"Girls like you aren't exactly welcomed at a place like this, so keep your head down and look the other way." Those were the exact words of my social worker when she dropped me in my newest hellhole, a place for "troubled teens". I didn't listen, and now I'm on their radar. They expect me to play along in their games of hierarchy, to fall in line in the social order they've deemed me fit. Too bad for them, I don't follow rules. Too bad for me, they're determined to make sure I do. Inconceivably attractive and treated like kings...these are the boys of Brayshaw High. And I'm the girl who got in their way.

"Girls like you aren't exactly welcomed at a place like this, so keep your head down and look the other way." Those were the exact words of my social worker when she dropped me in my newest hellhole, a place for "troubled teens". I didn't listen, and now I'm on their radar. They expect me to play along in their games of hierarchy, to fall in line in the social order they've deemed me fit. Too bad for them, I don't follow rules. Too bad for me, they're determined to make sure I do. Inconceivably attractive and treated like kings...these are the boys of Brayshaw High. And I'm the girl who got in their way.

She is the very thing he’s spent his whole life hunting. He is the very thing she’s spent her whole life pretending to be. Only the extraordinary belong in the kingdom of Ilya—the exceptional, the empowered, the Elites. The powers these Elites have possessed for decades were graciously gifted to them by the Plague, though not all were fortunate enough to both survive the sickness and reap the reward. Those born Ordinary are just that—ordinary. And when the king decreed that all Ordinaries be banished in order to preserve his Elite society, lacking an ability suddenly became a crime—making Paedyn Gray a felon by fate and a thief by necessity. Surviving in the slums as an Ordinary is no simple task, and Paedyn knows this better than most. Having been trained by her father to be overly observant since she was a child, Paedyn poses as a Psychic in the crowded city, blending in with the Elites as best she can in order to stay alive and out of trouble. Easier said than done. When Paeydn unsuspectingly saves one of Ilyas princes, she finds herself thrown into the Purging Trials. The brutal competition exists to showcase the Elites’ powers—the very thing Paedyn lacks. If the Trials and the opponents within them don’t kill her, the prince she’s fighting feelings for certainly will if he discovers what she is—completely Ordinary.

Do not touch the sword.Do not turn the key.Do not open the gate.In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn’t much a girl wouldn’t do for a glass of water.Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember.But a secret is like a knot.Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone.When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares…but it turns out they’re real, and Saeris has landed herself right in the middle of a centuries-long conflict that might just get her killed.The first of her kind to tread the frozen mountains of Yvelia in over a thousand years, Saeris mistakenly binds herself to Kingfisher, a handsome Fae warrior, who has secrets and nefarious agendas of his own. He will use her Alchemist’s magic to protect his people, no matter what it costs him… or her.Death has a name.It is Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate.His past is murky.His attitude stinks.And he’s the only way Saeris is going to make it home. Be careful of the deals you make, dear child.The devil is in the details...N.B. Quicksilver contains depictions of graphic violence/adult situations and is therefore recommended for readers 17+. For a full list of tropes and TWs, please visit the author's website.

I had my whole life planned out... until I met a hockey player obsessed with breaking all of my rules. My 5 simple rules for hooking up keep me from being distracted. And now I’m so close to landing my dream internship. Nothing is going to make me break them. Even a protective hockey player with clear grey eyes, a sharp jaw, and a body that makes my breath catch. Until Jax wins a bet and one kiss has me breaking them all. TROPES: Slowburn He Falls First Friends with benefits Jealousy Mutual pinning

A vibrant debut and powerful meditation on family, motherhood, and the cost of holding on to your dreams, reminiscent of Ann Napolitano. It’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star Susan Bliss. Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life, an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her home in New England as a wife and mother to young twins, and the bright lights of soapy Los Angeles. In the present, Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. Sebastian, a sensitive artist, cleaves to her memory, fascinated with the artifacts of her starry past. Viola, resentful of her mother’s torn allegiances, distances herself from the memories of her. But when Viola runs into her mother’s old costar Orson Grey—now a renowned Hollywood star—she finds herself falling deeply in love with him and begins to put together the pieces of a mother she never really knew. Sharp, assured, and beautifully written, Family Drama is a story told in double-helix, with intertwined timelines that explore the different versions of ourselves we share with the world and with each other.

Feminine rage, cancel culture, and suffocating societal pressure—a cutting and brazen thriller about two Asian American women on a quest for revenge after a public shaming pushes them to the limit, for fans of Yellowface and Counterfeit. When a conflict with a fellow passenger on the subway spirals into a humiliating breakdown, Shelley Hu’s life is over. The incident goes viral, costing Shelley her prestigious Manhattan law firm internship, her spot at Columbia Law, and her plan to build a better life for herself and her mother. Months later, Shelley is back in Kissimmee, Florida, working the night shift at a kitschy motel near Disney World—the very same job she held in high school. Shelley’s life is a black hole until, one night, the beautiful, enigmatic Sophia Moon checks in with her husband and young son. But Sophia’s appearance is far from random. It turns out that, once upon a time, Sophia suffered her own episode of public shaming. Since then, Sophia has rebuilt a new life, and she promises to help Shelley do the same. More importantly, Sophia vows to help Shelley enact revenge on the three people responsible for the worst day of her life with a precise set of plans. Shelley returns to New York with a new identity and plans that start off well. But when the situation soon spirals out of control, Shelley is forced to reckon with Sophia’s unspeakably dark side—though it may be too late.

