The Polite Act of Drowning by Charleen Hurtubise (paperback July 2024)
£9.99
An atmospheric, emotional coming-of-age novel with themes of generational trauma, sexual identity and coping with mental illness at its heart, as well as the silence of women drowning in plain view in their daily lives.
Michigan, 1985. The drowning of a teenage girl causes ripples in the small town of Kettle Lake, though for most the waters settle quickly. For sixteen year old Joanne Kennedy, however, the tragedy dredges up untold secrets and causes her mother to drift farther from reality and her family. When troubled newcomer Lucinda arrives in town, she offers Joanne a chance of real friendship, and together the teenagers push against the boundaries of family, self-image, and their sexuality during the tension of a long, stifling summer. But the undercurrents of past harms continuously threaten to drag Joanne and those around her under...
If you enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen you will like this.
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Tell Me Everything- Elizabeth Stroud ( hardback Sept 2024)
£14.99
It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been.
Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, TELL ME EVERYTHING is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat.
QUEER ROMANCE : Anyone's Ghost, and I Will Greet the Sun Again ( August 2024)
£16.99
Anyone's Ghost: August Thompson
Set over twenty years, August Thompson's debut Anyone’s Ghost will break your heart. It took three car crashes to kill Jake. The lonely life of fifteen-year-old Theron David Alden is transformed when he meets Jake. Older, cooler, more confident and startlingly beautiful, Jake likes the same bands, the same drugs, and has the same drive to oblivion. Over the course of two decades, Theron and Jake get high, drift apart, and are brought hurtling back together, until a final collision tears them apart forever. Theron wants Jake, and he wants to be Jake. But is Jake brave enough to want him back?
I Will Greet the Sun Again, Khashayar J. Khabushani
Three young brothers leave Los Angeles in the dead of night for Iran, taken by their father from their mother to a country and an ancestral home they barely recognize.
They return to the Valley months later, spit back into American life and changed in inexorable ways. Under the dazzling light of the California sun, our protagonist, the youngest brother, begins to piece together a childhood shattered by his father's violence, a queer adolescence marked by a shy, secret love affair with a boy he meets on the basketball court, and his ever-changing status as a Muslim in America at the turn of the new millennium.
Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner ( hardback July 2024)
£20.00
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble comes a darkly exhilarating novel about an American family and its inheritance - the safety and wealth that they fought for, and the precarity of their survival that is their legacy. In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island.
He is brutalised, held for ransom and then returned to his family. Miraculously, Carl, his wife and his three kids are left to move on with their lives, and resume their prized places in the ongoing saga of the American dream. But nearly forty years later, when Carl's mother dies, the trauma that has been bubbling beneath the Fletchers' lives all this time surfaces at last.
It becomes apparent that Carl has been quietly pursuing closure to the kidnapping for all these years, and his wife and children must face that the money that they believed bought them safety was actually never capable of doing any such thing. Long Island Compromise spans generations, winding through decades of history all the way through to the wild present, dealing along the way with all the mainstays of American Jewish life and the timeless questions about wealth, trauma, and the American soul.
Too many good reviews to copy!
Evil Eye, Etaf Rum ( paperback August 2024)
£9.99
The powerful and poignant novel from the author of the much-loved A Woman is No Man.
Raised in a conservative Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur. Now, she has a good job at the local college, and balances that with raising her two daughters and taking care of their home. Yara knows that her life is more rewarding than her mother’s – so why doesn’t it feel like enough? After Yara responds to a colleague’s racist provocation, she is put on probation at work and must attend mandatory counselling.
Her mother blames a family curse for Yara’s troubles, and while Yara doesn’t believe in superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy about falling victim to the same mistakes as her mother. Yara’s carefully constructed world begins to implode and suddenly she must face up to the difficulties of her childhood, not fully realising how that will impact not just her own future, but that of her daughters too. * * * Praise for Etaf Rum: ‘A love letter to storytelling’ New York Times ‘Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns … a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice’ Refinery
