Lost Lambs

Madeline Cash

Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction. The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens. Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together. Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With Lost Lambs, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.

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Dear Monica Lewinsky

Julia Langbein

From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid (“I loved it…and have never read anything like it”—Elizabeth Gilbert) comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites—starring an apparition of Monica Lewinsky    Forty-five-year old Jean Dornan cannot escape the shadow of something she did several decades ago. On a study abroad program to France in the summer of 1998, she embarked on a deeply inappropriate relationship with her professor. When the professor contacts her out of the blue to invite her to his retirement ceremony, she is jolted out of her malaise and filled with the need to understand why the affair derailed her life.    Rereading her old diaries, she is shocked to realize her relationship with the professor occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels. In a frenzy of guilt and regret, she finds herself praying to Monica Lewinsky—as if she were some kind of secular saint, the patron of persecuted and demonized women, perhaps?—and begging Monica’s forgiveness for not understanding everything they had in common. To her shock, Saint Monica appears to her—like a saucy Ghost of Christmas Past—and leads her back in time to reassess what happened. Had Jean merely been weak, stupid, blind, as she has told herself for years? What was it about her that led her into the affair? What did she really do that summer?     Told in flashbacks of those sun-lit six weeks that changed Jean's life, interspersed with irreverent accounts of real female martyrs and visitations from Saint Monica offering insight about Jean’s younger self, Dear Monica Lewinsky is a tender, hilarious, and thought-provoking examination of desire and how it shapes us. It is also a timely examination of what grace and forgiveness look like, in our lives and throughout history.

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Paradise Logic

Sophie Kemp

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time. It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

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Edinburgh

Alexander Chee

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

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The Bookshop Sisterhood

Michelle Lindo-Rice

“ This drama-packed page turner will warm your heart!” —Eliza Knight, USA Today bestselling author of The Mayfair Bookshop When life rewrites the story, only friendship will see them through. After years of hard work, four best friends—Celeste, Yasmeen, Toni and Leslie—are finally on the verge of opening the bookstore of their dreams. A place where their community can find solace with an intriguing new read, a comforting beverage and book-loving friends. But before they can cut the ribbon, their worlds are upended. Toni receives devastating news just months before her wedding, while Celeste’s struggling marriage threatens to collapse completely. Leslie learns a shocking secret about her family, and a lotto ticket changes Yasmeen’s life—but not for the better. As the bookstore’s grand opening fast approaches, the four women must lean on each other now more than ever to navigate their grief and uncertainty. And together, they’ll learn that sometimes, even life’s most unexpected plot twists can lead to beautiful new beginnings.

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How to Be Less Useful: The Joy of Inefficiency

Priyanka Mattoo

A delightful book about reclaiming pleasure in mid-life—a potent mix of self-help and memoir, from one of today’s wittiest, wisest voices."I have done everything right, and I have missed everything." When did our lives become entirely about efficiency and optimization? Especially as office workers, as parents, as consumers, as exercisers and healthy eaters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be less useful?With self-deprecating humor, devastating insight, and bracing honesty, Priyanka Mattoo shares her own journey toward being a less useful human, to investigate why pleasure gets back-burnered in American culture.Think about what we choose to systematically cut out or overlook as we Solo travel. Dessert. Sweaty dancing. "Pointless" hangs with friends. And then there are the activities that used to be fun and have somehow lost their luster, usually in the decade between 30 and 40: Cooking (ruined by exhaustion). Bad tv (the algorithm). Other humans (bandwidth). Eating at restaurants (Instagram). Mattoo takes on the zeitgeist, delivering invaluable, laugh-out-loud entertaining life lessons without an ounce of preachiness or pressure. She looks at where pleasure begins, what it serves, how we learn to repress it—in families, in friendships and romantic relationships, in jobs. And she shows us a way to identify and accept the things that give us pleasure, then to welcome them into our lives. What if, instead of being useful, we could all learn how to be happier, lighter, more present, more engaged? How to Be Less Useful is refreshing, funny, sparklingly astute, unignorable--a book for the current moment.

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August Is a Wicked Month

Edna O'Brien

Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future. Determined to change her life, she decides to go south in search of sun and companionship.

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Queenie is Working on It

Candice Carty-Williams

How is it possible for one woman to hold it together when she'Confronted with a racing biological clock when she doesn't even know if she wants kids.Trying to act normal when her heart is smashed into a million pieces.Ten times smarter than the people she's working for.Priced out of the housing market in the place she grew up.Stuck in a situationship when all she wants is the love of her life back . . .Bigger. Not better. Older. Not wiser. Queenie Jenkins is working on it.Award-winning author Candice Carty-Williams returns with a scalpel-sharp, poignant and hilarious new book that shines a dazzling light on the realities of modern womanhood.

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August Is a Wicked Month

Edna O'Brien

Separated from her husband, Ellen finds herself living alone in a city she dislikes - a place that denies her past and offers no hope for her future. Determined to change her life, she decides to go south in search of sun and companionship.

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Queenie is Working on It

Candice Carty-Williams

How is it possible for one woman to hold it together when she'Confronted with a racing biological clock when she doesn't even know if she wants kids.Trying to act normal when her heart is smashed into a million pieces.Ten times smarter than the people she's working for.Priced out of the housing market in the place she grew up.Stuck in a situationship when all she wants is the love of her life back . . .Bigger. Not better. Older. Not wiser. Queenie Jenkins is working on it.Award-winning author Candice Carty-Williams returns with a scalpel-sharp, poignant and hilarious new book that shines a dazzling light on the realities of modern womanhood.

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