Now back in print — Maritta Wolff's 1941 masterpiece about small-town Midwestern life in post-Depression America. Whistle Stop, published to rave reviews and astonishing commercial success, is the story of the Veech family, an oversize, poverty-stricken tribe trying to make good in a cruel world. Through the course of a punishingly hot summer, we experience life with the six children and three adult Veeches as they bicker, brawl, make up, and provide titillating morsels of scandal for the neighborhood. A work of darkly comic grotesque, replete with shades of Flannery O'Connor, Whistle Stop is also a wrenching and earnest rumination on the tragedy of thwarted love.

It is June 21, the longest day of the year, and the life of new mother Camilla is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop off her infant daughter at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note. Then it starts. Breaking news: A hostage situation is developing in London. The police tell her Luke is involved—but he isn't a hostage. Her husband—doting father, eternal optimist—is the gunman.

It is June 21, the longest day of the year, and the life of new mother Camilla is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop off her infant daughter at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note. Then it starts. Breaking news: A hostage situation is developing in London. The police tell her Luke is involved—but he isn't a hostage. Her husband—doting father, eternal optimist—is the gunman.

Four obsessed women kidnap a K-Pop idol with unexpected and devastating results in this chilling, thought-provoking literary thriller that blends the dark impulsions of Butter with the ratcheting tension of Misery. Four wildly different women are consumed by Yosep, a dreamy twenty-one-year-old K-pop idol known as “the boy.” Ahna, a woman in her forties, first sought the company of younger men to quell the loneliness she experienced accompanying her husband on his trips abroad. When an affluent friend introduces her to the boy and she sees him on television, Ahna joins his cultish fandom. She soon bonds with Mihee, a beautiful, socially isolated woman in her twenties, who also worships the boy, and they eventually meet two other Nami, a young shaman, and Heeae, who worked as a maid for Ahna’s family and is Yosep’s birth mother. Heeae gave her son up for adoption to ensure him a better life but yearns to be reunited. Fierce and unapologetic, each woman has her own reason for wanting Yosep—a yawning desperation that spawns a dangerous plan. After taking the young singer hostage at a mansion in the mountains of South Korea’s Gangwon Province, Ahna, Yosep, Mihee, Nami, and Heeae will go to extreme lengths to keep him there, no matter how coercive—or murderous—the means. But the fervency that united this formidable team begins to fracture them, igniting a holy war over that sets each woman against the other. Who will emerge the victor? And just how far will she go to win the boy for herself? A probing, psychological novel as thrilling as a rollercoaster ride, told in exquisite, breathtaking prose, Holy Boy is a subversive, intricately plotted novel that explores the perils of objectification, the dark undercurrents of female desire, and the precarity of love. Translated from the Korean by Joheun Lee