The Jasmine Throne

Tasha Suri

Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess's traitor brother. Imprisoned by her dictator brother, Malini spends her days in isolation in the Hirana: an ancient temple that was once the source of the powerful, magical deathless waters — but is now little more than a decaying ruin. Priya is a maidservant, one among several who make the treacherous journey to the top of the Hirana every night to clean Malini’s chambers. She is happy to be an anonymous drudge, so long as it keeps anyone from guessing the dangerous secret she hides. But when Malini accidentally bears witness to Priya’s true nature, their destinies become irrevocably tangled. One is a vengeful princess seeking to depose her brother from his throne. The other is a priestess seeking to find her family. Together, they will change the fate of an empire.

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Burn Down Master's House

Clay Cane

Inspired by true, long-buried stories of enslaved people who dared to fight back, a searing portrayal of resistance for fans of Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Percival Everett, from Clay Cane, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Grift. As turmoil simmers within a divided nation, smoke from another blaze begins to rise. Sparked by individual acts of resistance among those enslaved across the American South, their seemingly disparate rebellions fuel a singular inferno of justice, connecting them in ways quiet at times, explosive at others. As these flames rise, so will they. Luke, quick-witted and literate, and Henri, a man with a strong and defiant spirit, forge an unbreakable bond at a Virginia plantation called Magnolia Row. Both seek escape from unimaginable cruelty. And sure as the fires of hell, Luke and Henri will leave their mark, sparking resistance among the lives they touch … One is Josephine, a young, sharp, and observant girl who wields silence as her greatest weapon. A witness to Luke and Henri’s resilience, she listens, watches, waits for the moment to make her move. Then there is Charity Butler, her husband a formerly enslaved man who proved his ferocity as a young boy standing alongside Josephine. At his encouragement, Charity fights for her freedom in court and wins—only to battle a deeply unjust system designed to destroy the life they’ve built. And finally, there is Nathaniel, who ruthlessly exploits other Black people and mirrors the cruelty of the white men who, like him, are enslavers. A perversion of the system of slavery, his fragile and contradictory rule will become a catalyst of its own. Inspired by the true stories of the profoundly courageous men and women who dared to fight back, Burn Down Master’s House is a singular tour de force of a novel—breathtaking in scope, compassion, and a timeliness that speaks powerfully to our present era. “To refill my well of radical hope, I read resistance stories. Whether from history or from historical imagination. Burn Down Master’s House is a resistance story for the ages. Clay Cane’s gripping novel is based on real stories of enslaved women and men, of their audacious struggle against slavery.”—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

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Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Sabrina Strings

In her first book, sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women. The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of color were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilogue consider how Americans normalized the "scientific management" of white women's bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other. The author does not address fat from the angle of health or previous attitudes white Europeans held towards corpulence.

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The Exodontists

Drew Huff

The Exodontists dream of bleach and teeth... In this whimsical Halloween horror novel, the Exodontists--a family of tooth-loving immortal monsters--must fight to keep their home after Spirit Halloween takes over the abandoned warehouse they live in. Worse, still: The warehouse isn't only their home. It's also where they've run a free dental clinic for the last few decades, serving the needy and providing goodness for the human town they dwell in. But trying to share the warehouse with the Halloween store ends up culminating in an epic grudge match to the death after the Exodontists unwittingly attract the attention of Garrett, a nasty incel employee of the Halloween store. And things get violent. Emotional. Dramatic. And oh-so exciting.

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Nightshade

Autumn Woods

MYSTERY. MURDER. REVENGE. WELCOME TO SORROWSONG UNIVERSITY. . . He’d burn the world down for her . . . but she plans to burn his to the ground. Isolated in the Scottish Highlands, Sorrowsong University only welcomes students from the most powerful families. Ophelia Winters doesn’t belong, but a rare scholarship grants her the perfect opportunity to investigate her parents’ “accidental” death near the castle grounds. Things get off to a rocky start when she runs afoul of the mysterious Alex Corbeau-Green – son of her prime suspect. As far as she’s concerned, he is just a younger version of his billionaire father. A monster hiding beneath a beautiful façade. When an unknown tormentor begins to stalk Ophelia, she realizes she may not be able to survive Sorrowsong on her own. Alex becomes her unexpected ally – and alibi for murder. And as she begins to fall for the soft heart that hides beneath his hard exterior, her hunger for revenge wavers for the first time. Can she really bring herself to destroy everything he’s ever known? A dark academia TikTok sensation packed with romantic suspense, murder, and addictive, enemies-to-lovers tension.

