarating new perspective to the twists and tropes of the genre all fans love, making for a uniquely propulsive and entertaining read.

Death Notice

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David Grossman; Jessica Cohen (Translator)

More Than I Love My Life

Patricio Pron; Mara Faye Lethem

Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

Lisa Harding

Cloud Girls

Sita Singh

Birds of a Feather

Misumi Kubo

So We Look to the Sky

Leila Slimani

Adèle

Gaëlle Josse; Natasha Lehrer

The Last Days of Ellis Island

Marie Desplechin; Will Hobson (Translator)

Taking It to Heart

Lisa Harding

Cloud Girls

Rin Usami; Asa Yoneda

Idol, Burning

Bernhard Schlink; Charlotte Collins

Olga

Ao Omae; Emily Balistrieri

People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice

Gaston Leroux

The Phantom of the Opera

Maria Gainza; Thomas Bunstead

Portrait of an Unknown Lady

Leila Slimani; Sam Taylor

Adèle

Maryla Szymiczkowa

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing

Sandro Veronesi; Elena Pala (Translator)

The Hummingbird

Leila Slimani; Sam Taylor

Adèle

Jorn Lier Horst

Ordeal

Sandro Veronesi; Elena Pala

The Hummingbird

Julia Navarro; Andrew Hurley

The Bible of Clay

Violaine Huisman; Leslie Camhi

The Book of Mother

Zhou Haohui; Zac Haluza

Death Notice

Sandro Veronesi; Elena Pala

The Hummingbird