Salt England

The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale.

Trunks packed with potions and cures, Jane Aire sets out on a crisp, clear morning in October to face the greatest challenge of her sheltered girls’-school existence. A shadow lies over Thornfield Hall and its reclusive master, Edward Rochester. And he’s hired her only as a last resort. Jane stumbles again and again as she tries to establish a rapport with her prickly new employer, but he becomes the least of her worries as a mysterious force seems to work against her.

On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.

In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates’. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond.

In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet.

Salt of the Earth is the true story of a courageous woman who survived a hellish twentieth century nightmare. Mob violence, injustice, kidnapping, murder and suicide were the black holes in the awful astronomy of Elaine Gere’s life. Somehow, she had to summon the courage to endure: to honor her beloved dead and to rebuild the shattered lives of the sons who depended on her strength.

From that first salty, viscous connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in Northern England, the one constant in Lucy’s life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her lessons in womanhood shape Lucy’s appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, maybe reckless life.

Marine biologist and former government agent Doc Ford is sure he's beyond the point of being surprised by his longtime pal Tomlinson's madcap tales of his misspent youth. But he's stunned anew when avowed bachelor Tomlinson reveals that as a younger man strapped for cash, he'd unwittingly fathered multiple children via for-profit sperm bank donations. Thanks to genealogy websites, Tomlinson's now-grown offspring have tracked him down, seeking answers about their roots...but Doc quickly grows suspicious that one of them might be planning something far more nefarious.

Theo, star pilot wannabe and troubled misfit has been accepted, against all her expectations, to Anlingdin. It’s the Hogwarts of star piloting academies, and Theo has been selected to train there with the best-of-the-best. Even better - she can finally leave behind the gawky, misfit days of teenage angst her previous life so complicated before. Great Liaden star pilots are born with a bang and not a whimper - and Theo has set a course to graduate from misfit to genuine maverick.

West Finch is one hurricane away from falling into the sea. Yet 16-year-old Harlow Prout is determined to save her small Maine hometown. If only she could stop getting in her own way and find someone - anyone - willing to help. But her best friend, Ellis MacQueen, “fixes” problems by running away from them - including his broken relationship with his twin brother, Tommy. And Tommy’s depression has hit a new low, so he’s not up for fixing anything. In the wake of the town’s latest devastating storm, Tommy goes out for a swim that he doesn’t intend to survive.