For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO’s Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and “making it”) as a writer in Hollywood. TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline’s serious ambivalence about having children. When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it—and unbeknownst to Harry—Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher. Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline’s understanding of what it means to be the “likeable female protagonist” of her own life.

In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust. A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.

For readers of The Cloisters and Counterfeit, Natalie Lemle’s debut novel offers an insider’s view into the world of stolen artifacts and the hidden networks that link museums to organized crime, when a woman is forced to remember the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in Italy, as everyone she knew then may now be in danger. Successful trusts and estates attorney Lena Connolly is asked by a colleague to assist on a case: the Italian government claims an artifact was looted and sold to a museum illegally and is seeking repatriation. The object in question is a cup made of dichroic glass, which would have been rare even in Ancient Rome, let alone thousands of years later. Lena has done everything she can to put the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps behind her. Her dreams of being an archaeologist shattered when her mentor Cyrille disappeared and her enigmatic boyfriend Giamma went dark, but with this new case, the past comes roaring back. Told in alternating timelines, Artifacts follows young Lena as she falls in love with both archaeology and Giamma on the streets of Torino while her adult self pieces together what truly happened on the dig, now a fully restored Roman villa with World Heritage status. The dichroic cup, Lena discovers, may have been taken from the very site she helped unearth. Powerful and exuberant, Natalie Lemle’s Artifacts brings readers behind the museum glass and asks questions about cultural heritage and the historical preservation of our shared sense of humanity.

Do not touch the sword.Do not turn the key.Do not open the gate.In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn’t much a girl wouldn’t do for a glass of water.Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember.But a secret is like a knot.Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone.When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares…but it turns out they’re real, and Saeris has landed herself right in the middle of a centuries-long conflict that might just get her killed.The first of her kind to tread the frozen mountains of Yvelia in over a thousand years, Saeris mistakenly binds herself to Kingfisher, a handsome Fae warrior, who has secrets and nefarious agendas of his own. He will use her Alchemist’s magic to protect his people, no matter what it costs him… or her.Death has a name.It is Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate.His past is murky.His attitude stinks.And he’s the only way Saeris is going to make it home. Be careful of the deals you make, dear child.The devil is in the details...N.B. Quicksilver contains depictions of graphic violence/adult situations and is therefore recommended for readers 17+. For a full list of tropes and TWs, please visit the author's website.

I had my whole life planned out... until I met a hockey player obsessed with breaking all of my rules. My 5 simple rules for hooking up keep me from being distracted. And now I’m so close to landing my dream internship. Nothing is going to make me break them. Even a protective hockey player with clear grey eyes, a sharp jaw, and a body that makes my breath catch. Until Jax wins a bet and one kiss has me breaking them all. TROPES: Slowburn He Falls First Friends with benefits Jealousy Mutual pinning

Born shrouded in the veil of the Primals, a Maiden as the Fates promised, Seraphena Mierel’s future has never been hers. Chosen before birth to uphold the desperate deal her ancestor struck to save his people, Sera must leave behind her life and offer herself to the Primal of Death as his Consort.    However, Sera’s real destiny is the most closely guarded secret in all of Lasania—she’s not the well protected Maiden but an assassin with one mission—one target. Make the Primal of Death fall in love, become his weakness, and then…end him. If she fails, she dooms her kingdom to a slow demise at the hands of the Rot.  Sera has always known what she is. Chosen. Consort. Assassin. Weapon. A specter never fully formed yet drenched in blood. A monster. Until him. Until the Primal of Death’s unexpected words and deeds chase away the darkness gathering inside her. And his seductive touch ignites a passion she’s never allowed herself to feel and cannot feel for him. But Sera has never had a choice. Either way, her life is forfeit—it always has been, as she has been forever touched by Life and Death.

Born shrouded in the veil of the Primals, a Maiden as the Fates promised, Seraphena Mierel’s future has never been hers. Chosen before birth to uphold the desperate deal her ancestor struck to save his people, Sera must leave behind her life and offer herself to the Primal of Death as his Consort.    However, Sera’s real destiny is the most closely guarded secret in all of Lasania—she’s not the well protected Maiden but an assassin with one mission—one target. Make the Primal of Death fall in love, become his weakness, and then…end him. If she fails, she dooms her kingdom to a slow demise at the hands of the Rot.  Sera has always known what she is. Chosen. Consort. Assassin. Weapon. A specter never fully formed yet drenched in blood. A monster. Until him. Until the Primal of Death’s unexpected words and deeds chase away the darkness gathering inside her. And his seductive touch ignites a passion she’s never allowed herself to feel and cannot feel for him. But Sera has never had a choice. Either way, her life is forfeit—it always has been, as she has been forever touched by Life and Death.