Territory of Montana, 1885. For Miss Kathryn Blackford, death is only the beginning. Desperate to escape her miserable life as a coal-miner in Cinder, a dismal town nestled in the Rocky Mountains, she stages her own death so that she can start life anew—unbound, unrestricted, and free to do as she pleases. Just as she is about to leave Cinder forever, Miss Blackford unexpectedly crosses paths with the stubborn and spoiled Miss Elizabeth Lancaster, daughter of the proprietor of Cinder’s coalmine. For that reason alone, Miss Blackford is determined to hate her. It would have been easy for that hate to endure, too, were it not for the inconvenient events that brought the two so close together, setting them on a tumultuous journey marked each day with calamity, deceit, and troublesome attraction.

For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend. London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever… Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself. Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil. Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties. As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over. Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.

James Frankie Thomas’s Idlewild is a darkly funny story of two adults looking back on their intense teenage friendship, in a queer, trans, and early-Internet twist on the Manhattan prep school novel. Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers. For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives. Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay and Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.

When the witch built the forty-flight tower, she made very sure to do the whole thing properly. Each flight contains a dreadful monster, ranging from a diamond-scaled dragon to a pack of slavering goblins. Should a prince battle his way to the top, he will be rewarded with a golden sword—and the lovely Princess Floralinda. But no prince has managed to conquer the first flight yet, let alone get to the fortieth. In fact, the supply of fresh princes seems to have quite dried up. And winter is closing in on Floralinda…

The NPR host Alexis Madrigal reveals how the Port of Oakland explains the world. In Pacific Circuit, the award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities—all personified in this changing landscape for the city’s lifelong inhabitants. Pacific Circuit holds a magnifying glass to the scars etched by generations of systemic segregation and the ceaseless march of technological advancement. These are not just abstract concepts; they are embedded in the very fabric of Oakland and its people, from dockworkers and community organizers to real estate developers and businesses chasing the highest possible profits. Madrigal delves into city hall politics, traces the intertwining arcs of venture capital and hedge funds, and offers unprecedented insight into Silicon Valley’s genesis and growth, all against the backdrop of Oakland—a city vibrating with untold stories and unexplored connections that can, when read carefully, reveal exactly how our markets and our world really function.

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the "Hand of God," as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn't supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet's history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations. Centuries later, Destry's protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that's buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn't Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they're threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur's very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they've built on Sask-E.

A queer immigrant fairytale about individual purpose, the fluid nature of identity, and the power of love to change and endure. Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.

One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.

In the epic tradition of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, This Vast Enterprise offers a bold new take on the Lewis and Clark expedition, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths about one of the most beloved episodes in American history. Celebrated young historian Craig Fehrman, whose first book, Author in Chief, was hailed by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as "one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years,"delivers a major new account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their long journey, in 1806, they brought an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. There was truth in those descriptions. But there was also distortion. For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of their expedition--a gripping narrative that draws on new documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Fehrman's central insight is that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But This Vast Enterprise introduces us to John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains' bulky barge. It introduces us to Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men. To capture this cast of characters, each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a new point of view, describing that person's desires and contradictions with an unprecedented level of care. Fehrman balances the story's inherent adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. One chapter shows Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest--his secret maneuvers to fund the expedition, uncovered here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. Another chapter reveals the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, a Lakota leader, completely upending our understanding of early Lakota American diplomacy. In his chapters, Clark is not a bad speller but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman found Clark's college notebook.) Lewis is someone whose psychological demons feel at once heartbreaking and modern. And yet, in the end, the captains are men who needed help--from Sacajawea, from York, and from each other. Their expeditiontruly was a vast enterprise, a sprawling and federally funded military mission that came down to the heroic sacrifices of a few human beings. This book portrays those people, all of them, for the first time. It is more than just a work of history--it's a testament to the power of innovative research and emotional storytelling, and a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.

Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, addiction, regret, love, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel—his most personal to date—that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past. Al Ward lives on an isolated mining claim in the high desert of central Nevada fifty miles from the nearest town. A grizzled man in his sixties, he survives on canned soup, instant coffee, and memories of his ex-wife, friends and family he’s lost, and his life as a touring musician. Hampered by insomnia, bouts of anxiety, and a chronic lethargy that keeps him from moving back to town, Al finds himself teetering on the edge of madness and running out of reasons to go on—until a horse arrives on his doorstep: nameless, blind, and utterly helpless. Al hopes the horse will vanish as mysteriously as he appeared. Yet the animal remains, leaving him in a conundrum. Is the animal real, or a phantom conjured from imagination? As Al contemplates the horse’s existence—and what, if anything, he can do—his thoughts are interspersed with memories of his life as a musician, from the moment his mother’s part-time boyfriend gifts him a 1959 butterscotch blonde Telecaster, to the day his life as a traveling musician begins. He joins various bands—all who perform his songs once they discover his talent–playing casinos, truck stops, clubs, and bars. He falls in love, and finds pockets of companionship and minor success along the way. Never close to stardom or financial success, he continues as a journeyman for decades until alcoholism and a heartbreaking tragedy lead him to the isolation of the barren Nevada desert. A poignant meditation on art, addiction, loneliness, heartbreak, and the reality of life on the road in smalltime bands, The Horse is a beautiful, haunting tale from an author working at the height of his powers.

Rule #1: They can't speak. Rule #2: They can't move. Rule #3: They can't hurt you. Ezra Friedman sees ghosts, which made growing up in a funeral home a bit complicated. It might have been easier if his grandfather’s ghost didn’t give him such scathing looks of disapproval as he went through a second, HRT-induced puberty, or if he didn't have the pressure of all those relatives—living and dead—judging every choice he makes. It’s no wonder that Ezra runs as far away from the family business as humanly possible. But when the floor of his dream job drops out from under him and his mother uses the family Passover seder to tell everyone that she’s running away with the rabbi’s wife, Ezra finds himself back in the thick of it. With his parents’ marriage imploding and the Friedman Family Memorial Chapel on the brink of financial ruin, Ezra agrees to step into his mother's shoes and help out . . . which means long days surrounded by ghosts that no one else can see. And then there's his unfortunate crush on Jonathan, the handsome funeral home volunteer who just happens to live downstairs from Ezra's new apartment . . . and the appearance of the ghost of Jonathan's gone-too-soon husband, Ben, who is breaking every spectral rule Ezra knows. Because Ben can speak. He can move. And as Ezra tries to keep his family together and his heart from getting broken, he quickly realizes that there's more than one way to be haunted—and more than one way to become a ghost.

When eighteen-year-old Keller Hartman is recruited into the Legion’s most prestigious galactic unit, it’s a dream come true. He's worked hard for this. He’s ready to prove himself. The problem? His new partner—the beautiful, no-nonsense pilot Lament Bringer—wants nothing to do with him. Forced to work together under Legion orders, Keller and Lament team up with a motley crew of specialists to investigate a mysterious visionary who can predict catastrophes. As they begin to peel back layers, however, they realize there's more to the story than meets the eye. With threats mounting and secrets unfolding, Keller and Lament will need to trust one another in order to stop the dangers at play. But with trust comes other feelings—ones neither of them is prepared for. With the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, the only thing worse than failing their mission might just be losing each other.