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 the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel composes a new the Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds. Son of Nobody upends the regal perspective of traditional epics and shows that “the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.” Readers of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad will revel in this breathtaking feat of the imagination.

Medea longs for a different life. Since childhood, she has been separated from her sister, shunned by her mother, and persecuted and tormented by her brother and father. All because of a unique and dangerous witchcraft. But when a dashing young hero, Jason, arrives to claim the famed Golden Fleece that her father fiercely protects, Medea sees her opportunity for escape. Her offer to help Jason overcome the trials set by her father sets in motion a journey that will test every ounce of her strength, magic and loyalty; a journey that will see her battle monsters, dethrone kings and fall in love. But when faced with the ultimate betrayal, Medea is driven to an act of desperation so brutal it rips apart the lives of everyone involved...

Love. Loyalty. Sacrifice.Grey Flynn has dedicated her life to her mage, Kier.She will be his blade on the battlefield, his healer and protector. The deep well of raw power inside her is Kier's to use. Grey would do anything for Kier - be anything for him - if he would only ask.When a quest to protect the child of an enemy kingdom pulls them into the dangerous heart of their nation's war, Grey and Kier will need to decide what they are willing to sacrifice to protect their secret. For Grey is no ordinary magical well, but heir to the lost island of Locke - the root of all power. If she dies, all magic dies with her.The Second Death of Locke is a devastatingly romantic epic fantasy and about the undying bond between a knight and their mage, perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and The Six Deaths of the Saint.