Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.The title of Maggie Smith’s new collection comes from the eponymous You ask what I’ll miss about this life. Everything but cruelty, I think. But you want one specific thing, so here—I’ll miss my body. I’ll miss its companionship, how it’s traveled with me, never leaving me—& by me, I mean my mind. my body hasn’t traveled with me. I’ve traveled inside it. Do I wear it, or does it carry me? Is the body a suit, or a suitcase? Within, poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers—and reconsiders—what it is to be Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience? Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds, and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable.

A dreamy debut novel about the summer love that changes two girls at the edge of adulthood. “In the heat and the green haze that seemed to surround us both like a physical presence, I felt intensely awake.” One afternoon at the start of summer, a teenage girl watches a new girl move in across the street. In Clara, she recognizes the same loneliness that she feels herself, but finds tenderness and laughter, too. Over hot, languid days spent talking and reading side by side in the garden, the narrator is awakened to the possibility of a true connection with another human being, free of the self-consciousness she feels with others. Meanwhile, in a distant fictional galaxy, Nadia the space explorer—the protagonist of a childhood book series beloved by both girls—traverses the known universe with her companion Rosa. Their imagined adventures make sense of new and powerful feelings. First Summer captures the innocence and agony of adolescence and the exquisite promise of love on the cusp of adulthood: a moment where fantasy is still vivid in the mind, even as adulthood looms. This story of the first summer of love echoes throughout the characters’ lives and will change them forever.

Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries. Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake. But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs. Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries. Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake. But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs. Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

A grandmother tells her granddaughter about her twisty, often surprising, journey to who she is now in this sweeping love story by USA Today bestselling author Jesse Q. Sutanto.Izzy Chen is dreading her family’s annual Chinese New Year celebration, where they all come together at a Michelin-starred restaurant to flaunt their status and successes in hopes to one up each other. So when her seventy-three-year-old glamorous and formidable grandmother walks in with a stunning woman on her arm and kisses her in front of everyone, it shakes Izzy to her core. She’d always considered herself the black sheep of the family for harboring similar feelings to the ones her Nainai just displayed.Seeing herself in her teenage granddaughter's struggles with identity and acceptance, Magnolia Chen tells Izzy her own story, of how as a teen she was sent by her Indo-Chinese parents from Jakarta to Los Angeles for her education and fell in love with someone completely forbidden to her by both culture and gender norms—Ellery, an American college student who became Magnolia's best friend and the love of her life. Stretching across decades and continents, Magnolia's star-crossed love story reveals how life can take unexpected turns but ultimately lead you to exactly who you're meant to be.

My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. The Orange and Other Poems provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling, and best-loved poets. In poems that go from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling—and being—in love to how to manage a painful break-up to cherishing the memories of people loved and lost, this is a collection to savour and share.

One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this big-hearted family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo. Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall. When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time. Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. The Orange and Other Poems provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling, and best-loved poets. In poems that go from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling—and being—in love to how to manage a painful break-up to cherishing the memories of people loved and lost, this is a collection to savour and share.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died comes a sad, funny, thrilling novel about sex, consumerism, class, desire, loneliness, the internet, rage, intimacy, power, and the (oftentimes misguided) lengths we’ll go to in order to get what we want. Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn’t? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does. Startlingly perceptive, mordantly funny, and keenly poignant, Half His Age is a rich character study of a yearning seventeen-year-old who disregards all obstacles—or attempts to overcome them—in her effort to be seen, to be desired, to be loved.