'Sultry, sinister and smart. Sterling Lockwood is going to steal your heart - just don't trust her with it' Stuart Turton, author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle In modern day Vienna, city of spies, American Sterling Lockwood is the loyal Concierge & Keeper of Secrets at the infamous Hotel Orient, a love hotel where cameras are banned, aliases are required, and every guest has a secret. After the double murder of two guests, including a tech mogul building an Austrian surveillance state, Sterling has to turn detective. But finding the truth will require breaking the Orient's sacred code of secrecy, while keeping a few secrets of her own. The police struggle when modern investigative technology proves useless at the old-fashioned hotel. Because clients use aliases, pay cash, and stay mere hours, all suspects have vanished. Sterling agrees to assist alongside her best friend and colleague Fernando, if only to avoid arrest and fight suspicion regarding her own movements that night. As enemies close in, she risks everything to solve a case haunted by the past in a city with a fetish for nostalgia.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

'Sultry, sinister and smart. Sterling Lockwood is going to steal your heart - just don't trust her with it' Stuart Turton, author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle In modern day Vienna, city of spies, American Sterling Lockwood is the loyal Concierge & Keeper of Secrets at the infamous Hotel Orient, a love hotel where cameras are banned, aliases are required, and every guest has a secret. After the double murder of two guests, including a tech mogul building an Austrian surveillance state, Sterling has to turn detective. But finding the truth will require breaking the Orient's sacred code of secrecy, while keeping a few secrets of her own. The police struggle when modern investigative technology proves useless at the old-fashioned hotel. Because clients use aliases, pay cash, and stay mere hours, all suspects have vanished. Sterling agrees to assist alongside her best friend and colleague Fernando, if only to avoid arrest and fight suspicion regarding her own movements that night. As enemies close in, she risks everything to solve a case haunted by the past in a city with a fetish for nostalgia.

Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries. Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake. But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs. Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries. Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake. But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs. Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.

In his fifth work of nonfiction, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. 

This book is an investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store. What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience and efficiency? In this exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing and immersive reporting, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself, why truckers call their job "sharecropping on wheels," what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "organic" and "fair trade," the struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business, the truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry and much more.

Three courses. Seven guests. One card. It's a deadly evening they'll never forget.  Seven strangers meet for an anonymously hosted dinner party. As the evening winds down, seven cards appear, one in front of each of the guests. On each card is a number - the age at which the guest will die. Spooked but skeptical, the guests disperse into the rainy night with the hope of forgetting the morbid turn of events.  Two weeks later, one guest is dead. At exactly the age the card predicted.  More guests begin to die as the years go on, each one dead at the same age as their card. It soon becomes clear that something much more sinister is abound. Now, it's up to the quickly dwindling group of dinner guests to figure out who (or what) was behind that fateful dinner party all those years ago, before their numbers catch up with them too.  Told from the perspectives of each of the seven guests, which span from hilarious to hateful, Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests is a spellbinding and mysterious exploration of mortality, begging the how would you live your life if you knew your number was up?