"When Maddy Donaldo, a homeless woman who has made a family of sorts in the dangerous spaces of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, witnesses the murder of a young homeless boy and is seen by the perpetrator, her relatively stable life is upended"--

In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son. Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door - an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter. Thanks...

THE PRICE OF SALT is the famous lesbian love story by Patricia Highsmith, written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The author became notorious due to the story's latent lesbian content and happy ending, the latter having been unprecedented in homosexual fiction. Highsmith recalled that the novel was inspired by a mysterious woman she happened across in a shop and briefly stalked. Because of the happy ending (or at least an ending with the possibility...

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount,...

"A coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old over the course of a single summer, as she tries to make sense of her new life with her estranged grandfather and sister after the death of her father and disappearance of her mother"-- 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...

Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege, having grown up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that is full-on gentrified, and getting more so with each passing year. She wasn't economically privileged herself, but her close childhood friendship with the daughter of wealthy tenants named Caroline, and the mere fact of living in a lovely neighborhood, close to her beloved Natural History Museum and just across the park...

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for....

Raymond Chance expatriates himself to Mexico after his marriage fails, he does eighteen months for Assault and Battery, and he's run over by a car in a Safeway parking lot. Ten years later he returns at the news of his ex-wife's death, hoping to rekindle something of a relationship with his one and only child, daughter Jen, now grown and living in Eugene, Oregon. But Jen, poisoned with hatred by her mother, she blows him off in no uncertain terms....

Told from the perspective of a high school girl and a football coach, Broken Field reveals the tensions that tear at the fabric of a small town when a high school hazing incident escalates and threatens a championship season. Set on the high prairies of Montana, in small towns scattered across vast landscapes, the distances in Broken Field are both insurmountable and deeply internalized. Life is dusty and hard, and men are judged by their labor. Women...