Pradyumna Kumar, known as PK, was born into a poor, untouchable family in a small village in eastern India. All his life he has kept a palm leaf bearing an astrologer’s prophecy: “You will marry a girl who is not from the village, not from the district, not even from our country; she will be musical, own a jungle and be born under the sign of the ox.” But not until PK attends art school in New Delhi do his stars begin to align. One evening, while drawing portraits in a park, he meets a young Swedish woman, Lotta von Schendin — and this brief meeting will change the courses of their lives forever.This is the remarkable true story of how a young Indian man armed with nothing more than a handful of paintbrushes and a secondhand Raleigh bicycle made his way across Asia and Europe in search of the woman he loves.

For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez, a darkly funny and moving debut novel about the unforgettable Agatha, whose devotion to a widow with dementia (and an inconvenient attachment to her daughter’s grave) sparks a radical reckoning with life, loss, and love’s aftermath.Have we done a bad thing, Agatha? Not at all. We’ve been very brave. Agatha, a bristly painter fleeing her own darkness, decamps to rural New Mexico to live the reclusive life of a small-town curmudgeon. It is there she meets Alice, a mild widow with a deepening case of dementia who keeps steady vigil at her daughter’s backyard grave. Despite Agatha’s rough edges and fierce aversion to sentimentality, she surprises herself by falling in love, and her well-worn convictions begin to upend. As Alice’s condition worsens, Agatha hatches a plan for them to live together at her remote residence at Mesa Portales. But when Alice’s wayward son comes along with different ideas—and Alice suddenly goes missing—Agatha takes matters into her own hands with the help of a faithful twelve-year-old-neighbor, a pair of shovels, and her trusty pickup, embarking on an unusual mission that calls into question whether some secrets are better kept buried… Sharp, watchful, at once thrillingly perceptive and hidden from herself, Agatha is as imposing and full of feeling as the vast canyon her rustic adobe home overlooks. Loosely inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, I Am Agatha introduces us to this irascible, indelible character over the course of a strange, singular stretch of days—days during which she learns new ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart.

East Village, summer of 1984. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who happens to have the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS.So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she'll see him again. There's no way Mark wouldn't give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment - and increasingly, her concern - Mark doesn't appear.Renata has other problems, too. There's something strange happening in her advertisements for paranormal 'exterminators' who promise to clear out bad energy keep showing up. At first, she's sure they're scam artists, but it becomes clear they're actually trapping ghosts as part of a city-wide gentrification plot to make downtown safe for Reaganites.Told with humour and pathos, Waiting on a Friend is a genre-bending retelling of Queer history that manages to be both heartbreaking and healing.

Every night, a woman tells a story to save her life. Every morning, she lives one more day.The story of Shahrazad and the Sultan goes like for one thousand and one nights, with her execution looming, Shahrazad tells a story. Against his wishes, the Sultan is entranced, and delays her punishment so that she can finish it. And so the cycle continues, until storytelling has saved Shahrazad's life.With her signature wit and wisdom, Jeanette Winterson opens the stories of the Arabian Nights and asks us to look again at what we think we know, and how these ancient stories reveal essential questions about our modern world. Who should we trust? Is love the most important aspect of life? What makes us happy? And most importantly, can we change the ending to our own story?As a child and a young woman, covert visits to the library turned Jeanette Winterson into a reader and expanded the possibilities for her future. Her life transformed from fact to fiction and gave her the courage to alter the endings she did not want to happen. The defiant response of I can change the story because I am the story.A celebration of the value of literature in our contemporary world and a delightful recounting of some of our oldest Jeanette Winterson shows us how storytelling can change all of our lives as we know them.

A major debut collection of globe-spanning stories set in the worlds of art, crime, and fantasy, by an exceptionally elegant and mischievous storyteller.A stone appears in a woman’s pocket like a charm only to end up lodged in someone else’s throat. A condescending artist throws a dinner party with his too-square wife, only to learn too late that she is far more daring than he ever imagined. A young and besotted apprentice haunts her mentor’s lover after a stinging betrayal. In The Good Eye, the world can change in an instant. The beautiful turns grotesque, the exalted becomes the disgraced, the genius an imposter. Contradictory forces confront the men and women of Gibson’s collection, as they wrestle with the limits of perception. Pulsing with style and vibrancy, The Good Eye takes readers on an unforgettable journey, without ever giving in to easy answers, and announces the arrival of a prodigious new talent.

For fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado, The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories. In this bold and enchanting collection Senaa Ahmad takes license with history and its players, sending the reader on a thrilling ride. In “Let’s Play Dead,” Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn gone, but there’s a tiny problem―she keeps coming back to life no matter what he does. “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” hurls readers back to 1945, where they assume the role of a technician for the Manhattan Project, surrounded by labyrinthine paths and harrowing outcomes. And “Inside the House of the Historian” invites us to a dinner party turned murder mystery full of figures like Nefertiti, Queen Victoria, John Adams, and Marilyn Monroe. These stories and others entice readers to confront the past, the present, and themselves all at once. Zany and haunting, inviting and brilliant, each poignant tale delves into surreal nature of today through the lens of yesterday, charting the tragicomic yet hopeful act of living. The Age of Calamities is an evocation of life and death on history’s unsteady margins, of how to reckon with the blunt-force trauma of ill-fated times. Fiercely clever and wildly inventive, this debut establishes Senaa Ahmad as a literary force.