A magnetic, stirring debut novel about an adrift young woman whose growing fascination with her boyfriend’s cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it. Katie is far from home and fresh out of college, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, and all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend James make decisions for them both. It doesn’t help that she’s no longer speaking to her mother. Or that her roommate has abruptly moved out of their New York City apartment. But when James takes Katie on vacation to his family’s seaside house, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and Katie discovers a sudden, strange, and giddy sense of connection. Silver doesn’t mind that Katie can’t seem to get a job, hold her own at dinner parties, or make amends with her mother. Silver, who gets to lie around all day, misbehave spectacularly, be cute, gross, and still get fed, seems to have the life Katie increasingly longs for. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack. Because if Katie has learned anything from her estranged mother, it’s that devotion comes at a price. As Katie’s affection for Silver deepens, all of her other relationships begin to falter. Soon, Katie must confront what it is she desires from her life, and what she might have to risk to get it. Both darkly playful and unexpectedly heartfelt, this debut from a major new voice in fiction is a timeless reckoning with the uncertainty of becoming a person in a world that is as disorienting as it is full of hope and promise.

Speak Still confronts colonial silencing by asking aloud: why do we, as speakers of English as a second language (ESL), feel estranged from the language, despite having known it since childhood? Taking the author’s bilingual experience in Hong Kong and the UK as a point of departure, the book reimagines a more inclusive sense of belonging for all through a fusing of personal narrative and cultural criticism, reclaiming silence as an interlocutor that interrupts cultural homogeneity, and opens up the time and space for subdued voices to be heard. Speak Still shows that this silence, indeed, speaks volumes.

Speak Still confronts colonial silencing by asking aloud: why do we, as speakers of English as a second language (ESL), feel estranged from the language, despite having known it since childhood? Taking the author’s bilingual experience in Hong Kong and the UK as a point of departure, the book reimagines a more inclusive sense of belonging for all through a fusing of personal narrative and cultural criticism, reclaiming silence as an interlocutor that interrupts cultural homogeneity, and opens up the time and space for subdued voices to be heard. Speak Still shows that this silence, indeed, speaks volumes.

Stevie cannot escape her mother. Abandoning college plans to work a dead-end job, her days are a purgatorial bore. Many dream of moving to L.A. and into the spotlight, but Stevie can't wait to move away from it - and her mother's orbit - to start over.Stevie's mother, Moon, is many an out-of-work actress, a recovering addict, whatever a mistress becomes when she's widowed, and a mother. Reeling in the aftermath of her lover and TV husband's death, Moon struggles to process her grief. And the last thing she expects is for Stevie to leave her too.Now, neither Stevie nor Moon can afford to quit each other. And their cost of living forces them into a glass-walled pool house in the backyard, while their home is rented out to pay the bills. But when Adam, Moon's former TV son and Stevie's forever crush, arrives for the funeral, the three are pulled into a messy orbit, moving back into the 'Big House' and play-acting a picture-perfect family even as tensions rise and relationships unravel.Pool House is a course charted through the wilderness of motherhood, a story about the challenges of navigating class, fame, burgeoning sexuality, and grief as two women grapple with what it means to grow up and grow older in Hollywood.

Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an almost archetypal status as a traveller, and his Travels is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1271, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown.

I have grown hungry. Grief no longer nourishes me. I will eat the wild.Whisper your prayers, light your candles, watch your steps, cherish your life, and— most importantly— never let the spirits hear your name.These were his mother's rules before she disappeared. And Kazuki followed them, even when his father was ripped apart by a malevolent spirit. When he decides to go in search of his mother, an encounter with a corrupted bear leaves him weak, wounded, and worst of all, tainted.With her rules and his father’s sword, he ventures north into the unknown. Demons, spirits, and gods all haunt his steps, and the closer he gets to the truth, the further from himself he becomes. His name forgotten.Can he find his mother, or will the wild consume him?