"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists -- he a photographer, she a dancer -- trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the spook who sat by the door, is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as Freedom Fighters in this explosive, award-winning novel. As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a man's reaction to oppression, it is universal.

A provocative and thoroughly feminist “cult classic” (The New Yorker) about a smart, sensitive, yet deeply troubled young woman fighting to live on her own terms. I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser. No one will know… The radiance drifts blue circles around my head. If I wanted to I could float up and through them. I am weightless. My brain is cool like rippling waves. Conflict does not exist. For a moment I cannot see—the lights are large orange flowers. Ellen has two lives. A single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, she periodically descends into episodes she describes as “radiances.” While under the influence of the radiance, she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a colorful, glorious, liberating experience for Ellen, and despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, she relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda and the freedom it gives her. In what would turn to be her final published work, originally released in 1979, Elaine Kraf tackles a dark and disturbing subject in an utterly original, witty, and inventive manner. Provocative at the time of its publication and thoroughly iconoclastic, The Princess of 72nd Street is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

In the isolated Appalachian town of Burrsville, Tess Wynne lives in precious quiet. Having been left for dead a century earlier, Tess made a deal with the devil to stay in the only home she’s known. Tending to her wildlife sanctuary, she keeps the land and its people safe – pulling on spidering threads of ancient magic, trying to preserve the balance of nature against the encroaching ravages of human influence. But, every autumn, the devil returns, offering Tess more power in exchange for a foothold into the human world. And, every autumn, Tess refuses.As Tess prepares her wildlife sanctuary for the winter, an unexpected addition to Burrsville catches the local’s attention. Freshly arrived Zeke Abdee, the town’s new pastor, begins to sinisterly mould the townspeople to his will.With everyone slowly turning on Tess, Pastor Zeke is determined to stake his claim on the very land where Tess keeps her sanctuary. Cornered, a desperate Tess pushes her magic to the darkest edges. All the while, the devil bides his time, waiting for Tess to decide if she will be prey - or predator...

Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise? When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality. Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and anonymous 'creepypastas', Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.