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Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

John Garth

How the First World War influenced the author of the Lord of the Rings “Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written.” —A. N. Wilson As Europe plunged into World War I, J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford and part of a cohort of literary-minded friends who had wide-ranging conversations in their Tea Club and Barrovian Society. After finishing his degree, Tolkien experienced the horrors of the Great War as a signal officer in the Battle of the Somme, where two of those school friends died. All the while, he was hard at work on an original mythology that would become the basis of his literary masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings trilogy.   In this biographical study, drawn in part from Tolkien’s personal wartime papers, John Garth traces the development of the author’s work during this critical period. He shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that the young man used his imagination not to escape from reality—but to transform the cataclysm of his generation. While Tolkien’s contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.   “Garth’s fine study should have a major audience among serious students of Tolkien.” —Publishers Weekly   “A highly intelligent book . . . Garth displays impressive skills both as researcher and writer.” —Max Hastings, author of The Secret War   “Somewhere, I think, Tolkien is nodding in appreciation.” —San Jose Mercury News   “A labour of love in which journalist Garth combines a newsman’s nose for a good story with a scholar’s scrupulous attention to detail . . . Brilliantly argued.” —Daily Mail (UK)   “Gripping from start to finish and offers important new insights.” —Library Journal   “Insight into how a writer turned academia into art, how deeply friendship supports and wounds us, and how the death and disillusionment that characterized World War I inspired Tolkien’s lush saga.” —Detroit Free Press

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The Exodontists

Drew Huff

The Exodontists dream of bleach and teeth... In this whimsical Halloween horror novel, the Exodontists--a family of tooth-loving immortal monsters--must fight to keep their home after Spirit Halloween takes over the abandoned warehouse they live in. Worse, still: The warehouse isn't only their home. It's also where they've run a free dental clinic for the last few decades, serving the needy and providing goodness for the human town they dwell in. But trying to share the warehouse with the Halloween store ends up culminating in an epic grudge match to the death after the Exodontists unwittingly attract the attention of Garrett, a nasty incel employee of the Halloween store. And things get violent. Emotional. Dramatic. And oh-so exciting.

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Die Farben der Zeit : Eine lesbische Liebesgeschichte (German Edition)

Alina Joelle

Witchy Cottagecore-Vibes und eine Liebe, die die Zeit übersteht. Die Hexe Charlotte lebt mit ihren zwei Katern in einem Cottage in Edinburgh und fristet ein Dasein in Einsamkeit. Während alle um sie herum altern, bleibt sie immer vierundzwanzig Jahre alt. Als sie der quirligen Studentin Mary begegnet, ist es Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Mary wird zu dem Lichtblick in Charlottes Leben, doch da taucht eine Person aus ihrer Vergangenheit auf – und ein Gegenmittel gegen den Fluch, der auf ihr lastet. Schließlich muss sie sich endlich altern oder die Frau, die sie liebt? Eine Geschichte mit zwei möglichen Enden – und du darfst entscheiden, welches du für dich annimmst!

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The Witching Hour

Anne Rice

From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries. Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches—a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being. On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking... and The Witching Hour begins. It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher... a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn. From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.

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Die Farben der Zeit : Eine lesbische Liebesgeschichte (German Edition)

Alina Joelle

Witchy Cottagecore-Vibes und eine Liebe, die die Zeit übersteht. Die Hexe Charlotte lebt mit ihren zwei Katern in einem Cottage in Edinburgh und fristet ein Dasein in Einsamkeit. Während alle um sie herum altern, bleibt sie immer vierundzwanzig Jahre alt. Als sie der quirligen Studentin Mary begegnet, ist es Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Mary wird zu dem Lichtblick in Charlottes Leben, doch da taucht eine Person aus ihrer Vergangenheit auf – und ein Gegenmittel gegen den Fluch, der auf ihr lastet. Schließlich muss sie sich endlich altern oder die Frau, die sie liebt? Eine Geschichte mit zwei möglichen Enden – und du darfst entscheiden, welches du für dich annimmst!

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Love in Focus

Lyla Lee

When her seven-year long relationship suddenly falls apart, relationship advice columnist Gemma Cho is convinced that real love doesn’t exist. As a bisexual woman who’s had zero luck with both men and women, she’s ready to give up on her own romantic prospects when she gets paired up with Celeste Min, a world-renowned photographer, on a highly visual, potentially career-saving piece on modern love. Celeste is extremely talented, sexy, and gay, and would be the perfect collaborator and rebound for Gemma if it weren’t for one major fact: she’s Gemma’s ex, the one that broke her heart in college and moved to a whole another country before Gemma could even make sense of what went wrong between them. Despite working on a project together about what constitutes love and romance in the modern age, when it comes to their own affairs, both Gemma and Celeste are tripping over each other’s feet…and into each other’s arms. Heightened by their shared love for love and the unmistakable sparks that still fly between them, Gemma and Celeste struggle to keep their relationship strictly professional. For the sake of her career, Gemma needs this piece to do well. And for the sake of what’s left of her beaten up hopeless romantic heart, she wants to fall head over heels for Celeste again. But can she trust Celeste to feel the same this time around? LOVE IN FOCUS is a second chance sapphic rom com that will appeal to fans of THE BOLD TYPE and DELILAH GREEN DOESN’T CARE.

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