Babel

R.F. Kuang

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in this unforgettable work of dark academia that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. The unique magic system of silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization. For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, a secret society dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide… Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

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The Lamb

Lucy Rose

From an incendiary new talent, a contemporary queer folktale about a mother and daughter living in the woods, for fans of Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Julia Armfield. “Deliciously dark and shockingly bold—someone needs to make this into a film right now! Lucy Rose is one to watch. This is one of my favorite debuts in a long time.”—Kirsty Logan, author of Now She is Witch and Things We Say in the Dark A FOLK TALE. A HORROR STORY. A LOVE STORY. AN ENCHANTMENT. Margot and Mama have lived by the forest ever since Margot can remember. When Margot is not at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. People who have strayed too far from the road. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she picks apart their bodies and toasts them off with some vegetable oil. But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom. With this gothic coming-of-age tale, debut novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.

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Gideon the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

The Emperor needs necromancers. The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman. Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit. Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon's sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die. Of course, some things are better left dead.

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Hell Followed With Us

Andrew Joseph White

Prepare to die. His kingdom is near. Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with. But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC’s leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji’s darkest secret: the cult’s bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all. Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick’s terms…until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own. A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation.

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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Patrick Süskind

An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

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Thirst

Marina Yuszczuk

Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic. It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet. In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back. With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.

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Glasgow Boys

Margaret McDonald

A striking debut exploring the power of identity, community and the Scottish working class. This coming-of-age story is an incisive look at young masculinity and the way even the most fraught childhood is not without hope. Neither Finlay or Banjo can remember the last time they had a hug. Against all odds, 18-year-old Finlay has begun his nursing degree at Glasgow University. But coming straight from the care system means he has no support network. How can he write essays, focus on his nursing placement and stop himself from falling in love when he's struggling to feed himself? Meanwhile, 17-year-old Banjo is trying to settle into his new foster family and finish high school, desperate to hold down his job and the people it contains. But his anger and fear keep boiling over, threatening his already uncertain future. Underpinning everything is what happened three years ago in their group care home, when Finlay and Banjo were as close as brothers until they stopped speaking. If these boys want to keep hold of the people they love, they have to be able to forgive one another. More than this, they must find a way to forgive themselves.

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These Violent Delights

Micah Nemerever

When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father’s recent death.  Paul sees the wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel. And admiration isn’t the same as trust. As their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. Separation is out of the question. But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship.    Exquisitely plotted, unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is a novel of escalating dread and an excavation of the unsettling depths of human desire. The Secret History meets Call Me by Your Name in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

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Trainspotting (Mark Renton, #2)

Irvine Welsh

''The best book ever written by man or woman . . . Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible" —Rebel Inc THE BESTSELLING NOVEL THAT INSPIRED DANNY BOYLE’S CULT FILM Described by The Sunday Times as "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent," Trainspotting follows the lives of a group of Scottish junkies. Its bleak depiction of drug addiction is vivid and brutal, and has lost none of its power to shock. Choose the book that outraged the critics. Choose the literary phenomenon that defined a generation. Choose Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.

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Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.

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Hungerstone

Kat Dunn

For what do you hunger, Lenore? Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day. The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger. Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . . Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.

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The Secret History

Donna Tartt

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

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Glasgow Boys

Margaret McDonald

A striking debut exploring the power of identity, community and the Scottish working class. This coming-of-age story is an incisive look at young masculinity and the way even the most fraught childhood is not without hope. Neither Finlay or Banjo can remember the last time they had a hug. Against all odds, 18-year-old Finlay has begun his nursing degree at Glasgow University. But coming straight from the care system means he has no support network. How can he write essays, focus on his nursing placement and stop himself from falling in love when he's struggling to feed himself? Meanwhile, 17-year-old Banjo is trying to settle into his new foster family and finish high school, desperate to hold down his job and the people it contains. But his anger and fear keep boiling over, threatening his already uncertain future. Underpinning everything is what happened three years ago in their group care home, when Finlay and Banjo were as close as brothers until they stopped speaking. If these boys want to keep hold of the people they love, they have to be able to forgive one another. More than this, they must find a way to forgive themselves.

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The Starless Sea

Erin Morgenstern

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world—a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.

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