A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew. It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe―which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other. In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

Tender, brutal, devastating, OVERSPILL is the debut novel from incredible new literary talent, Charlotte Paradise. Sara is twenty-five. She has never used a tampon without having a panic attack. She starts dating Miles. For three months, they don’t touch. Miles respects her boundaries, though he longs for them to melt away. Sara desires Miles, but she knows her body, or rather she knows it is an unknowable thing. Sara wants to be in love, to find a person who allows her to be herself. Someone who is happy with everything she is and everything she isn’t. Miles hopes he won’t hurt her. But how do you navigate a relationship for which there is no blueprint? How do you love someone when your body is not your own, and how do you reclaim it? Overspill is a luminous, shattering debut about love, trauma and self-acceptance, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney and Coco Mellors.

Now that all the others have run out of air, it's my turn to do a little story-making. In Homer's account in The Odyssey, Penelope—wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy—is portrayed as the quintessential faithful wife, her story a salutary lesson through the ages. Left alone for twenty years when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War after the abduction of Helen, Penelope manages, in the face of scandalous rumors, to maintain the kingdom of Ithaca, bring up her wayward son, and keep over a hundred suitors at bay, simultaneously. When Odysseus finally comes home after enduring hardships, overcoming monsters, and sleeping with goddesses, he kills her suitors and—curiously—twelve of her maids. In a splendid contemporary twist to the ancient story, Margaret Atwood has chosen to give the telling of it to Penelope and to her twelve hanged maids, asking: "What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?" In Atwood's dazzling, playful retelling, the story becomes as wise and compassionate as it is haunting, and as wildly entertaining as it is disturbing. With wit and verve, drawing on the story-telling and poetic talent for which she herself is renowned, she gives Penelope new life and reality—and sets out to provide an answer to an ancient mystery.

Days before his release from prison, Shadow's wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America. Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break. Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, American Gods takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You'll be surprised by what - and who - it finds there...

The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman—Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman—Briseis—watches and waits for the war's outcome. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army. When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and coolly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis's people but also of the ancient world at large. Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war—the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead—all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives—and it is nothing short of magnificent.

From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart. The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?

A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with an insane job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes calling, offering an opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS-affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup, Nadia leaps at the chance.In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused about taking orders from an obvious UN novice, and the murmurs of deradicalization being inherently unethical and possibly illegal threaten to end Nadia’s UN career before it even begins.Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decides to visit the camp with her sullen team, composed of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr.At the camp, after a clumsy introductory session with the ISIS women, Nadia meets Sara, one of the younger refugees, whose accent immediately gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction, Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamanté headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home.But the system Nadia finds herself trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment barely makes a dent in Nadia’s ultimate goal of freeing Sara . . . and the other women, too, of course. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined.A triumph of dark humor, Fundamentally asks bold questions: Who can tell someone what to believe? And how do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

Set in the contemporary Paris of American  expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds  himself caught between desire and conventional  morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves  into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing  imagination, and he creates a moving, highly  controversial story of death and passion that reveals the  unspoken complexities of the heart.

A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with an insane job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes calling, offering an opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS-affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup, Nadia leaps at the chance.In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused about taking orders from an obvious UN novice, and the murmurs of deradicalization being inherently unethical and possibly illegal threaten to end Nadia’s UN career before it even begins.Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decides to visit the camp with her sullen team, composed of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr.At the camp, after a clumsy introductory session with the ISIS women, Nadia meets Sara, one of the younger refugees, whose accent immediately gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction, Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamanté headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home.But the system Nadia finds herself trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment barely makes a dent in Nadia’s ultimate goal of freeing Sara . . . and the other women, too, of course. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined.A triumph of dark humor, Fundamentally asks bold questions: Who can tell someone what to believe? And how do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all. Outside of a childhood nickname she can't shake, Piglet's rather pleased with how her life's turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she's got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she's always cooking. But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they're set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly… hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears, and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can't explain. Torn between a life she's always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what you know you deserve, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by. A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women's sometimes complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all. Outside of a childhood nickname she can't shake, Piglet's rather pleased with how her life's turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she's got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she's always cooking. But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they're set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly… hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears, and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can't explain. Torn between a life she's always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what you know you deserve, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by. A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women's sometimes complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.