Literature & Fiction

A fresh-faced newcomer arrives in an isolated, gang-run town and soon finds herself taking a job nobody else wants: bodyguard to a ghoul. Not just your average mindless, half-rotted shuffler, though. Lucille is a dancer who can still put on her own lipstick and whose shows are half burlesque, half gladiator match. But the stranger is no stranger to this particular ghoul. Both women are undercover in their own way. And both have something to lose if their connection comes to light.

Born in Pevek, Russia, a decaying mining town, beautiful Vanessa Hathaway knew she was her family’s only hope for a bright future. Like a good daughter, she allowed her father to arrange her marriage to wealthy American industrialist Victor Clayton. The photos of Victor showcased a handsome man in his mid-40s. Vanessa steeled herself to fake happiness but in her heart she knew she could never love the dark-haired Texan.

When Tia meets Pacifique, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime love. They spend five wild days and nights together, and then Tia wakes up in the hospital with a collarbone broken in a bike accident—and no trace of Pacifique. Unable to convince anyone that Pacifique exists, Tia winds up in a psychiatric ward, forced to face the possibility that this perfect lover may be a figment of her imagination. While there, Tia meets Andrew, a contemplative man with schizophrenia, who falls in love with Tia. He, too, tells her to forget Pacifique. Who to believe? 

Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow is going undercover to infiltrate the gang, armed with a shotgun and a device that measures sorcerous energy. His job is to gain knowledge of Rook’s power and unlock its secrets. But there is someone else who has Rook in her sights: the Lady of Traps and Snares, a bloodthirsty Mayan goddess who will stop at nothing to satisfy her own desires. Caught between the good, the bad, and the unholy, Morrow will have to ride out a storm of magical mayhem to survive.

The flame of rebellion burns across the solar system in this dazzling conclusion to Linden A. Lewis’s stunning First Sister trilogy perfect for fans of Red Rising, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Expanse. 

In 1465 a simple pocketful of herbs could get you burned at the stake, but Luccia Alimenti, daughter of one of the legendary women doctors called Salernistas, travels Europe secretly distributing medical texts to midwives and herbalists. Despite dodging the Inquisition and battling the Plague with her beloved Irish godmother, Luccia finds love as well as heartbreak. Pushed to the edge, however, she must use her skill as an archer to rescue women being taken to the pyre.

Two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as “the capitalist” becomes a point of fixation, and “the news reports” filter through in fragments. 

When escort Ruby meets Mistress Media executive Yvonne in Vegas, she’s drawn to the beautiful but icy woman. So when Yvonne proposes a fake marriage with an irresistible payoff, Ruby can’t say no. But with their incandescent chemistry, how long will it take for business to turn into pleasure?

Four strangers and six weeks: This is all that separates Mara from one life-changing payday. She was surprised when reality TV producers came knocking and even more shocked to be cast in their new show, Civilization. Now she just has to live off the land with her fellow survivors for long enough to get the prize money. When the cast wakes one morning to find something has gone horribly wrong, fear ripples through the group. Are the producers giving them an extra challenge? Or are they wrapped up in something more dangerous?

There is plenty to distract Marie Santora when she comes home to lick her wounds after the end of her relationship. Not least of which is her sister Lisa’s plan to transform a rundown campground into a gay and lesbian paradise—complete with a five-star Italian restaurant—with the help of a contractor who just happens to be the woman who broke their brother’s heart.

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and disappointments.

Adam Binder has lost what matters most to him. Having finally learned the true identity of the warlock preying on his family, what was supposed to be a final confrontation with the fiend instead became a trap that sent Adam’s beloved Vicente into the realm of the dead, where none living are meant to be. Bound by debt, oath, and love, Adam blazes his own trail into the underworld to get Vicente back, and to end the threat of the warlock once and for all. But the road to hell is paved with far more than good intentions.

In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her "crybaby" younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself.

Having only recently ascended from your average nobody to what many would consider the pinnacle of humanity, the inexperienced Cat is overwhelmed, to say the least. She’s worried about how her girlfriend, Lucy, will react to the changes, and wonders whether she can use her newfound power and growing influence to care for her “kittens,” a group of orphans in her charge. Meanwhile, as if black-ops assassins and their corporate masters weren’t dangerous enough, the alien Antithesis have infiltrated the mining town of Black Bear. 

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in. When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever.