It has been twenty years since the end of the war. The dictatorial Augurs—once thought of almost as gods—were overthrown and wiped out during the conflict, their much-feared powers mysteriously failing them. Those who had ruled under them, men and women with a lesser ability known as the Gift, avoided the Augurs' fate only by submitting themselves to the rebellion's Four Tenets. A representation of these laws is now written into the flesh of any who use the Gift, forcing those so marked into absolute obedience. As a student of the Gifted, Davian suffers the consequences of a war fought—and lost—before he was born. Despised by most beyond the school walls, he and those around him are all but prisoners as they attempt to learn control of the Gift. Worse, as Davian struggles with his lessons, he knows that there is further to fall if he cannot pass his final tests. But when Davian discovers he has the ability to wield the forbidden power of the Augurs, he sets into motion a chain of events that will change everything. To the north, an ancient enemy long thought defeated begins to stir. And to the west, a young man whose fate is intertwined with Davian’s wakes up in the forest, covered in blood and with no memory of who he is…

Fourth Wing meets The Hunger Games in this spicy, page-turning romantasy where humans and direwolves forge unbreakable bonds and fight for survival at all costs.  Only the worthy survive the Bonding Trials.  She’ll risk her life—and her heart—to be one of them.   Meryn Cooper has always hated the Bonded, elite warriors who form mental links with the massive, vicious direwolves they ride. While they live in luxury, Meryn struggles to keep her family out of poverty. When her little sister, Saela, is kidnapped—stolen across the border by the immortal monsters her country has spent centuries fighting—Meryn’s world falls apart.   Desperate to cross the front and save her sister, Meryn enlists in the army and is thrown into the deadly Bonding Trials, where any mistake will cost her life.     Now Meryn must survive four months of training at the castle. She is bound to a feral direwolf who refuses to communicate. The other trainees would love to spill her common blood. And her cold and beautiful instructor, Stark Therion, is eager to punish any weakness.   Everything is a competition, and everyone is out to get her—everyone except the dangerously handsome crown prince, whose attention adds another target to her back. In the castle, every smile hides a knife…and the halls hide dark secrets.   It’s bond or bleed. Duel or die. Failure is ruin.  Dire Bound contains mature content including depictions of graphic violence, and is therefore recommended for readers 17+. For a full list of tropes and TWs, please visit the author's website.   Readers are already falling in love with  “ONE OF THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR! This book was insanely good.” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐   “Stop it right now... I’m actually quite feral for the next book…” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐    “The plot was THICK, the tension and banter? Flawless. And the world with the wolf bond, and trials??? NEED MORE NOW.” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐“I just finished and still trying to mentally and emotionally recover to what just happened to me. You need to read it IMMEDIATELY.” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “If you’re into dark romantasy with high stakes, fierce characters, and just the right amount of emotional wreckage, Direbound is your next obsession.” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “What an incredible read!! … I am blown away. … The romance, the anguish, the BANTER! I love a book with good banter and this was FULL OF IT!” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I. Am. OBSESSED. … Left me spiraling in the best way possible. The morally grey anti-hero? Perfection. The slow-burn tension? Electric.

What will you sacrifice for the truth? Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation - a heinous web of cause and effect - that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes. Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa's urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late.Praise for Maria Ressa: Winner of the UNESCO Press Freedom Award 2021; Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2021 'A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us' Hillary Clinton 'Maria Ressa is 5ft 2in, but she stands taller than most in her pursuit of the truth' Amal Clooney 'Maria is a key voice ... she is so incredible in so many ways' Carole Cadwalladr

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now. Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, award-winning author Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a captivating narrative from testimony, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, reconstructing the incident and the lives behind the legendary song. This singularly original account pushes narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, but more importantly, it renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

A masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers. Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end? In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn't automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vanna. Vanna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vanna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don't speak a common language, Vanna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy. In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir's life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair--and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war – part of the Miraculous Generation – now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past, his family’s role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet was viewed over 10 million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse. This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.  It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,’ a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11. This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.

