Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

Ellis Hope has one goal for his first year at college: be his own person. He’s determined to break free from his brother Elliot’s shadow, and get over the soul crushing attraction he has for his brother’s best friend. The campus meetup app provides an effective distraction from Gabe and Elliot making waves as the new star players for Huntston University’s baseball team.

Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds everyone, especially the eccentric side-show proprietor who commissioned it. Benny’s work earns him an invitation to join the show’s eclectic crew of performers—his first welcome in the city—and share in their astonishing secret: the tank Benny built is a cage for their newest exhibit, a living, breathing, in-the-flesh merman stolen from the banks of the East River under a gleaming full moon.

Beast has been disfigured in a fire, but he's covered his skin with tattoos to make sure no one mistakes his scars for weakness. The accident not only hurt his body, but damaged his soul and self-esteem, so he's wrapped himself in a tight cocoon of violence and mayhem where no one can reach him. Until one night, when he finds a young man covered in blood in their clubhouse. Sweet, innocent, and as beautiful as an angel fallen from heaven, Laurent pulls on all of Beast's heartstrings.

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries.

Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the dovecote that James has built for his prize racing pigeons.

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, counselor, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred. But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the violence with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and dreams she'd built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing.

In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that homosexuality, which is a crime at the time, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage, there is a third party: John has a lover, a working-class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry.

Daniel Mulligan is tough, snarky, and tattooed, hiding his self-consciousness behind sarcasm. Daniel has never fit in - not at home in Philadelphia with his auto mechanic father and brothers, and not at school where his Ivy League classmates looked down on him. Now, Daniel's relieved to have a job at a small college in Holiday, Northern Michigan, but he's a city boy through and through, and it's clear that this small town is one more place he won't fit in.

After losing her job and her fiancé and moving back from the city to live with her parents, Shell Pine needs some help. And according to the sign in the window, the florist shop in the mall does too. Shell gets the gig, and the flowers she works with there are just the thing she needs to cheer up. Or maybe it’s Neve, the beautiful shop manager, who is making her days so rosy? But you have to get your hands dirty if you want your garden to grow—and Neve’s secrets are as dark and dangerous as they come.

Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide - a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

The path to self-acceptance has always felt like an uphill battle for me. It's hard not to feel that way when the most important people in my life decided long ago they can't accept me as I am, that they don't want a gay son, a feminine son, a boy who likes pretty things. Caring for myself from a young age has come with a lot of hardships, but finding myself bruised, homeless, and sleeping in my car just about tops the list. Fortunately, the person I least expect offers to take me in and share his home with me.

My whole life, I’ve been taught to despise shifters. So when I’m hired to track two escaped convicts, I’m suddenly thrust into the world I hate - or thought I did. Yet I’m inexplicably drawn to the alpha of the pack, whose land the convicts may be hiding on. He’s different than any shifter I've ever met - laidback and quick to laugh, caring, and protective. As secrets are revealed, I start to wonder if everything I’ve been raised to believe was a lie, though it may not matter, because it seems like someone wants us dead.

The monstrous Void continues to ravage the Prime Kingdoms, leaving one of them in ruins. Dungeons everywhere run amok, and refugees from around the continent flee to find safety. In a desperate attempt to end the chaos, four heroes from the Adventurers' Guild scour the world for its final secrets. Fortunately, they won't fight alone. Their journey so far has earned them loyal allies, from stray bandits to lost peoples and even forgotten gods. The world itself has united against the encroaching Void. But when their opponent is the end of all things . . . that may not be enough.

Marry me for one year. Payment: $1.2 million. Hayden Somerset is convinced the ad is a joke, but he responds anyway because, hello, $1.2 million. He’s broke, living in a tiny apartment with two roommates, and exhausted from praying his ancient car survives just one more week. His skyrocketing rent and crushing student loans aren’t helping either. At this point, there isn’t much Hayden wouldn’t do for that kind of cash.

A Language of Limbs is a breathtaking spin on a will-they-won’t-they love story; it is a tender epic that explores the weight of a choice, the love of community, and how joy is found in even the darkest corners.

Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself.

Like many Overseas Filipino Workers, Mary Grace Concepcion has lived a life of sacrifices. First, she left her husband, Ale, to be a caregiver in Hong Kong. Now, she has travelled even farther, to Canada, in the hopes of one day sponsoring Ale and having children of their own. But when she arrives in Toronto, she must navigate a series of bewildering and careless employers and unruly children.

Elaine's mission through the fairy ring went horribly wrong, and she finds herself in Pallos once again—over 20,000 years in the future. All she has are her friends, her magic, and the clothes on her back. Fighting their way out of the wilderness, they quickly meet Iona, a wandering paladin of the Valkyrie order. She's heading to the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft, and Elaine joins her: To learn wizardry. To figure out her place in the world and where she wants to go next. To get her third class. To kiss cute women. To eat some tasty mangos. To read books, at long last.

Born Kathleen to an immigrant Irish farming family in southern Ontario, Kit McNair has been a troublesome changeling since, at ten, they fell through the river ice and drowned—only to be nursed back to life by their mother's Celtic magic. A daredevil in boy's clothes, Kit chafes at every aspect of a farmgirl's life, driving that same mother to distraction with worry about where Kit will ever fit in. When Rebekah Kromer, an elegant German-Canadian doctor's daughter, moves to town with her parents in April 1939, Rebekah has no doubt as to who 19-year-old Kit is.