THE BRAND NEW DARK ROMANCE FROM THE AUTHOR OF TIKTOK SENSATION LIGHTS OUT. . .I wanted this woman, and I was a man who always got what he wanted. Nico 'Junior' Trocci knows Lauren Marchetti is off limits. She is sweetness and laughter, whereas Junior exists in a world of violence and depravity. Men like him don't get to have women like her. It's why he pushed her away back in high school and has kept his distance ever since. But when Junior looks Lauren up online, he discovers the shy, bookish girl he remembers is gone. In her place is a strikingly beautiful woman whose social media is filled with scantily clad pictures of herself and a connection to a nearby play club. Junior's innocent curiosity quickly turns into a dark obsession. But watching Lauren from a distance isn't enough; he needs to make her his.He's ruthless; a walking red flag. Good thing red is my favorite color. Lauren is intrigued by the mystery man who keeps showing up at her club, who tempts her white-hot desires. But as their flirty online messages stir up a deeper form of connection, Lauren worries she's developing real feelings for this brooding stranger. As their combined desire ratchets up to a breaking point, who will seduce who? And will they survive the fall?Caught Up is a fast-paced dark romance with a morally grey male lead. Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to readers. Please check the content warning at the beginning of the book.

From one of the world’s most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that US power poses to humanity’s futureThe land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of “spreading democracy” — except wreak havoc in country after country and establish a reckless foreign policy that served the interest of few and endangered all too many? Without, ironically, making Americans any safer. In this timely book, Noam Chomsky, one of the most widely known intellectuals of all time, and his fellow political commentator Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace America’s pursuit of global domination, offering an incisive critique of the self-serving myths they continue to push.Offering penetrating accounts of Washington’s relationship with the Global South, its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they argue, they are now driving us closer to wars with Russia and China that imperil humanity’s future. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions Noam Chomsky has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism.

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans. America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the fantastic tale of slaves that spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and negro spirituals. It is a sugarcoated legend based on an almost true story. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF. 

Perry Firekeeper-Birch was ready for her Summer of Slack but instead, after a fender bender that was entirely not her fault, she’s stuck working to pay back her Auntie Daunis for repairs to the Jeep. Thankfully she has the other outcasts of the summer program, Team Misfit Toys, and even her twin sister Pauline. Together they ace obstacle courses, plan vigils for missing women in the community, and make sure summer doesn’t feel so lost after all. But when she attends a meeting at a local university, Perry learns about the “Warrior Girl”, an ancestor whose bones and knife are stored in the museum archives, and everything changes. Perry has to return Warrior Girl to her tribe. Determined to help, she learns all she can about NAGPRA, the federal law that allows tribes to request the return of ancestral remains and sacred items. The university has been using legal loopholes to hold onto Warrior Girl and twelve other Anishinaabe ancestors’ remains, and Perry and the Misfits won’t let it go on any longer. Using all of their skills and resources, the Misfits realize a heist is the only way to bring back the stolen artifacts and remains for good. But there is more to this repatriation than meets the eye as more women disappear and Pauline’s perfectionism takes a turn for the worse. As secrets and mysteries unfurl, Perry and the Misfits must fight to find a way to make things right – for the ancestors and for their community.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. Montgomery, Alabama 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn down one-room cabin, she’s shocked to learn that her new patients are children—just 11 and 13 years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica and their family into her heart. Until one day, she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened and nothing will ever be the same for any of them. Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten.That must not be forgotten. Because history repeats what we don’t remember.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk” city of “old traditions and new machinery,” but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream. He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

From RuPaul’s Drag Race winner and host of HBO’s We’re Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and music. In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way—by following in the footsteps of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Harriet wants to put on a show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed by a rival at the BET Awards. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have one week to write a Broadway caliber musical she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only mount a show that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future. Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).

NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements, told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.Black-Owned celebrates small businesses and their role in community building—and in liberation. Journalist Char Adams reports on how Black bookstores have always been centerpieces of resistance. This is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. The first Black-owned bookstore was opened by an abolitionist in 1834. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X would deliver speeches at the doorstep of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem, a place dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Soon many bookstores became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike.Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstore and Maya Angelou even became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. Now a new generation of Black activists are joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles. And several stores made national headlines in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today finds Black-owned bookshops in a position of strength—and as Adams will make clear, in an era of increasing division, their presence is needed now more than ever.Populated by vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.